Teachers in public schools regularly face labor oppression. Despite this reality, in research and practice, "social justice teacher preparation" has largely neglected the topic of "labor struggle." We offer this community auto-ethnography as a collective reflection on how we came to our own understandings around these issues…

Arts educators are rightly passionate about our work and its liberatory potential. However, we must also grapple with the ways in which ableism and racism circulate in arts education spaces, evading change and sustaining injustice. Through a fictionalized vignette, I explore how ableism and racism circulate in arts classrooms to co-construct…

US college and university administrators are reluctant to regulate racialized assaultive speech by members of their campus communities, even when the effect and objective of such speech is to demean, degrade, ostracize, and threaten Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. My critical race theory analysis reveals how two US Supreme Court…

Through subversive teaching and learning methods, Black women educators have always been trailblazers and pioneers, creating space for Black students to thrive. This article provides a critical analysis of the liberatory and pedagogical prowess of Black women educators by showing them as "Transformers" with the ability to create,…

Overrepresentation of students of color with and without dis/abilities in exclusionary practices (e.g., suspension, expulsion) is a historically accumulating educational debt that stems from the intersection of racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. As a historical, sociopolitical, and geospatial situated issue, addressing racial…

Women of Color feminists have theorized and pointed to the ways that chisme is a resistant practice for Women and Girls of Color. In line with this theoretical and epistemological framing of chisme, the authors explore the ways that gossip is, in fact, an intellectual and political literacy practice that Women and Girls of Color utilize in the…

In cities across the country, school communities must contend with new challenges introduced by gentrification and the arrival of middle class and white families. This collaborative research study looks at schools where parent organizers are attempting to intervene in processes of gentrification that may further marginalize lower-income families…

With approximately 40 million foreign-born people in the United States, US classrooms are witnessing an intense concentration of newcomer students and a persistent achievement gap between immigrant students and their English-speaking, US-born peers. Yet, some teachers are consistently successful with "those" children typically…

In this critical theoretical conceptualization situated in Disability Critical Race Theory (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013), we identify the current education system as a series of dysfunctional education ecologies. We next analyze how dysfunctional education ecologies are maintained through implicit bias, consider how these biases may impact…

Common explanations for the employment difficulties facing young adults without a secondary credential center on skill deficits, with little attention given to policies and practices that shape the nature of work. Using interview data from a participatory action research project, this article examines the employment experiences of 43…

The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to…

School leaders can ally with other educational stakeholders to encourage undocumented student persistence in Pk-12 schools. We explore (1) how school leaders create systems of support for undocumented and newly arrived immigrant students, and (2) how school leaders interpret and implement policies or school structures that affect student…

Culturally-responsive pedagogies require moving beyond blanket assumptions about learners to focus deeply on local meaning-makings. This narrative analysis case study examines the ways a 20-year-old African American man challenges the negative educational identity with which he is forced to contend as he navigates a large and complex urban public…

In social justice education a tension sometimes emerges between the complex ideas we want participants to grapple with and the relatively straightforward activities we use to communicate those ideas. We adapt learning activities to meet participants' evolving needs and to communicate emerging theories and analyses, but sometimes adjusting an…

This article reports on racism expressed by school personnel (administrators and teachers) and experienced by Latina/o students at a high school located in Tucson, Arizona. Students in a specialized social science research program, called the Social Justice Education Project (SJEP), documented personal encounters with racist articulations at their…