“To Virgo or not to Virgo”: Examining the Closure and Reopening of a Neighborhood School in a Predominantly African American Community

Neighborhood schools engender the idea that schools can be integral community centers, with learning facilitated by the personal relationships developed among teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Neighborhood schools also have represented stigmatized segregated spaces located in communities with high poverty rates, low high school graduation rates, and little opportunity for social mobility. Drawing from print and online media sources related to the closure and reopening of D.C. Virgo Middle School (Virgo), a racially- and economically-segregated middle school in an urban, southern community, this study uses conceptual content analysis to examine the competing discourses surrounding Virgo. The authors conclude that the public discourse examined herein represents the tension between public schools as stigmatizing beloved spaces. As a stigmatizing space, the school can transfer the stigmatized identity to associated students and personnel. As a beloved space, the school can nurture possibility and hope.     

“Yeah,Things are Rough in Mexico. Remember We Talked About Hard Times?” Process Drama and a Teachers Role in Critically Engaging Students to Dialogue About Social Inequities in a Dual Language Classroom

The Urban Review - The majority of dual language education programs in the U.S. context include children coming together with the long-term goal of becoming bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate...     

From Getting “Fired” to Becoming a Collaborator: A Case of the Coconstruction of Identity and Engagement in a Project-Based Mathematics Classroom

This article investigates the coconstruction of student identity and engagement in the case of a 9th grader in a project-based algebra classroom that afforded students a great deal of autonomy. The focal student, Terrance, utilized classroom resources to serve both project-related and social functions as he interacted with his peers during multiweek projects. As a result, his positioning within his group and patterns of engagement in the mathematics projects shifted dramatically across the academic year. The article ends with a discussion of student autonomy as a potentially powerful feature of hybrid classrooms.     

“Learning to do” as a pillar of education and its links to entrepreneurial studies in higher education: European contexts and approaches

The author links the “learning to do” pillar, one of the four pillars of the Delors Report of 1996 Delors J Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty First Century: Learning: The Treasure Within Paris: UNESCO 1996  [Google Scholar], “Learning: The Treasure Within”, to the principles and purposes of an entrepreneurial university and the aims of the European Commission and the Bologna Process to enhance the employability of graduates of higher education. An entrepreneurial university will fulfill the meaning of this pillar, particularly if it includes life‐long learning, career counseling, instruction and training in job‐related social skills, and a commitment to educate and to train graduates who will be agents of change. Universities must also promote intellectual entrepreneurship as a means to achieving worthy ends including sustainable employability and human values.     

Response to “A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it,learn it,and share it”: a design perspective

This essay is a response to the special issue call on the theme of Shifting to digital: Informing the rapid development, deployment, and future of teaching and learning. In this essay, the author first described the needs of student-centered learning that emerged from the current full-scale online teaching and learning practice due to the pandemic. With these needs, the author revisited the published article of A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it, learn it, and share it (Lee and Hannafin, in Educ Technol Res Dev 64(4):707–734, 2016), discussed its value, application, and future development.

     

“We’re not a bank providing support”: Street-level bureaucrats and Syrian refugee youth navigating tensions in higher education scholarship programs in Lebanon

Scholarships are increasingly used to expand higher education access for refugee youth in exile, but less is known about their equity implications. Drawing from scholarship on street-level bureaucrats and Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, I identify street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) decision-making within refugee higher education. Drawing on 62 interviews with Syrian youth and organizations in NGOs in Lebanon, and 24 organizational, scholarship-related documents, I elaborate the fundamental (mis)alignments that emerge in scholarship-granting organizations’ goals, and the needs of refugee youth they seek to support. Organizations over-emphasize transitions to university, overlooking the most vulnerable youths’ transitions through university. Though youth link their futures to opportunity and not geography, SLBs seek to fund youth willing to return to Syria and engage in post-conflict reconstruction.     

“… We have learnt not just to sit back,twiddle our thumbs and let them take over.” Single‐sex settings and the development of a pedagogy for girls and a pedagogy for boys in Danish schools

Teachers in the Danish co‐educational elementary school system (the ‘folkeskole’ with pupils from 7 to 16 years) who are involved in innovative pedagogical projects have used segregation as an organisational method in introducing and developing equal opportunities and anti‐sexist pedagogical initiatives. The idea of arranging single‐sex settings started out as a means to provide space for girls and to enhance their competence professionally as well as to empower them personally. In setting up ‘Project Girls’ Class—Boys’ Class’, an ongoing developmental project about gender equity, the teachers, a woman and a man, have mixed their two classes and segregated the girls and the boys for longer or shorter periods or for a whole term in certain subjects, thus giving them space and tutoring on their own terms. It started in 1987/88, when the pupils were 10‐11 years old. Here for the first time they were segregated for 2 months. The involved girls developed self‐confidence and prefer to be in their girls‐only setting whereas it is the teachers (more than the involved boys themselves) that find that the boys’ class can provide important learning experiences for boys in raising their awareness of values and attitudes—both among the boys themselves and in relation to the girls. From the point of view of educational theory and how learning can become true learning, affecting the cognitive, emotional as well as moral and behaviourial attitudes, the paper reflects on why the segregation projects have given such clear results, whereas much other excellent tutoring by committed teachers seems not to have had the same impact. It comes to the preliminary conclusion that, in the hands of devoted teachers (people committed to the issues of gender equity and anti‐sexism and who are close to their pupils) the technique of polarising can be very effective.     

“Actually, I May be Clever Enough to do it”. Using Identity as a Lens to Investigate Students’ Trajectories Towards Science and University

We have followed a group of students in the potential pipeline for science through their last years of upper secondary school and in the context of a university mentorship program. The student group is defined by their choice of Mathematics at A-level which is mandatory for admission to tertiary STEM education in Denmark. Rich data (repeated interviews, questionnaires (pre-and post-) and observations) from 14 target students have been collected. Using Late Modern identity theory as a lens, we have analysed students’ identity narratives in order to establish their trajectories in relation to university in general, and towards science studies and science careers in particular. We find that the diversity of students’ educational identity narratives can be characterized and their trajectories understood in terms of a Four Factor Framework comprising: general identity process orientations (reflecting, committing, exploring), personal values, subject self-concepts and subject interests. In various ways these constructs interact and set the range and direction of the students’ searches for future education and careers. Our longitudinal study suggests that they have enough permanence to enable us to hypothesize more or less secured paths of individual students to tertiary science (or other areas of academia).     

“It’s not just learning English,it’s learning other cultures”: belonging,power, and possibility in an immigrant contact zone

This ethnographic investigation of a multiethnic, multilingual classroom examines the ways in which immigrant students’ goals for community and belonging were mediated by their vibrant cultural and linguistic practices. Findings demonstrate how youth formed a community of practice through brokering acts, resource pooling, and linguistic play across national, cultural, and linguistic differences. As such, immigrant students were agentive transcultural navigators whose practices broach new understandings of social life and learning, and present a pedagogy of possibility. It is argued that immigrant classrooms in contact zones must be reenvisioned – from reductive spaces where educational goals are to acculturate the immigrant into a fading US homogeneous mainstream – to cutting edge spaces of twenty-first-century learning.     

“I think it was a trick to fail Eastern”: A multi-level analysis of teachers’ views on the implementation of the SHRP Program in Uganda

This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and districts, providing new learning materials – including specific teaching techniques – and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi-layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP’s pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and community levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can benefit from teachers’ resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">So we decided to call</Emphasis> “straight line” (…): Mathematics students’ interaction and negotiation of meaning in constructing a model of elliptic geometry

In this paper, we investigate university students’ interaction in an attempt to construct a model of elliptic geometry. In order to study the several ways in which geometrical meaning is produced through context and practices, we introduce three different types of use of geometrical concepts, namely as (1) elements of representation of spatial experience, (2) objects of traditional school practice, and (3) constituents of an abstract mathematical theory. The analysis of students’ dialog according to this framework reveals how students develop their ability to communicate mathematically and negotiate their meanings. Students with a different use of geometrical concepts were able to interact and understand their peers.