In this brief essay, I respond to four critics of my most recent book, "Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens" (Oxford University Press, 2024). I attend to their concerns regarding who is included in the "we" of the fundamental civic question, "What should we do?" That…

As agentic documents, anti-trans policies express a yearning for the queer, the trans, the black, exist[strikethrough] through a poetics of silence. In this conceptual manuscript, I discuss voice as a trans woman phenomenon, a phonic movement through which trans women reorganize themselves to the world. The annihilation of trans women's voice,…

Across the globe, women and racial minorities are underrepresented in leadership. We examined the development of 5-10-year-old children's leadership cognition in India, the world's largest democracy. This cultural context offered the opportunity to study the development of attitudes about gender and to extend examinations of children's conceptions…

To date six states (Oregon, California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and New Jersey) have adopted legislation that amends curricular standards to include affirming representations of LGBTQ+ people and identities in schools. Nonetheless, the legislation falls short of clarifying what constitutes an LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum. Thus, the decision of…

For centuries, language has been used by the dominant culture both as a means of constructing power and as a way of maintaining it. Race, language, gender, and sexuality can all contribute to reinforcing one's identity as an "other." In doing so the dominant culture can create and reinforce blame and the perpetuation of minority groups…

Long regarded as the "great equalizer" across all social identity categories, including race/ethnicity, class, and gender, the education system plays a pronounced role in the curation and dissemination of knowledge on social stratification. In contemporary times, this role is perhaps no more evident than in academia's gatekeeping role in…

In the realm of modern children's literature, biographies of women showcase lives of exceptional talent, perseverance, civic engagement, and more: lives meant to inspire young readers. Since its inception in 2001, the Robert Sibert Informational Book Medal and Honor award has included a biography (or two) every year, with the exception of 2004 and…

In this article, the author recounts some of the events that occurred on September 11, 2001, when four doomed airlines crashed after being hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, resulting in the deaths of 2,977 people in New York, New York, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and on an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is at this…

In December 2019, the institutional affirmative action "Onde elas estão?" ("Where are they?") was launched for the mitigation of gender inequality in the STEM disciplines in Brazil, coincidentally in the same period which the first reports of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in the city of Wuhan, China. Unfortunately, when…

Textbooks do not only offer information on specific topics and delineate competence development but provide insights into a society's socio-cultural norms and values by means of representations. In particular, this refers to the diversity with which classrooms, groups of friends and families are depicted in textbooks. The contribution at hand…

Alterity is a concept with an extensive yet elusive history. Popularly conceived of as radical difference and Otherness, I identify alterity as the source of much of the virulent forms of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and other dichotomies in society that pit one group against another. Coming out of the tradition of critical qualitative inquiry, I…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to discuss the significance of "contextual factors" on the talent development of underserved populations. Understanding the "context" and background of an individual provides greater insight into their life experiences (Paik, 2013). Race, class and gender, in particular, play a role in…

The disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on First Nations peoples and on other communities of color is not new. Indigenous peoples, Black people, and other marginalized communities experience the consequences of environmental degradation disproportionately (Taylor, 2014; Washington, 2019), telling us that environmental justice and…

The pandemic made us hold our breath for a return to "normal." But education in "normal" times involves race-based violence and class-based inequality that the pandemic simply made plainer to see. Reviewing the impacts of the pandemic and action for racial justice over the last two years, I show how the dislocation of the…

This article addresses the practices of white benevolence as it (re)produces anti-Black racism in the post-conflict country of Liberia. This is undertaken through an analysis of the ProPublica documentary "Unprotected" which chronicles sexual violence against Liberian girls at the More Than Me Academy, linked to the broader practices of…