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We Need You to Keep Pressing Toward Justice amid Policies and Practices Designed to Maintain Inequity
by H. Richard Milner IV on April 12, 2022
Education, educators, and the truth about the ugly roots and maintenance of all types of inequity are under attack in the United States. I increasingly hear from families, community members, policymakers, students, and educators sharing their discouragement, uneasiness, and fear about policies and practices designed to maintain inequity. From a Tennessee school board that banned Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, to states implementing policies against classroom discussion about the legacy of racism in America, it’s a hard time for teachers to explain history and contemporary challenges while balancing demands from stakeholders who increasingly police what they believe students should learn.
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Re-centering Ethics in Higher Education
by Ashley Floyd Kuntz and Rebecca M. Taylor on March 30, 2022
The present moment is a baffling one for public colleges and universities. How can they protect academic freedom and tenure, respect freedom of speech, and maintain productive relationships with state legislatures? How can college and university leaders respond to legislative pressure to avoid “divisive concepts” while not infringing upon the academic freedom of faculty who research and teach about race, sex, gender, and other concepts being targeted as “divisive”? How can public universities prepare students to enter professions—especially teaching—in which these concepts are not only unavoidable but necessary?
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Using a Continuous Improvement Approach to Help More High School Students Succeed
by Martha Abele Mac Iver and Robert Balfanz on March 16, 2022
As students returned to in-person learning this past fall after months of remote schooling, high school educators have faced particular challenges. Half of the students at these schools were personally unknown to faculty. Both ninth and tenth graders were entering the building and meeting teachers face-to-face for the first time.
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Language, Dignity, and Educational Rights
by Luis E. Poza, PhD on February 18, 2022
For all our efforts to describe and measure language in educational research and policy, I always come back to the words of a pair of Nobel laureates. In her Nobel lecture (hyperlink), novelist and essayist Toni Morrison exalted language as a conduit of human experience and potential, stating “The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers” (1993, para. 18). In this vein, Nobel Peace Prize winning Indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú wrote on the occasion of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (hyperlink) that “language is the vehicle that permits thought to be in accordance with the knowledge and the world vision of a given culture, of a given people . . . In language lies the main weapon of resistance of those cultures which for centuries have suffered the imposition of alien cultural values . . .” (1996, p. 17). Taken together, these quotes remind me that languaging—the holistic repertoire of practices and features used for verbal and nonverbal communication (hyperlink)—is a feature of fundamental personhood and humanity. It is through our languaging that we express our ideas and emotions, and through languaging that we can both affirm and transcend our social groupings, rich with their histories, values, and knowledge.
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On the Intersectional Amplification of Barriers to College Internships Participation
by Matthew Wolfgram, Brian Vivona, and Tamanna Akram on January 13, 2022
Marisol is a twenty-year-old first-generation Latina college student studying justice studies at an urban comprehensive university. She works thirty hours a week, helping her family not only financially but also with care for her two younger siblings. Her parents speak little English so she must accompany them to doctor visits and the like to translate. She has a passion for her schoolwork and wants to succeed in the classroom and pursue a career in a social justice organization. An internship has opened in such an organization; however, it is unpaid; Marisol desperately wants this opportunity, but with all her responsibilities she simply cannot take it.
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Is Complicity in Oppression a Privilege? Toward Social Justice Education as Mutual Aid
by Nicolas Tanchuk, Tomas Rocha, and Marc Kruse on December 15, 2021
“As a White person,” Peggy McIntosh (2017) once remarked, “I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, White privilege, which puts me at an advantage” (p. 28). Like McIntosh, many social justice educators have come to believe that it is crucial for students to discover how members of dominant groups are advantaged and subordinate groups are disadvantaged by oppressive relationships. Oppressive domination, in this picture of politics, is a zero-sum game. In it, some “win” by exploiting others. Yet if culpable complicity in oppression is a privilege, an advantage for those in dominant groups, why would those in positions of dominating power dismantle the oppressive systems they can maintain? It is irrational to pursue what is disadvantageous over what is advantageous. If members of dominant groups effectively embrace the conception of advantage taught in the discourse of privilege, we should be unsurprised if oppressive relationships persist or expand. This is the problem of privilege.
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Partnerships with Immigrant Families in Politically Polarized Times
by Adriana Villavicencio on December 7, 2021
Close to a quarter of all public school students in the United States come from immigrant households; yet, K–12 schools struggle to effectively serve this population. This is especially true in a political climate that is outwardly hostile to immigrants (Gándara, 2018) and in the midst of a pandemic that has taken a disproportionate toll on immigrant communities. Our work on immigrant serving schools has highlighted the importance of social justice leadership (Villavicencio, 2020), buffering schools from harmful policy (Jaffe-Walter & Villavicencio, 2021), and teacher practice focused on culturally relevant, linguistically responsive classrooms (Villavicencio, Jaffe-Walter, & Klevan, 2020). Another critical—and typically overlooked—dimension of effectively serving immigrant students and children of immigrants is building and maintaining authentic partnerships with families.
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Testing What Isn’t Taught and the Potential Consequences on Identity Formation
by Kristin J. Davin on November 29, 2021
Emergent bilingual learners are accustomed to involuntarily taking many high-stakes tests in English, but a new policy asks them to voluntarily take a proficiency test of their home language, regardless of whether they received any instruction in school in this language. The Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) is a policy adopted in forty-three states that originated in California in opposition to English-only legislation and from a desire to change deficit-based views of bilingualism. The program recognizes students who graduate high school bilingual and biliterate and was designed to serve as a clear symbol to colleges, universities, and employers that an individual is proficient in two or more languages. Each year, more and more institutions of higher education award credit for SoBL attainment, paving pathways to higher education for students who may not have previously had the opportunity to enter college with any credit and decreasing the cost of a degree.
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Investing in Black Academic Leaders
by Russell S. Thacker and Sydney Freeman Jr. on November 22, 2021
In 2017, the Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted the fact that the city’s three most prominent universities each had an African American serving in the top academic post. Why was it so newsworthy? Up until that time, only 4 percent of all provosts at four-year institutions in the United States were Black. This statistic caught our eye. Given the historic views on the capacity for intellectualism in the Black community and the low numbers of Black faculty, we knew Black academics at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) had an uphill climb.
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We Can’t Go Back to Normal: Restorative Classrooms During COVID-19
by Maisha T. Winn and Lawrence Torry Winn on November 9, 2021
In March of 2020, the world quickly came to a standstill as the reality of COVID-19 started to sink in. Some of the most popular social gatherings were suspended, postponed, or moved to virtual platforms: Broadway plays, professional and college sports, the Kentucky Derby, weddings, Juneteenth, Fourth of July, and the Olympics. These events as well as disruptions to employment, housing, healthcare, and travel impacted everyone’s daily routine.
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