This article addresses how leadership scholarship perpetuates whiteness and the problems this causes for educators and students advancing social justice. The organizations that the authors oversee deliver place-based, community-driven programs serving youth and families from the lowest quartile of the socioeconomic ladder. Their constituents are…

In this article I venture the hypothesis that music confronts education with the possibility to think violence in ways that are both inherently educational and radically "affirmative." Beginning with a reflection on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which emphatically evokes the violence within the genesis of music, I then move in a…

In this review of literature, we attend to some of the ways that well-intentioned hopes for fostering creativity and encouraging greater inclusion may also rely on problematic premises that work to reify exclusionary logics and practices. More specifically, we historicize and critically examine how creativity studies--often despite explicit…

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…

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…

This essay shares the idea of a grief garden, or a safe, public, green spaces for communities to come together and engage in activities designed for intentional grieving following tragic events and injustice. The idea is being developed by The Justice Fleet, a mobile social justice museum based in St. Louis, Missouri which fosters healing through…

Anti-bias education is an optimistic commitment to supporting children who live in a highly diverse and yet still inequitable world. Rather than a formula for a particular curriculum, it is an underpinning perspective and framework that permeates everything in early childhood education--including a teacher's interactions with children, families,…

In 2016, the federal government rescinded a 2014 disciplinary guidance package that had served as a much-needed resource to schools and districts across the country, a decision that the Center for Learner Equity (CLE) opposed. As documented in a 2019 CLE analysis, disciplinary removals cause students with disabilities to lose instructional time…

The aim of this article is twofold: first, it seeks to discuss the relationship between democracy and colonization, and to examine the implications of this relationship for democratic education and, second, it turns to decolonial thinking as a resource for critiquing and reconstructing "radical democratic education." A decolonial…

To fully grasp the systems of oppression youth of color must navigate, educators must consider their experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. This paper adds to the small but growing body of literature across fields highlighting how Black and Latinx youth are simultaneously positioned by schools and the justice system as criminals that…

Research on microaggression has primarily focused on the experiences of adults, as researchers have yet to extensively examine the experiences of school-age children. The few studies that exist suggest that microaggressions are problematic well before young people reach college or the working world. The current study adds to the microaggression…

Just as our society is polarized, higher education is no less divided as to its mission and purpose, whether it should be preparing students for employment or for engagement as citizens, whether it should be corporatist and profit-driven or promote intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, and whether it should pursue a neoliberal agenda or…

This paper considers the potential of impasses within cinematic assemblages and the pedagogy of cinema to expand the possible horizons of Black queer youth. Black queerness in film provides pedagogical tools for exploring the limits of the category of queer. Both Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight" and Dee Rees's "Pariah" counter…

Shorthand is, by definition, coded symbolism used for purposes of speed. It's a system of abbreviation, intended to skim the top of more complex systems of meaning, taking shortcuts but keeping track of the important facts. Shorthand is used all the time in adult basic education (ABE). The very name of the field, adult "basic" education,…

This unit activity guides students through an interrogation of bias, normativity, and co-cultural experiences within the context of dis/ability and appearance. Specifically, students complete implicit bias tests related to ability and body size, read about historical displays of bodily difference in circuses and "freak shows," and then…