The "Struggle for Identity in Today's Schools" examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity. What surfaces throughout the chapters are two lessons to be learned in relation to identity. The first lesson is that identities and the acts attributed to them are always forming and re-forming in relation to historically specific contexts, and these contexts are political in nature, I.E., defined by issues of diversity such as race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, gender, and economics. The second lesson presented by the authors is that identity forms in and across intimate and social contexts, over long periods of time. The historical timing of identity formation cannot simply be dictated by discourse. The identities posited by any particular discourse become important and a part of everyday life based on the intersection of social histories and social actors. Importantly, the social-cultural use of identities leads to another way of conceptualizing histories, personhoods, cultures, and their distributions over social and political groups. Contents of this book include: (1) Cultural Identity--Discovering Authentic Voice; (2) Introduction: Cultural Identity and the Struggle for Recognition (Patrick M. Jenlink and Faye Hicks Townes), which includes: (a) Affirming Diversity, Politics of Recognition, and the Cultural Work of Schools (Patrick M. Jenlink); (b) Dialoguing Toward a Racialized Identity: a Necessary First Step in a Politics of Recognition (Kris Sloan); and (c) Misrecognition Compounded (Faye Hicks Townes); and (3) Struggle for Recognition--Embracing Cultural Politics, which includes: (a) Recognition, Identity Politics, and English Language Learners (Angela Crespo Cozart); (b) Identity Formation and Recognition in Asian-American Students (Kim Woo); (c) Curriculum and Recognition (Ray Horn); (d) Extracurricular Activities and Student Identity (Amanda Rudolph); (e) Recognition, Identity Politics, and the Special Needs Student (Sandra Stewart); (f) Athletes, Recognition, and the Formation of Identity (Vincent Mumford); (g) Administrator to Parent Recognition: Treat Me with Respect (Julia Ballenger); (h) Recognition and Parent Involvement (Betty Alford); (I) Student Identity and Cultural Communication (Sandy Harris); (j) Value-Added Community: Recognition, Induction-Year Teacher Diversity and the Shaping of Identity (John Leonard); and (k) Coda: Recognition, Difference, and the Future of America's Schools (Patrick M. Jenlink).

This practitioner-focused guide to creating identity-safe classrooms presents four categories of core instructional practices: Child-centered teaching ; Classroom relationships ; Caring environments ; Cultivating diversity. The book presents a set of strategies that can be implemented immediately by teachers. It includes a wealth of vignettes taken from identity-safe classrooms as well as reflective exercises that can be completed by individual teachers or teacher teams.

Advance Praise for Moving the Rock “The future comes at us fast — which means school reformers don’t have time to wait. They need real tools in real time. That’s why Moving the Rock is so important. Grant Lichtman has guidance for anyone — teachers, parents, administrators, government officials — intent on helping young people succeed not ‘someday,’ but today.” — Daniel H. Pink, best-selling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind “Grant Lichtman’s book is a clear and comprehensive guide to the “what" and the “how” of educational transformation. Organized around essential levers for change, it is a must-read for anyone who wants to make a difference in our schools.” —Tony Wagner, Harvard Ilab Expert in Residence, and best-selling author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators” “This book gives me hope for a brighter future in education. Despite the dark clouds imposed by misguided policies, Grant Lichtman diligently tells stories of grass-roots innovations in the classrooms and schools all over the world. Moving the Rock is an inspiring call to action for all educators.” —Yong Zhao, Ph.D., Foundation Distinguished Professor, School of Education, University of Kansas “If you have children, or teach children, or want our children to succeed, this is a must-read book. Grant Lichtman throws down the challenge for all of us; that WE can change education, and he shows us just how successful schools everywhere are overcoming change-killing inertia in our schools.” —Todd Rose, best-selling author of The End of Average; Harvard University Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Educationgives educators, parents, administrators, students, and other stakeholders a clear paradigm for transforming our outmoded schools into schools that will help our children to meet the challenges of tomorrow. It’s no secret that our educational system is stuck. Moving the Rock shows the important roles all of us can play in un-sticking it by moving seven specific levers that will change the focus of education from what we teach to how we learn. Importantly, moving the levers is completely possible today, and in fact is already happening now in many schools. Drawing on research and extensive experience in the education community, Grant Lichtman outlines the seven essential levers that can profoundly change our schools so that we are teaching all our children how to learn, including • Creating the Demand for Better Schools • Building School-Community Learning Laboratories • Encouraging Open Access to Knowledge • Fixing How We Measure Student Success • Teaching the Teachers what They Really Need to Know • and more At the end of each of each chapter there are one or more challenges, ways that all of us can collectively turn the pioneering work of others into transformation for all our schools.

Goes beyond the category of transgender to question the need for gender classification Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. He examines four areas where we need to re-think our sex-classification systems: sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage. For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis’ recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people.

In this book, the author examines the experiences of gay and bisexual college students as they struggle to form a sense of identity.

Teacher identity is shaped by recognition or its absence, often by misrecognition of others. Recognition as a teacher, or the strong and complex identification with one’s professional culture and community, is necessary for a positive sense of self. Increasingly, teachers are entering educational settings where difference connotes not equal, better/worse, or having more/less power over resources. Differences between discourses of identity are braided at many points with a discourse of racism, both interpersonal and structural. Teacher Identity and the Struggle for Recognition examines the nature of identity and recognition as social, cultural, and political constructs. In particular, the contributing authors to the book present discussions of the professional work necessary in teacher preparation programs concerned with preparing teachers for the complexities of teaching in schools that mirror an increasingly diverse society. Importantly, the authors illuminate many of the often problematic structures of schooling and the cultural politics that work to define one’s identity – drawing into specific relief the nature of the struggle for recognition that all face who choose to entering teaching as a profession.

This volume brings together leading scholars in urban education to focus on inner city matters, specifically as they relate to educational research, theory, policy, and practice. Each chapter provides perspectives on the history and evolving nature of urban education, the current education landscape, and helps chart an all-important direction for future work and needs. The Handbook addresses seven areas that capture the breadth and depth of available knowledge in urban education: (1) Psychology, Health and Human Development, (2) Sociological Perspectives, (3) Families and Communities, (4) Teacher Education and Special Education, (5) Leadership, Administration and Leaders, (6) Curriculum & Instruction, and (7) Policy and Reform.

A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor book, and recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature. In this New York Times bestselling novel, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension. A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement? There were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before. Written in tandem by two award-winning authors, this four-starred reviewed tour de force shares the alternating perspectives of Rashad and Quinn as the complications from that single violent moment, the type taken directly from today’s headlines, unfold and reverberate to highlight an unwelcome truth.

This book provides an invaluable resource for researchers who wish to improve education by bridging students, school, family, and community resources. Based in connecting experiences in and out of school, it suggests a strategy to put students' practices, cultures, and identities in the center of a twenty-first-century education.

What makes a moral person moral? Who decides what morality means? What makes leadership practice moral? In today’s schools, what stands as moral leadership? These are questions that reflect the complexity integral to the calculus of human morality, especially in a world that is defined daily by its variant meanings of morality, its acts of immorality. The school as an educational setting is or should be a decidedly moral center of the society; it is the natural intersect between the family and the multi-dimensional nature of public life. Educational Leadership and Moral Literacy addresses these questions, situating the reader in a conversation that examines the meaning and nature of moral leadership through the lens of moral literacy and the dispositional aims of moral leadership in educational settings. The contributing authors extend an argument that the work of leader educators and practitioners alike must continuously be re-articulated around the dispositional aims aligned with a moral, democratic education. Educators must be concerned with developing the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of the educational leader as a “moral person.”