“What are you Representing?” Contesting Identities of Incarcerated Youth

This article explores how incarcerated youth and adult supervisors contest claims to identity via language of “representing”. Comparing how youth and adults “represent” in discussions of their own past and future selves sheds light on the constrained universe of discourse within which both groups work to express identities and on the basis of which we counsel, mentor, and educate young people. Acknowledging these constraints can contribute to understanding what I call exceptionalism—the idea that only exceptional poor and raced young men, through great personal effort and sacrifice, may resist the lure of the “street”. I conclude by discussing implications of this work for education and youth development work both inside and beyond the juvenile justice system as well as for research across lines of difference by committed “outsiders”.

In the shadow of whiteness: (re)exploring connections between history, enacted culture, and identity in a digital divide initiative

Who we are, our identities, as educators and learners cannot be considered separately from our histories and cultures. As such, many attempts at improving education for historically marginalized minority groups often revolve around finding ways to connect youth culture to curricula. What remains largely unexamined, however, are the history, culture, and identities of White educators and how these forces necessarily impact the ways in which curricula are designed for youth of color. By reconsidering DeGennaro and Brown’s article “Youth Voices: Exploring Connections between History, Enacted Culture and Identity in a Digital Divide Initiative” through a lens of Whiteness, this article aims to illustrate that the histories and identities of African–American learners are dialectically related to the histories and identities of White educators. However, because Whiteness tends to be invisible, White educators have the privilege of not examining who they are and where they come from as part of their own identity development during the teaching and learning process. This article invites White educators to question what it means to educate youth of color by recognizing their own Whiteness as a powerful force in shaping pedagogical activities. By understanding both themselves and their students as racialized, cultural actors, White educators can begin to develop curricula that are truly empowering for minority youth.

Accessing resources for identity development by urban students and teachers: foregrounding context

Many attempt to address the documented achievement gap between urban and suburban students by offering special programs to enrich urban students’ academic experiences and proficiencies. Such was the case in the study described by DeGennaro and Brown in which urban students participated in an after-school technology course intended to address the “digital divide” by giving these youth supported experiences as technology users. However, also like the initial situation described in this study, instructional design that does not capitalize on what we know about urban education or informal learning contexts can actually further damage urban youths’ identities as learners by positioning them as powerless and passive recipients instead of meaningful contributors to their own learning. The analysis presented in this forum is intended to further the conversation begun by DeGennaro and Brown by explicitly complexifying our consideration of context (activity structures and setting) so as to support the development of contexts that afford rich learning potential for both the urban students and their learning facilitators, positioned in the role of teachers. Carefully constructed contexts can afford participants as learners (urban students and teachers) opportunities to access rich identity resources (not typically available in traditional school contexts) including, but not limited to, the opportunity to exercise agency that allows participants to reorganize their learning context and enacted culture as needed.

“Suicide machine” seekers: transgressing suicidal taboos online

Internet-mediated joint suicides or “Net group suicides” (Net shinjū) has become a significant social problem in Japan since 2002. Despite a privileged view of suicide-related cyberspaces as a murky underworld, there has been little study about how the participants of such spaces interact and perform their “suicidal” identity. Viewing cyberspace as a unique discursive playground that sprouts a myriad of transgressive narratives, this paper examines “Suicide Club” (Jisatsu Club) an online discussion forum that facilitated the largest “Net group suicide” in Japanese history. A thematic content analysis of actual postings on “Suicide Club” reveals the double-edged nature of the forum. While some participants were determined to seek suicide companions or what I metaphorically call “suicide machines,” others used the board as a social outlet to freely disclose their pent-up struggles, attempting to collectively transgress social taboos of suicide.

Youth voices: connections between history, enacted culture and identity in a digital divide initiative

The design of educational experiences is often mediated by historical, institutional, and social conceptions. Although these influences can initially shape the way that educational opportunities are created and implemented, this preliminary form has the potential to reorganize. In this paper, we illustrate how history shows its presence in the ways that instructors systematically arrange a technology course for urban youth. This original approach to the course inhibits youth participation. Incrementally, however, the cultural enactments of instructors and students lead to a reorganization of activity. Through highlighting history and examining the intersection of culture, we provide insight into the ways in which adolescents of color become successfully engaged in learning technology. We focus our study by asking how co-existence and the dialectic of structure and agency play a role as youth develop an identity as a technology user. Further, this emergent learning design affords outsiders a unique view of the educational and contextual experiences of these youth. Our illustration of how history, enacted culture and identity mediate the emergent learning design stems from a grounded theory approach to analyzing video, interview and artifact data in this after-school technology course.

A cultural-historical reading of “Culturally Sensitive Schooling”: thinking beyond a constructivist view of science learning

“Culturally-Sensitive Schooling” as proposed by Brayboy and Castagno offers an important way of thinking about the relations between formal and informal science learning and between Western and Indigenous science. The constructivist framework adopted by Brayboy and Castagno in their discussions is consistent with the theoretical approach traditionally used by many researchers and scholars interested in science learning. In this article I explore the basic concepts introduced in their paper, but use a different theoretical lens for explicating concept formation. Through a cultural-historical reading of “Culturally Sensitive Schooling,” different insights can be gained about the relations between everyday informal learning and schooled learning in science. I argue that dialectical logic is more productive for re-theorising science teaching and learning in culturally diverse communities.

A categorization of the “whys” and “hows” of using history in mathematics education

This is a theoretical article proposing a way of organizing and structuring the discussion of why and how to use the history of mathematics in the teaching and learning of mathematics, as well as the interrelations between the arguments for using history and the approaches to doing so. The way of going about this is to propose two sets of categories in which to place the arguments for using history (the “whys”) and the different approaches to doing this (the “hows”). The arguments for using history are divided into two categories; history as a tool and history as a goal. The ways of using history are placed into three categories of approaches: the illumination, the modules, and the history-based approaches. This categorization, along with a discussion of the motivation for using history being one concerned with either the inner issues (in-issues) or the metaperspective issues (meta-issues) of mathematics, provides a means of ordering the discussion of “whys” and “hows.”

Mexican-American Students’ Perceptions of Teachers’ Expectations: Do Perceptions Differ Depending on Student Achievement Levels?

This exploratory study examines the learning beliefs of high and low achieving, low-income Mexican-American students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 ninth grade students. The qualitative analysis shows that students’ perceptions of their teachers’ expectations of a “good” student or a “not so good” student did not differ along achievement lines. However, the students’ perceptions about what it means to be a good student differentiated the low-achievers from the high-achievers. This study’s findings may be used to inform educators about Mexican-American students’ orientation towards school and learning, in hopes for creating more equitable educational settings where all students achieve to their fullest potential.

Identifying the Role of the International Consortium “MIT/ LINC” in Supporting the Integration of ICT in Higher Education in Emerging Countries

The goal of this research effort is to provide insights on what core needs and difficulties exist toward the implementation of ICT in higher education in emerging countries and how a consortium like LINC can best support these efforts. An exploratory research design combining a survey, on-site interviews, participant observation and document analysis were employed to answer the research questions. Main challenges in establishing technology- based learning environments were identified in the area of pedagogies, finances, technological infrastructure, cultural change, organization, and management. LINC, as an non-political organization embedded in an academic environment, can take an important role in facilitating the dialogue among participants through various platforms, take an active role in promoting joint programs and assist with efforts to “localize” tools and practice.

Urban science classrooms and new possibilities: on intersubjectivity and grammar in the third space

In this article I explore research in urban science education inspired by the work of Kris Gutierrez in a paper based on her 2005 Scribner Award. It addresses key points in Gutierrez’s work by exploring theoretical frameworks for research and approaches to teaching and research that expand the discourse on the agency of urban youth in corporate school settings. The work serves as an overview of under-discussed approaches and theoretical frameworks to consider in teaching and conducting research with marginalized urban youth in urban science classrooms.

The Trouble with Rainbow Boys

Few pieces of GLBTQ fiction have received the popular and scholarly acclaim awarded to Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Boys series. Although “problem novels” are rarely taken seriously as literature, the books—the first novel in particular—have joined the few pieces of GLBTQ literature incorporated into educational discourse and curriculum. In this article, the author suggests that although the positive nature and surface construction appeals to those seeking “affirmative” representations of GLBTQ youth, the contributions made by the series may be overshadowed by its reliance on heteronormative gender stereotypes that may actually work to perpetuate homophobic attitudes toward gay sexuality.

Should educational leadership focus on best practices or next practices?

Policy makers and leadership developers now admonish both aspiring and practicing educational leaders to base what they do on evidence of “best practice”. Some argue, however, that today’s best practices stand a reasonably good chance of being unsuitable for schools in the future. Unfortunately, effective leadership in future schools is empirically unknowable. This paper unpacks the arguments about “best” and “next” practices concluding that there is an empirically defensible foundation for current and future leaders.

The notion of historical “parallelism” revisited: historical evolution and students’ conception of the order relation on the number line

This paper associates the findings of a historical study with those of an empirical one with 16 years-old students (1st year of the Greek Lyceum). It aims at examining critically the much-discussed and controversial relation between the historical evolution of mathematical concepts and the process of their teaching and learning. The paper deals with the order relation on the number line and the algebra of inequalities, trying to elucidate the development and functioning of this knowledge both in the world of scholarly mathematical activity and the world of teaching and learning mathematics in secondary education. This twofold analysis reveals that the old idea of a “parallelism” between history and pedagogy of mathematics has a subtle nature with at least two different aspects (metaphorically named “positive” and “negative”), which are worth further exploration.

Evaluating online learning communities

This article reviews recent evaluation studies of online learning communities to provide a systematic understanding of how such communities are evaluated. Forty-two representative studies were selected and categorized into a newly developed taxonomy of online learning community evaluations. This taxonomy is divided into four components: evaluation purpose, evaluation approach, measures for evaluation, and evaluation techniques. The findings suggest that it is inappropriate to conceptualize evaluation of such communities as a one-size-fits-all, generalizable measure of “good” or “bad.” Instead, we recommend a comprehensive, on-going, diagnostic approach to measuring clusters of indicators, or syndromes, of a particular OLC and examining the causal relation assumed by the evaluators between what is measured and the success of OLC as an imputed outcome.

Valuing indigenous knowledge: to call it “science” will not help

In this commentary on Brayboy and Castagno’s paper, published in this volume, we discuss, on the one hand, many points of agreement between their proposal of culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth and El-Hani and Mortimer’s proposal of culturally-sensitive science education. On the other hand, we focus on a key disagreement, not only with Brayboy and Castagno, but with a whole body of literature on multicultural, postcolonialist, postmodernist education. The main point of disagreement lies in the fact that we are not sure that to broaden the concept of science so as to talk about “native science” or “indigenous science” is indeed the best strategy to attain a goal that we wholeheartedly share with Brayboy and Castagno, to value other ways of knowing for their own sake, validity, and legitimacy.

Computer Manipulatives in an Ordinary Differential Equations Course: Development, Implementation, and Assessment

The d’Arbeloff Interactive Mathematics Project or d’AIMP is an initiative that seeks to enhance and ultimately transform the teaching and learning of introductory mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A result of this project is a suite of “mathlets,” a carefully developed set of dynamic computer applets for use in the university’s ordinary differential equations course. In this paper, we present the rationale for such computer innovations, the philosophy behind their design, as well as a discussion of their careful development and implementation. Survey results are reported which yielded positive student feedback and suggestions for improvement.