Attending college, for many immigrant families, is a critical step in achieving the American Dream. This essay, written as a reflection and response between professor and student, explores the conflicting messages young community college students negotiate and process as they move through the City, revealing how knowledge learned in the college…

This essay outlines how Black placemaking, a sociological framework used to study Black residents in urban contexts, might be used to study Black students' experiences at historically White institutions (HWIs) of higher education. Black placemaking engages with the intersection of Blackness, place, structure, and agency. The author argues that…

In Singapore, resilience lies at the heart of the nation's efforts at building a strong civic culture. For those experiencing urban poverty, resilience holds little weight against the national rhetoric of self-reliance and meritocracy as keys to success. This paper presents a three-way conversation between the researcher, applied theatre…

Today there is a lot of discussion about creative economies and how cities are the engines driving growth in a variety of industries. But cities are not merely rows of buildings, or sets of laws, such as zoning ordinances or parking regulations. A city is, rather, a set of dynamic experiences that we all participate in as co(labor)ators. As a way…

During a sabbatical semester in Fall 2018, "Community Literacy Journal (CLJ)" co-editor Paul Feigenbaum volunteered as a "Scholar-in-Residence" at Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a nonprofit established in 1994 that is based in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Guided by its mission "to create hope out of…

In this response to the call for transformative models of teaching students in urban contexts, the author presents his own experiences in becoming a critical pedagogue, the path that led him there, and three models of classrooms that he sees in such contexts. He emphasizes the need to reject an apolitical stance in urban education, and provides a…

This article is a response to Kassam, Avery, and Ruelle's insights as presented in this forum on rural science education. Topics considered include troubling the urban/rural divide in the context of Indigenous knowledge and expanding to include the common Canadian notion of the "remote," a designation rooted in our national colonial…

This report compares average rates of frequent teacher absence (more than 10 days) for teachers with and without union or union-like contracts in traditional public schools and charter schools. The study's rationale is that such absences substantively harm students and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. It finds that teachers contractually…

This article responds to Henry Tam's article in this issue of FORUM by exploring opportunities for co-operative problem-solving for staff and students of the Royal Docks Community School in the London Borough of Newham. Becoming a co-operative trust helped the school move out of special measures and develop a strategy of participation and…

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital.…

This essay critiques the ideological assertions of corporate school reform and discusses how these logics perpetuate failure in urban education. Drawing on theories of neoliberal urbanism, the right to the city, and the commons, the essay argues that educational researchers and advocates need to reframe the values of urban education in line with a…

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's "gay pioneer," Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue--the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory--I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both…

This article presents a review of "Lost youth in the global city: class, culture and the urban imaginary," by Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly. In many ways the "juke-box boys" would today form a stratum of the "lost youth" that Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly discuss in their thoughtful account…

Exploring the lives of rural lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and their identity work, Mary Gray's "Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America" offers one of the first ethnographic studies of queer rural life in the United States and their use of new media. Throughout, Gray provides…

This article discusses how issues of diversity and equity are addressed in the preparation of science teachers who are charged with teaching diverse students in schools. Highlighting examples from my own teaching and research and other studies in education, I frame this article in terms of a broad application of theory in science teacher…