What might PK12 schools do to improve teachers’ and students’ STEM knowledge and skills? This book will look at equity and access issues in STEM education from PK12, university, and administrative and policy lenses.

An ambitious project to help economically disadvantaged students develop technical, creative, and analytical skills across a learning ecology that spans school, community, home, and online. The popular image of the "digital native"--usually depicted as a technically savvy and digitally empowered teen--is based on the assumption that all young people are equally equipped to become innovators and entrepreneurs. Yet young people in low-income communities often lack access to the learning opportunities, tools, and collaborators (at school and elsewhere) that help digital natives develop the necessary expertise. This book describes one approach to address this disparity: the Digital Youth Network (DYN), an ambitious project to help economically disadvantaged middle-school students in Chicago develop technical, creative, and analytical skills across a learning ecology that spans school, community, home, and online. The book reports findings from a pioneering mixed-method three-year study of DYN and how it nurtured imaginative production, expertise with digital media tools, and the propensity to share these creative capacities with others. Through DYN, students, despite differing interests and identities--the gamer, the poet, the activist--were able to find some aspect of DYN that engaged them individually and connected them to one another. Finally, the authors offer generative suggestions for designers of similar informal learning spaces.

Living on the Boundaries: Urban Marginality in National and International Contexts examines the complex, often controversial issues impacting those who live on the margins of society in our densely populated cities. It describes and analyzes the living conditions of marginalized persons in cities and neighborhoods throughout the world and the consequential impact on their future social mobility. Chapters focus on key issues that include immigration, educational under-achievement, urban renewal, public health, immigration, homelessness, environmental issues, race, segregation, and the marginality of urban youth and economically disadvantaged groups. This volume is packed with research compiled by an international array of scholars and intellectuals from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, economics, political science, psychology, education, public health, law, criminology, history, urban studies, geography and demography, and urban planning. From the first chapter to the last, this immensely insightful anthology richly details and informs us about the human condition, from multidisciplinary perspectives, about urban life in global contexts.

This book offers a multifaceted approach to the world of young adults, everything from Ray Schrock's use of Walter Dean Myers' sports stories to discuss race relations and cultural politics to Joyce Litton's analysis of the highly popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Quartet.

This unique book focuses on how to provide effective instruction to K-12 students who find writing challenging, including English language learners and those with learning disabilities or language impairments. Prominent experts illuminate the nature of writing difficulties and offer practical suggestions for building students' skills at the word, sentence, and text levels. Topics include writing workshop instruction; strategies to support the writing process, motivation, and self-regulation; composing in the content areas; classroom technologies; spelling instruction for diverse learners; and assessment approaches. Every chapter is grounded in research and geared to the real-world needs of inservice and preservice teachers in general and special education settings.

Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children's literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. Even as children's literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.

Education questions and/or problems beg to be conceptualized and analyzed through more than one identity axis. This is.an edited collection that looks across the different realms of urban education—theorizing identity markers in urban education, education in urban schools and communities, thinking intersectionally in teacher education & higher education, educational policies & urban spaces—seeking to better understand each topic using an intersectional lens.

This authoritative handbook examines the community, district, and teacher leadership roles that affect urban schools. It will serve as a foundation for pedagogical and educational leadership practices that foster social justice, equity, and advocacy for those who have been traditionally and historically underserved in education. The handbook’s ten sections cover topics as diverse as curriculum, instruction, and educational outcomes; gender, race, and class; higher education; and leadership preparation and support. Its twenty-nine chapters offer both American and international perspectives.

Explores the ways that immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses. In her ethnographic study of Lao American students at an urban, public high school, Bic Ngo shows how simplistic accounts of these students smooth over unfinished, precarious identities and contested social relations. Exploring the ways that immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses that simplify and confine their experiences within binary categories of good/bad, traditional/modern and success/failure, she unmasks and examines the stories we tell about them, and unsettles the hegemony of discourses that frame identities within discrete dualisms. Rather than cohesive, the identity negotiations of Lao American students are responses that modify, resist, or echo these discourses. Ngo argues that while Lao American students are changing what it means to be "urban" and "immigrant" youth, most people are unable to read them as doing so, and instead see the youth as confused, backward, and problematic. By illuminating the discursive practices of identity, this study underscores the need to conceptualize urban, immigrant identities as contradictory, fractured and unresolved. Bic Ngo is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota and coeditor (with Kevin K. Kumashiro) of Six Lenses for Anti-Oppressive Education: Partial Stories, Improbable Conversations.

A comprehensive collection of essays from leading experts on family and community engagement The Wiley Handbook of Family, School, and Community Relationships in Education brings together in one comprehensive volume a collection of writings from leading scholars on family and community engagement to provide an authoritative overview of the field. The expert contributors identify the contemporary and future issues related to the intersection of students' families, schools, and their communities. The Handbook's chapters are organized to cover the topic from a wide range of perspectives and vantage points including families, practitioners, policymakers, advocates, as well as researchers. In addition, the Handbook contains writings from several international researchers acknowledging that school, family, and community partnerships is a vital topic for researchers and policymakers worldwide. The contributors explore the essential issues related to the policies and sociopolitical concerns, curriculum and practice, leadership, and the role of families and advocates. This vital resource contains a diverse range of topics related to the field Including information on current research as well as the historical origins. The Wiley Handbook of Family, School, and Community Relationships in Educationis a comprehensive and authoritative guide to family and community engagement with schools.