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Growing and Sustaining Science Classroom Communities
by David Stroupe on May 15, 2023
Teaching has always been crucial and underappreciated profession across the world. Almost everyone spends some time in a school, and in those spaces, teachers play an important role in designing and facilitating opportunities for participation and learning. Many people fondly remember a favorite teacher and classroom, or conversely, might hope to forget a school that made them feel rejected. While society might collectively forget, those of us who spend time in schools know that teachers and administrators – the adults in a school building – have a great responsibility as we shape the lives of children. By representing and upholding equitable communities and participatory structures that ensure powerful learning opportunities for children, especially those from marginalized communities, teachers and administrators can help change the world. While easy to think and say, such short-term and long-term work is difficult to enact. Therefore, we want to help you spark conversations about how we can individually and collectively work together to reimagine your classroom and school as sites of equitable learning opportunities.
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Broadening STEM Opportunities: Why So Slow?
by Margaret A. Eisenhart and Lois Weis on May 1, 2023
On December 7, 2022, President Biden announced a new initiative “to provide all students with the opportunities they need to access and excel in science, technology, engineering, math, and medical (STEMM) fields” (EdWeek, 2022). This initiative joins similar ones previously proposed by both Democratic and Republican administrations at the beginning of their terms. Yet, little seems to change. There continues to be too few qualified and interested young people to fill the demand for STEM workers. There continues to be large groups of young people--of color, from lower-income backgrounds, and girls and women-- who are underrepresented in critical areas of both STEM education and STEM work. Trend data indicate that the number of women in STEM jobs would need to double, the number of Black people would need to double, and the number of Hispanic people would need triple to reflect US societal demographics by 2030 (NSF as reported in EdWeek, 2022). Why do these patterns persist despite the many and varied attempts to change them?
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Can a Better Understanding of How Teacher Evaluation Works Help Improve Its Design?
by David D. Liebowitz on March 6, 2023
How can we support all teachers so that they continue to learn and improve throughout their careers? How can we ensure that all students receive high-quality instruction every day in every classroom? These were some of the motivating questions that prompted forty-four US states to implement reforms to their teacher evaluation practices in the early 2010s. These new policies sought to improve student outcomes by providing developmental supports to grow teachers’ skills and by imposing accountability pressures to increase their effort levels. While these joint aims are firmly part of the design of most present-day teacher evaluation policies, researchers and policy makers have too infrequently reflected on the interactions between these goals.
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White Ignorance in Global Education
by Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia on February 13, 2023
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to racism and White supremacy in global education circles, despite clear associations between the International Aid System and its colonial and racist foundations. Spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, long-running critiques of the aid sector, made by Global South activists and Black women, in particular, have gained traction in mainstream media, practitioner circles, and foreign aid–related blogs since the summer of 2020.
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Going Beyond Education Policy to Solve Problems in Schools
by Sarah Winchell Lenhoff on November 2, 2022
Abraham Maslow wrote “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” In the United States, public education is our hammer, and every social problem looks like a nail. From poverty and racism to poor nutrition and child neglect, public schools are asked to identify and solve virtually every social ill we have created and let fester.
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Beyond Accommodating Disability in the Classroom: Should Our Goal be Embodiment, Disembodiment, or Something In-Between?
by Andrea Avery on October 19, 2022
When we think about “accommodating” disability in the classroom, our objective should not be pure disembodiment—where the body you show up in, to teach or to learn, is irrelevant—but embodiment: learning environments and experiences that have been constructed to invite, see, and explicitly affirm all bodies. This is true in both physical classrooms and online learning environments. Several years ago, I began exploring my identity and experiences as a disabled classroom teacher, leaning heavily on “embodied vulnerability” as conceptualized by Dominique C. Hill. However, never had I felt as embodied, or as vulnerable, as when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Suddenly, though my disability was known to my colleagues and students, the school’s policies around COVID-19 caused me (and disabled and chronically ill colleagues and students) to experience a new “discrepancy between body and world,” what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “misfitting”: like the college students described by Parsloe and Smith, we were marked as Other and “less-than-ideal,” with our needs for accommodation framed as “problem[s] of [our] individual bodies.”
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Platform Studies in Education
by T. Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia on September 12, 2022
One of the most significant changes to education in the last decade is the proliferation of platform technologies in teaching, learning, and administration. Even before a pandemic accelerated schools’ adoption of platforms for online instruction, educators relied on such technologies to share assignments and synthesize data (Google Classroom), manage classroom behavior (ClassDojo), monitor school devices (GoGuardian), assess student learning (Kahoot), communicate with families (SeeSaw), and supplement instruction (Khan Academy). According to one study, in 2019 US districts accessed, on average, over 700 digital platforms each month. As of 2021, this number has doubled.
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How Schools Stay the Same: A Study of White Parent Opposition to Ethnic Studies
by Ethan Chang on August 22, 2022
Ethnic Studies, an interdisciplinary curriculum and pedagogy that centers the insights of Black, Indigenous, and minoritized peoples, has become one of several targets of predominantly white parent opposition. Such opposition is not new. Yet these recent attacks represent an illustrative case for understanding the shifting dynamics of education politics and policymaking in the US and how and why schools stay the same.
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Pedagogies for Spiritual Development? Canadian–Muslim Educators Share Insights
by Claire Alkouatli on May 10, 2022
Most expressions of education in North America center normative conceptions of the human being who teaches and learns as a composite construction of embodied cognitions and emotions. But do we have spiritual dimensions, too? Expressions of education centering the spiritual are proliferating, including those originating in Islamic traditions. Over the past decade, Islamic education has been evolving in formal K–12 Islamic schools and informal weekend schools and expressed in centers at the Universities of Cambridge (CMC), South Australia (CITE), Warwick, University College London (CEMC) and dedicated institutions like Bayan Islamic Graduate School and Zaytuna College.
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More Veteran Students Attended For-Profit Colleges Since the Post-9/11 GI Bill
by Liang Zhang on April 26, 2022
For-profit colleges enroll a disproportionately large number of veteran students relative to public and private nonprofit colleges; the imbalance has been reinforced since the implementation of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2009. In a new study published in Harvard Education Review, Liang Zhang, a professor of higher education at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, finds that since the implementation of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, a greater proportion of veterans attended for-profit institutions instead of public institutions; and at the same time, they attended colleges in more expensive locations.
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