Background: We build on participatory and critical understandings of democracy to analyze a two-and-a-half-year collaborative redesign of our teacher education program. Purpose: To theorize and design for the seemingly everyday, ordinary, and unremarkable work it takes for teacher education programs to embody democratic principles and…

Background/Context: Almost 100 years ago, John Dewey advocated for a democratic U.S. educational system, one that echoed the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and achieved an ethical ideal by inviting participation of all students. Yet the U.S. educational system continues to stop short of this goal insofar as students of Color--especially those in…

Background/Context: Scholars have long critiqued the antidemocratic forces at work in education, advocating for a more equitable, liberating, and democratic vision of schooling, with teacher education taking on a central role. Mainstream teacher preparation obstructs democratic education, as evidenced by the failure to disavow and dismantle white…

Background/Context: In this article, we draw on Villegas's explanations of beliefs as precursors to social justice dispositions and Mills et al.'s Australian research about social justice dispositions as either affirmative or transformative. These conceptual positions assist us in understanding the beliefs that are derived from applicants'…

Background/Context: Prison settings present some of the deepest democratic contradictions in the United States. Purpose/Objective: In this study, we investigate how and what teacher education programs can learn from and support teaching practices in prison settings and pre-K-12 contexts. Population/Participants: This study draws from interview…

Background: There is scant research on whether or how special education teacher preparation plays a role in shaping, maintaining, or perpetuating ableism and oppression for disabled students, which the author proposes is "structural ableism." This conceptual article argues that special education teacher preparation programs' systems and…

Background/Context: Social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have long assumed that Western democracies enjoy relative stability because of deep commitments to a culture of democratic governance. But those commitments are quickly fading in almost every developed and developing democracy around the globe. In the same period in which…

Background/Context: Current estimates show 2,500 Islamic State (IS) jihadists are from the United States, Australia, and Western Europe. How and in what ways formal schooling influences the radicalization process and the development of extremist worldviews is yet to be fully understood. There is little research that explores how religious…

Background/Context: Within the United States, wealth disparities are growing and upward social mobility is becoming increasingly difficult to attain. These trends call into question the American Dream ideology that anyone can succeed through hard work. This meritocratic ideal has traditionally been one of the unifying ideologies promoted through…

Background/Context: Traditional adult education in Spain treated the learner as a mere object that could be shaped by the educator. Although current practices of the democratic adult education movement in Spain reveals a completely opposite standpoint on adult education, there has been little analysis of the several influences converging and…

Background/Context: Increased polarization of viewpoints in the United States may have detrimental consequences for democratic pedagogy. The goals of civil society require a reliance on democratic values, and active participation is necessary for a strong civil society that demands the common good be deliberated in democratic ways. Discussion as…

Background/Context: The Adult School of La Verneda Sant Martí, located in Barcelona, Spain, is a reference at the international level because of its trajectory and its contributions to the transformative movement in democratic education. The school was created in 1978 to address the demands of the working-class residents of the La Verneda…

This chapter examines the charter school policy and planning network and how this network is helping to grow urban charter schools and related advocacy organizations across the United States.

Background/Context: Throughout history, a country's economic and military strength has influenced its times of cultural splendor and the rise of famous intellectuals and artists. Spain has been an exception to this. At the turn of the 20th century, a surprising series of events that no one could have predicted occurred. At the time, Spain had…

Background: In anthropology and related disciplines, the term "assessment" refers to the everyday activities of ordinary people as they figure out what to do next given what others have just done. The assessments, in turn, constitute what is happening, whether in encounters between policeman and person in the street, or classroom lesson,…