Construction and Validation of the Perception of Attention to Diversity Scale (PADS)

The main objective of this study was to develop and validate a reliable and valid scale that allows the measurement of the perception that teachers have of attention to diversity in the classroom: the Perception of Attention to Diversity Scale (PADS). To this end, 456 teachers answered a survey. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed a robust adjustment of the expected bifactorial structure. The two factors identified were the perception of attention (a) related to the Specific Educational Needs, with five items, and (b) related to cultural diversity, with four items. The patterns of relationship between the scale and its factors with other psychological variables supported the construct validity. The study provides a useful tool both to measure the perception that teachers have of the levels of attention to diversity they offer in the classroom, and to analyze the relationship that such perception can have with different study variables.

After the Virus: Disaster Capitalism, Digital Inequity, and Transformative Education for the Future of Schooling

The 2020 COVID-19 disaster triggered an educational crisis in the United States, deeply exacerbating the inequities present in education as schools went online. This primary impact may not be the only one, however: literature describes a secondary impact of such disasters through “disaster capitalism,” in which the private sector captures the public resources of disaster-struck communities for profit. In response to these warnings, we ask how schools, families, and communities can counteract disaster capitalism for educational equity. To address this question, we first synthesize a critical framework for analyzing digital inequity in education. We then dissect the strategies disaster capitalism uses to attack the school-family-community relationship and exacerbate digital inequity in “normal” times as well as during crises. Employing the notion of community funds of knowledge, we next examine the resources schools, families, and communities can mobilize against disaster capitalism and digital inequity. Finally, guided by the concepts of generative change and transformative learning, we consider actionable practices of countering disaster capitalism for a transformative education.

Taking Financial Literacy Downtown: Leveraging Community Partnerships to Increase Communication of Essential Financial Information in an Urban Area

Financial illiteracy is a systemic issue across the country, especially among lower-income individuals in urban communities. This low level of financial literacy often leads to higher levels of debt, lower credit scores, less wealth accumulation, and poor retirement planning. Increasing financial literacy in these priority populations can be effective in combatting some of these negative financial outcomes. This study emerged from a partnership between community organizations in a large urban metropolitan area and scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Guided by formative research principles, this manuscript reports on research findings derived from several focus groups with community members. These focus groups helped to identify existing perceived financial knowledge levels, categorize barriers to enhancing financial literacy, and illuminate potentially pathways to effective financial literacy program development.

The Integration of 21st-Century Skills in Science: A Case Study of Canada and the USA

This comparative study examines the extent to which the 21st-century skills are integrated into the 4th and 8th-grade public school science curriculum in Canada in relation to that of the United States of America (USA) by analyzing the 4th and 8th grade Common Framework of Science Learning Outcomes of Canada and the 4th and 8th grade Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) of the United States in relation to the 21st-century skills as listed by the Applied Educational System (AES). The results predicted a huge economic decline of the United States in the nearest future in contrast to that of Canada if an intervention is not instituted.

Urban Literacy Leadership: Examining One Principal’s Vision and Practice: A Sociocultural Investigation of One Principal’s Practice

School leadership research offers prescriptions for strong instructional and culturally relevant leadership for diverse and urban adolescent populations, yet little evidence describes how school principals impact adolescents’ in-school reading experiences. This qualitative inquiry sought to understand how one urban secondary principal perceived and enacted his role in a school’s effort to teach reading. It also investigated how staff and students perceived his actions. Framed by sociocultural perspectives of reading and a distributed leadership perspective, data analysis revealed that the principal made time and nurtured relationships to grow teacher capacity, support and participate in independent reading, and attend to individual readers and teachers. This study affirms the importance of context in shaping urban adolescents’ reading experiences and raises implications for the urban school principal’s role in their literacy instruction.

The Future Ready Lab: Maintaining Students’ Access to Internships during Times of Crisis

In this manuscript, we highlight the virtual Future Ready Lab as one example of an innovative internship concept designed to increase the quantity of meaningful paid internship experiences available for students to participate in, prepare for further education, and be able to compete in the 21st Century workforce. The Lab’s premise is to provide access to student populations (e.g., economically disadvantaged, Black, and Latinx students) who oftentimes are not afforded the opportunity to hone their 21st Century skills in a high-impact internship experience. The virtual nature of the Future Ready Labs provided opportunities for high school students to participate, despite transportation limitations, social distancing, emerging safety precautions, and requirements based on the COVID-19 pandemic. In this manuscript, we help fill gaps in existing literature concerning how schools support students’ work-based learning experiences during times of crisis, particularly for diverse and economically disadvantaged learners. We conclude with recommendations for practice, and a broader work-based learning framework for how partnerships can be forged and sustained in high schools across the nation, as well as implications for educational policy, practice, and research.

Multicultural Classrooms: Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy among A Sample of Canadian Preservice Teachers

Many teachers enter classrooms with limited cross-cultural awareness and low levels of confidence to accommodate cultural diversity. Therefore, teaching a heterogeneous body of students requires teachers to have culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy (CRTSE). The investigation of factors impacting teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching diverse students has produced mixed results. The purpose of the current study was to explore the determinants of CRTSE in a sample of Canadian preservice teachers. One hundred and ten preservice teachers from a medium-sized public Canadian University completed measures of political orientation, CRTSE, cross-cultural experiences, and teacher burnout. Higher levels of preservice teachers’ CRTSE were predicted by lower levels of Emotional Exhaustion (i.e., a key aspect of burnout syndrome) and more frequent cross-cultural experiences in their childhood and adolescence. Implications for training preservice teachers are discussed.

Implicit Sense of Academic Futility: An Unexpected Burden From Lower Secondary Education

Vocational and professional training tracks can be a good option for many adolescents, many of whom enter these programs with a sometimes hidden burden of negative experiences and attitudes to school. This paper explores the sense of academic futility in future VET students at the end of lower secondary education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 25 Czech students in which they described their experiences from lower secondary school, we found that despite the students’ beliefs that their achievement is the product of their own effort, they describe situations from which it is evident that they noticed (i.e., perceived) that they actually did lose control over their results. At the same time, they explicitly claim that they have full control over their own achievement. This implicit sense of academic futility is created by several mechanisms at the school level: the curriculum, ineffective teaching, grading leniency, and teachers’ distrust of students’ capabilities.

Time for Change: Understanding Teacher Social-Emotional Learning Supports for Anti-Racism and Student Well-Being During COVID-19, and Beyond

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the approximately 3.2 million teachers serving 50.8 million students in U.S. schools were positioned, along with school counselors, as de facto first responders for student well-being. Teachers across the country, already struggling to transition their teaching to online platforms, had to simultaneously implement recently adopted Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Standards. While prioritizing the social and emotional needs of children is of course a necessity, we wondered about the support needed for teachers who shouldered this work? Of particular interest were the supports for teachers operating in urban schools and with communities of color disproportionately impacted. And within this timeframe, global uprisings protesting police murders of Black bodies revealed the crucial importance of anti-racist educational practices. While we contend that teacher well-being is a key determinate of student well-being, we also explored the ways teachers innovated and created online communities (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to support one another’s SEL and anti-racist pedagogy. The connection between these practices to research-supported online teacher support structures that influence teacher emotions (e.g., efficacy) was further explored. We conclude with implications from learnings from this crisis for practitioners, educator preparation programs, policy, and future research while adding to the limited literature concerning teacher SEL, anti-racism, and teacher-created communities.