Equity, Equality, and Reform in Contemporary Public Education

Principles of equity have largely been overlooked in the field of education in favor of an acute focus on equality. Brown vs. Board of Education challenged practices of separate but equal, maintaining that equality was the foundation on which education should be built if all students were to benefit from education. Without a dual consideration for both equity and equality, practitioners are limited in their ability to provide an appropriate education to diverse populations of children. It is not enough to give students the same access to learning opportunities and resources. Educators must also create individualized pathways to the learning environment if all students are to benefit academically.

Pedagogical Interventions in the First-Year Writing Classroom for First-Generation College Students

This chapter discusses ways of engaging first-generation college students in the first-year writing classroom. Many interventions exist for helping first-generation college students adjust to and thrive in academic life, such as TRIO programs. This chapter focuses on how instructors in writing classrooms can create pedagogical interventions to encourage and engage these students in academic discourse. To better understand how the pedagogical interventions were received, the author studied contemporary research on multiple ways of engaging first-generation college students in the first-year writing classroom. Along with this research, the author also collected data from students that identified what activities and assignments most engaged them and what they learned from those assignments. From this data and outside research, the author determined three main pedagogical interventions to help first-generation college students succeed, such as peer review groups, creating empathetic spaces, and assigning empathetic writing genres.

Girls in STEM K-12 Subjects

While utilizing social learning feminist theory, this chapter explores current literature pertaining to the limited presence of women in STEM careers. This stems from girls' attitudes and self-assessment of math and science achievement, male-dominated workplaces, and societal stereotypes. The social learning feminist theory is composed of two theories: post-modernist feminism and social learning theories. The authors provide practical recommendations to broaden the definition of STEM to allow more women access to these related fields as well as to encourage more girls to pursue STEM majors.

“So, Are You Hindi?”

Immigrant children and adolescents living in the United States encounter significant stressors during the acculturation process, particularly in the schooling context. South Asian immigrants identify strongly with religious and geographic region background. This chapter investigates intersections between religion and education in U.S. South Asians' post-migration experiences in the American Midwest. Findings suggest South Asian children enrolled in U.S. schools are confronted daily by the duality between their parents' birth culture and mainstream values and traditions of the host culture. Participants and their families experience prejudice and racism in daily activities, including school. Prejudice ranges from judgments about English-speaking ability to doubts about the South Asian education system to prepare workers for U.S. jobs. Findings show religious affiliation, accent, skin color, and ethnic dress create barriers for South Asians trying to fit into everyday American society.

Viewing the Contamination of Student Achievement Through the Lens of Poverty

This chapter addresses the growing number in the underserved population of school-age children and their families who live in poverty and raises awareness as to how that factor directly contaminates student achievement. It is important to understand the federal definition of poverty and the attendant unique social environment. This chapter highlights an appreciation for the history of American race relations and its role in poverty-related behavior, as well as examines the inherent biases prevalent in American communities and schools that work to restrict opportunities for underprivileged families and children. It explores the impact of changing a culture of poverty through the lens of schools and role models, subsequently understanding multidisciplinary approaches for eliminating policies that alienate and exclude the poor. It includes best practices in pedagogy, services, and support for marginalized populations that will illuminate for the practitioner how the contamination of student achievement occurs and empowers them to assist those trapped by poverty.

Revolutionizing Education

The chapter discusses equity and educational reform as it relates to minority students in the United States. Historical information is presented along with a synopsis of the current state. Recommendations to equalize learning opportunities and reform education are presented. Students in schools all across America have been shortchanged. They are drowning in a bottomless ocean with the waves and currents pulling them further and further into the depth of a sea of confusion, a sense of hopelessness, and an emptiness that has shattered their dreams.

Education as the Practice of Freedom

As a result of the complex, multilayered, and problematic environment in which they work, two scholars collaborating between the continents of Australia and North America complicate the data from standardized testing in their communities to argue for the implementation of indigenous knowledge epistemology as a strategy to achieve social justice and equity in global classrooms. The chapter explores the residual effects of imperialism on the formerly colonized and investigates postcolonial themes such as the indigenous self, gender constructs, cultural and communal identity. The study reveals just how critical it is to global research to have the benefit of scholars collaborating across borders. The study provides findings and offers recommendations in direct response to the question: How can educators engage students as collaborators within a third space that elevates their voices as successful students?

Using Culturally Responsive Teaching and Data-Driven Instruction in Mathematics to Create Equity and Equality

The diverse nature of school populations in current education requires teaching that not only considers the differences in their students, but how their own practices have an impact on a student's ability to learn content. Traditional Eurocentric models of education are not relevant to the lives of racially culturally ethnically linguistically diverse students, thus creating barriers to learning for students who do not fit neatly into categories of Black or White. For the academic environment to be accessible for all students, classroom instruction must become culturally aligned. This may be somewhat of a challenge given that classroom teachers are ill-prepared to meet the needs of RCELD students in math education. Teachers are faced with the critical challenge of creating learning environments that bridge the gap between culture and curriculum with appropriate strategies and resources, while all the while adhering to state and federal standards. This chapter explores using culturally responsive teaching to teach mathematics.

Sowing Seeds of Justice

Forming the basis for a provocative dialogue and written to illuminate teaching stories often pushed to the margins, this chapter provides a counter-narrative to the discourse surrounding leaky teacher-of-color pipelines and the national teacher crisis. Employing a critical race analytical lens, critical auto-ethnographic approach, and narrated through prose, five female educators committed to social justice share how they rely on unique and intersecting identities to sustain themselves in contested school spaces, while simultaneously exploring the cultural wealth they and their students bring into those spaces. Their collective stories reveal important lessons essential to our understanding of how to develop teachers for social justice. They also provide insight for those who teach in schools and classrooms meant to educate our most vulnerable and under-served students, and may answer the question, Why doesn't anyone want to teach anymore?

Educational Disparities Among Marginalized Groups of Students

Parents play a critical role in shaping their children's educational outcomes. Scholars identify parental resources, family background, and capital investments in children as factors that contribute to educational outcomes later in life. Schools also prove to be important contexts where children develop, suggesting that both families and schools are important for promoting youths' educational success. Ecological systems theory suggests the importance of considering how multiple contexts affect youths' social, cognitive, and behavioral development and maintains that socio-demographic factors, such as race and ethnicity, may affect interactions with immediate settings, such as families and schools. Therefore, drawing from this perspective, this researcher argues that perceiving one's school as unsafe and being the victim of bullying disrupts the educational process, particularly for students of color. Bullying encompasses a power dynamic between the bully and bully-victim, and the presence of bullying in schools may exacerbate unequal school environments.