Background or Context: Amid a backdrop of increasing deprofessionalization of teaching and teacher education, education researchers and reformers continue to highlight the complexity and expertise of these professions. Expertise-as-process (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993) is a conception of expertise that eschews the traditional focus on…

Background/Context: This study contributes to ongoing work in professional learning communities, self-study, and reflection. It offers a structure and a process rooted in a philosophy of practice grounded in various thinkers like Dewey, Rogers, Curran, Freire, Gattegno, Greene, and Carini. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore…

In this paper, the authors discuss the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy 20 years after its introduction to the professional literature. The authors discuss key tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy, examine empirical examples of it, and makes recommendations on how the concept may inform and influence the outcomes of culturally diverse…

Background/Context: Concepts of justice relevant to making personal and public decisions about education. Purpose: To clarify a concept of formative justice that persons and the public often ignore in making decisions about educational effort. Setting: "The windmills of your mind" Research Design: Reflective essay.…

The narrative in this chapter runs as follows. As the political, social, and economic environments that surround the American high school undergo seismic shifts, they create new forms of secondary education. We report that the environmental conditions between 1890 and 1920 were such that most of the pillars that anchored the American high school…

Background/Context: Principles of evidential reasoning have often been discussed in the context of educational and psychological measurement with respect to construct validity and validity arguments. More recently, Mislevy proposed the metaphor of assessment as an evidentiary argument about students' learning and abilities given their…

Background/Context: Students' ready engagement in electronic games and the relative ease with which they sometimes learn complex rules have intrigued some educators and learning researchers. There has been growing interest in studying electronic gaming with the aim of trying to work out how learning principles that are evident in games can be…

Background/Context: Two scholars who each primarily identify as a scholar of critical race/whiteness studies and a scholar of disability studies, respectively, engage in this article in a purposeful dialogue that responds to the invitation put forth by Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor, and Valle to engage with the construct of inclusive…

Background/Context: This article calls attention to the restrictive notions of inclusive education promulgated within the discourse of special education in the United States and asserts the value of using disability studies in education to support broader conceptualizations of inclusion that potentially incorporate all students.…

Background/Context: In June 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to prohibit student assignment on the basis of race. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (hereafter referred to as PICS), the court deemed race-based strategies used to voluntarily desegregate school districts to be unconstitutional. Although the…

Background/Context: The Supreme Court's June 2007 decision on the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS) provides an important context for school districts and educational policy makers as they consider the role of race in school assignment. The PICS decision has been described as essentially…

Purpose: In this article, we compare current schooling practices and reform efforts to the mechanistic industrial model and illustrate why this paradigm is no longer sufficient in this "flat world." Schooling and school reform in the 21st century continue to be approached as if these are a flatworm capable replicating itself. We argue that a new…

This article is a case study of compensatory education as it was developed and implemented by an innovative urban school principal in the early 1960s. I argue that while the compensatory education movement was often marred by pejorative-sounding language and inegalitarian ideas, especially as it was shaped and expanded by policy makers and…

Background: Geography education typically appears in school curricula in a didactic or disciplinary manner. Yet, both the didactic and the disciplinary approach to geography education lack a serious engagement with society, politics, and power, or democratic theory. We suggest, from Dewey, that most students, the social studies, and indeed society…

Background/Context: This study examines education in the context of neoliberalism and how current educational policies such as high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum create schooling environments hostile to social justice education. Relying on education for liberation literature, teacher education for social justice scholarship, and work on…