Refereed Journal Articles by Laura A Taylor
Reading Research Quarterly, 2024
In recent years, a number of states in the United States have enacted educa- tional policies, oft... more In recent years, a number of states in the United States have enacted educa- tional policies, often referred to as “critical race theory” bans, that aim to restrict teaching about race and racism in schools. This study examines how current and future elementary literacy educators interpreted and intended to respond to one such law in Tennessee. Drawing theoretically on policy sociol- ogy and critical race theory policy analysis, we qualitatively analyzed data generated in focus groups with 18 prospective and practicing teachers. Our findings illustrate the restrictive effects of the policy on elementary literacy instruction, caused partially by teachers interpreting the policy as substan- tially impeding their ability to engage students in critically reading, writing, and talking about race and racism. Further, findings demonstrate how this new policy intersected with and exacerbated existing curricular constraints in elementary literacy classrooms, including developmental discourses and neoliberal standardization, reinforcing normative whiteness by producing fur- ther impediments to elementary literacy instruction as a space to develop critical consciousness about race. This study contributes to emerging litera- ture on the effects of divisive concepts legislation, as well as situating this current legislative wave within existing policy contexts of restriction.
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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2023
Discourses of social justice are becoming increasingly prevalent in educational spaces, with risi... more Discourses of social justice are becoming increasingly prevalent in educational spaces, with rising numbers of teachers and teacher education programs expressing their aims to teach towards social justice. Yet, recent scholarship has documented the contested meanings of social justice in contemporary educational contexts. This qualitative case study aims to build upon existing literature by examining how two equity-oriented Black educators in an urban elementary school conceptualized and critiqued the discourses of social justice circulating in their school. Through thematic and discourse analysis of data generated through teacher inquiry group meetings and interviews, it examines their experiences with the language of social justice becoming associated with dehumanization and white saviorism, and it documents the equity-oriented pedagogical positions constructed by these teachers in opposition to such discourses. This analysis draws attention to contemporary (mis)uses of social justice discourses and proposes implications for justice- and equity-oriented teacher education.
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Linguistics and Education, 2022
Attending to both the political and pedagogical dimensions of silence in schools, this article en... more Attending to both the political and pedagogical dimensions of silence in schools, this article engages in a close analysis of the silences constructed within an interaction between one first-grade student and his teacher in order to build theory regarding how silence is constructed in the classroom. Drawing on theories of neoliberalism as well as humanizing pedagogy, it presents multiple readings of this interaction to illustrate how interpretation of silence is shaped by ideology. Further, it emphasizes the mediating role of mandated standardized curriculum in the production of silence in this interaction. Through this analysis, it argues that neoliberalism creates both ideological and material barriers to the practice of silence in contemporary classrooms, while also suggesting how silence might be strategically used by teachers as a humanizing pedagogical resource.
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Teaching and Teacher Education, 2022
Neoliberalism influences teaching not only through educational policies like high-stakes testing ... more Neoliberalism influences teaching not only through educational policies like high-stakes testing but also through more fundamentally shaping understandings of teaching and learning. This case study explores how neoliberalism framed the sense-making of one critically-oriented teacher in an accountability-constrained school through a discursive analysis of her teaching narratives. While documenting the teacher's consistent critique of accountability policies like high-stakes testing, the analysis also identifies the more insidious ways neoliberal logic shaped her thinking through frames of individual responsibility and of equating neoliberalism with reality. These findings suggest implications for how critically-oriented teacher educators and researchers consider teacher agency and resistance.
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The Reading Teacher
Conversations with students about their reading and writing provide an opportunity to scaffold li... more Conversations with students about their reading and writing provide an opportunity to scaffold literacy learning, and teachers can take different stances to adjust scaffolding in these conversations.
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Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 2020
This article explores how critical pedagogy unfolds in the everyday interactions between teachers... more This article explores how critical pedagogy unfolds in the everyday interactions between teachers and students. Specifically, Freirean constructs of critique and dialogue were explored in two key literacy events drawn from an ethnographically informed case study of one fourth-grade classroom. The events were first examined from an ethnographic perspective to understand how sociopolitical issue(s) were being critiqued (or avoided). These events were then analyzed again through micro-analytic discourse analysis to explore how teachers and students jointly accomplished dialogue and critique through proposing and taking up of particular stances toward text(s). By juxtaposing these two analytic lenses, the researchers argue for an understanding of critical pedagogy, particularly the tenets of critique and dialogue, as interactionally co-constructed in the continually evolving, everyday talk between teachers and students. This article closes by considering the implications of this work for classroom-based literacy research that examines critical pedagogy.
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Urban Education, 2020
Although there is much research detailing the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing (HST... more Although there is much research detailing the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing (HST), there is less that examines teachers’ practices within and beyond its control. This multiple case study analyzes ethnographic data to explore two teachers’ practices in an urban context where HST was relevant. Drawing on Foucault’s conceptualization of a plague-stricken town, we explore the mobilization of disciplinary power associated with HST. We then examine teachers’ agency as they taught beyond the administrative gaze. We found that teachers sometimes complied with administrative mandates while also articulating tensions of providing access and actively resisting/critiquing the test.
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Equity & Excellence in Education, 2019
Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too... more Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative study of literacy conferences in three urban elementary classrooms, I use microethnographic and critical approaches to discourse analysis to explore two sets of conflicting discourses mobilized by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions: curriculum as tailored versus standardized and as present oriented versus future oriented. To further explore how teachers and students interact amidst the tensions between these discourses, I present a close analysis of a writing conference in which a teacher-student pair prepare for the upcoming high-stakes writing test. This analysis makes visible challenges and possibilities of teachers and students co-constructing humanizing pedagogies while suggesting the need to attend to its temporal dimensions.
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English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2019
Purpose
By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims... more Purpose
By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.
Findings
In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.
Practical implications
Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.
Originality/value
These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.
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International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education
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Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, rec... more Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, recently, there has been an uptake of frameworks of multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogies, critical literacy, and others into literacy teacher preparation. In this study, we examine connections that pre-service teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge and literacy and barriers they face in building these connections. Areas of connection include examining one's past; recognizing students' lives and resources in literacy teaching; considering race, racism, and students' racial identity; drawing on multilingualism as a strength of students for literacy learning; and engaging actively and inquiring into literacy.
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Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2019
Literacy development involves not only the cultivation of new practices but also of new identitie... more Literacy development involves not only the cultivation of new practices but also of new identities. Drawing on theories of stance and positioning, this study examines the identity negotiations of one first-grade student with his teacher across a semester. Through close analysis of the stance bids and negotiations within a series of writing conferences, it demonstrates how the pair negotiated between four stances (feedback, instruction, management, and collaboration) in disrupting the student's initial institutional positioning as a struggling writer. These findings illustrate how teachers might use stance as a pedagogical tool, highlighting three patterns of negotiation between the pair that supported the development of the student's literate identities while showing how new discursive patterns and positions emerged as the pair interacted across a semester. This analysis suggests the necessity of negotiation as a pedagogical orientation in (re)positioning students, as well as the need to look across multiple timescales in examinations of identity.
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International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2018
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to disrupt traditional, separate roles in preservice teacher... more Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to disrupt traditional, separate roles in preservice teacher (PT) education, moving toward hybrid mentoring spaces, which is practice-based and a collaborative model of supporting PTs into teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
Design-based research was collaboratively enacted by a research team. The authors focused analysis on video-recorded collaborative coaching conferences, as well as shared discussions of those conferences between researchers, cooperating teachers (CTs) and field supervisors (FSs). At each of three iterations of coaching conversations, changes were made to the practice of collaborative coaching, allowing the research/design team to reflect upon practices and deepen the understanding of the development of design principles.
Findings
Three design principles of collaborative coaching grew through this research – a need for shared understanding and valuing of a coaching model amongst participants to guide decision making; a partnership between CTs and FSs in centering the PTs’ reflection on problems of practice, including the need for CTs and FSs to continually reflect on how their shifting roles toward this goal; and a relational framework including transparent communication. The authors extend these principles through two narrative vignettes and a framework that focuses on hybrid spaces for coaching.
Research limitations/implications
The research questions and design did not inquire into the relationship between collaborative coaching and PTs’ teaching practices.
Practical implications
Each narrative serves as a coaching model of how PTs, CTs and FSs, or triads, worked toward resolving practical challenges in coaching to better support PTs. The authors provide practical tools for teacher preparation programs to build collaborative relationships with teachers and schools.
Originality/value
Placing the PT into an active, leadership role in reflection on practice disrupts expert-novice and other binaries that may not serve programs that seek to prepare reflective practitioners. Previous studies have identified tensions when mentoring is not a collective process, but few studies have explored models that disrupt the two activity systems that often operate separately.
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Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2018
Many teacher education programs provide teachers with opportunities to read, write, and discuss c... more Many teacher education programs provide teachers with opportunities to read, write, and discuss critical pedagogy, with the hope that such work will allow them to develop more equitable and just teaching practices. Yet, there often remains a gap between the theoretical discussions of teaching and learning in teacher education classrooms and the pedagogical practice in those teachers’ K-12 classrooms. In this study, we examine how one teacher, Gabriela, used narratives to make connections between her third-grade classroom and the critical concepts she was exploring in a teacher education course. Embedded within an ethnographic case study of an inservice teacher education program, we used a discourse analytic approach to examine both the sociocultural knowledge and the identities Gabriela constructed through narrative as she engaged with issues of language, race, and power within the course. We consider some of the affordances of narrative in this space, including how it allowed Gabriela to integrate her understandings of multiple course topics, to position herself in multiple ways as a teacher, and to disrupt her existing understandings of race and racism in the classroom. This analysis suggests that critically oriented teacher education programs might more intentionally make space for narrative to connect critical theory and pedagogical practice.
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This study is part of a longitudinal, multiphase study on development of literacy mentoring pract... more This study is part of a longitudinal, multiphase study on development of literacy mentoring practices particularly with regard to the cooperating teacher. This paper reports on the findings from the first year of the study during which cooperating teachers (CT) participated in a master's program focused on coaching and mentoring while mentoring preservice teachers completing their elementary education degree inside a literacy specialization cohort. Drawing on observational and interview data and employing an activity theory framework, we examine the ways the CTs' involvement in a community of peers and faculty who met regularly in courses was instrumental their appropriation of a model of mentoring known as coaching with CARE. Analysis indicated that coursework, particularly two courses taken during the first year, offered multiple spaces that functioned as ways for participants to work through tensions that arose as the CTs moved across activity systems (from their coaching community at the university to their individual schools situated within area school districts). Specifically, these spaces afforded opportunities to work through understandings of the underlying theories and concepts related to reflective coaching,
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Linguistics and Education, 2018
Given the role of literacy education in (re)producing both oppressive and emancipatory language i... more Given the role of literacy education in (re)producing both oppressive and emancipatory language ideologies, teacher education must attend to teachers’ developing understandings of language and language learning. In this study, we examine one possible tool for building such understandings: through the telling of small stories. Focusing on small stories told during discussion of language variation within a graduate education course, we analyzed thirty such stories to identify how they were used to build identity positions and discourses of language. Three types of small stories were identified, each positioning the teller in distinct ways with regards to power and agency: as passive observer, as active resister, or as uncertain participant. These findings suggest affordances and constraints for using these types of narratives to examine and construct language ideologies within teacher education.
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English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2018
Purpose
This paper aims to consider how students and teachers engaged in political work in their... more Purpose
This paper aims to consider how students and teachers engaged in political work in their design and enactment of critical literacy workshops in one US elementary school facing pressures of accountability and standardization.
Design/methodology/approach
As a collaborative team of university researchers and classroom teachers, the authors used a qualitative, thematic approach to analyze data collected across a two-year, ethnographic case study.
Findings
Drawing on Janks’ (2012) conceptualization of p/Politics, this analysis identified three ways in which teachers approached their teaching politically: constructing flexible and broad definitions of readers and writers; blurring hierarchies between teachers, students and texts; and viewing literacy as a tool of power. In addition to elaborating on these themes, the findings illustrate how these political teaching practices supported students’ engagement with explicitly Political topics.
Originality/value
The era of Trump and “fake news” calls for people to not only start discussions about important social issues but also be able to engage in these discussions diplomatically and critically – in other words, to not only respond to the world but also to reconstruct it (Luke, 2004) and to imagine it better (Greene, 1995). This study offers a timely examination of ways to reshape reading and writing workshops in more critical ways, helping to prepare students for participation in the civic, career and personal worlds within and beyond school.
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Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice, 2017
In this report, we explore the potential for drama pedagogy in the classroom to support the engag... more In this report, we explore the potential for drama pedagogy in the classroom to support the engagement and growth of emergent bilingual students in language and literacy. We are focused on the use of drama to promote dialogic interactions during teacher read alouds. This study was conducted as a collaborative, action research investigation involving classroom teachers and university-based researchers. Our goals focused on three areas. First, we were interested in the impact of the drama intervention on comprehension. Second, we were interested in the responses of students to drama in read alouds with attention to differences in responses related to gender, grade level, skill level, and English Language Learner (school labeled) status. Third, we were interested in the students’ explanations for why (or why not) drama enhanced their engagement with the stories read. The findings suggest the power of incorporating drama to promote participation and dialogic interactions in support of language learning
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Teaching Education, 2017
In this paper, we examine the role of reflection in teacher preparation, specifically within a me... more In this paper, we examine the role of reflection in teacher preparation, specifically within a mentoring relationship between cooperating and preservice teacher. We report findings from a case analysis of this pair who engaged in problem-posing dialogue within pre- and post-conferences around practice over one year of their work together in an elementary-level classroom. The context is an innovative programme in which cooperating teachers pursue their Master’s degree while undergraduates (preservice teachers) complete their elementary education degrees. Our analysis of talk about teaching during six coaching cycles as well as supporting documents illustrates how Jane’s mentoring supported reflective practices and disrupted a notion of a field experience as simply a place to ‘practice’ pedagogical knowledge with corrective feedback. Additionally, we explore the tensions in this approach to mentoring. This case study has implications for teacher educators who seek to bolster teacher preparation through the support of mentoring relationships.
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Teaching and Teacher Education, 2017
While scholarship on teacher research suggests the value of this work for teaching and learning, ... more While scholarship on teacher research suggests the value of this work for teaching and learning, there are challenges in sustaining it beyond teacher education, in part because teachers may not envision themselves as researchers. Drawing on sociocultural theories of identity, this paper uses discourse analysis to consider how an instructor in a graduate course on teacher research supported inservice teachers in constructing identities as teacher researchers. The analysis identifies the ways the instructor used personal narratives as a tool to intentionally position teachers as teacher researchers as participants discursively negotiated these identities.
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Refereed Journal Articles by Laura A Taylor
By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.
Findings
In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.
Practical implications
Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.
Originality/value
These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.
The purpose of this paper is to disrupt traditional, separate roles in preservice teacher (PT) education, moving toward hybrid mentoring spaces, which is practice-based and a collaborative model of supporting PTs into teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
Design-based research was collaboratively enacted by a research team. The authors focused analysis on video-recorded collaborative coaching conferences, as well as shared discussions of those conferences between researchers, cooperating teachers (CTs) and field supervisors (FSs). At each of three iterations of coaching conversations, changes were made to the practice of collaborative coaching, allowing the research/design team to reflect upon practices and deepen the understanding of the development of design principles.
Findings
Three design principles of collaborative coaching grew through this research – a need for shared understanding and valuing of a coaching model amongst participants to guide decision making; a partnership between CTs and FSs in centering the PTs’ reflection on problems of practice, including the need for CTs and FSs to continually reflect on how their shifting roles toward this goal; and a relational framework including transparent communication. The authors extend these principles through two narrative vignettes and a framework that focuses on hybrid spaces for coaching.
Research limitations/implications
The research questions and design did not inquire into the relationship between collaborative coaching and PTs’ teaching practices.
Practical implications
Each narrative serves as a coaching model of how PTs, CTs and FSs, or triads, worked toward resolving practical challenges in coaching to better support PTs. The authors provide practical tools for teacher preparation programs to build collaborative relationships with teachers and schools.
Originality/value
Placing the PT into an active, leadership role in reflection on practice disrupts expert-novice and other binaries that may not serve programs that seek to prepare reflective practitioners. Previous studies have identified tensions when mentoring is not a collective process, but few studies have explored models that disrupt the two activity systems that often operate separately.
This paper aims to consider how students and teachers engaged in political work in their design and enactment of critical literacy workshops in one US elementary school facing pressures of accountability and standardization.
Design/methodology/approach
As a collaborative team of university researchers and classroom teachers, the authors used a qualitative, thematic approach to analyze data collected across a two-year, ethnographic case study.
Findings
Drawing on Janks’ (2012) conceptualization of p/Politics, this analysis identified three ways in which teachers approached their teaching politically: constructing flexible and broad definitions of readers and writers; blurring hierarchies between teachers, students and texts; and viewing literacy as a tool of power. In addition to elaborating on these themes, the findings illustrate how these political teaching practices supported students’ engagement with explicitly Political topics.
Originality/value
The era of Trump and “fake news” calls for people to not only start discussions about important social issues but also be able to engage in these discussions diplomatically and critically – in other words, to not only respond to the world but also to reconstruct it (Luke, 2004) and to imagine it better (Greene, 1995). This study offers a timely examination of ways to reshape reading and writing workshops in more critical ways, helping to prepare students for participation in the civic, career and personal worlds within and beyond school.
By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.
Findings
In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.
Practical implications
Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.
Originality/value
These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.
The purpose of this paper is to disrupt traditional, separate roles in preservice teacher (PT) education, moving toward hybrid mentoring spaces, which is practice-based and a collaborative model of supporting PTs into teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
Design-based research was collaboratively enacted by a research team. The authors focused analysis on video-recorded collaborative coaching conferences, as well as shared discussions of those conferences between researchers, cooperating teachers (CTs) and field supervisors (FSs). At each of three iterations of coaching conversations, changes were made to the practice of collaborative coaching, allowing the research/design team to reflect upon practices and deepen the understanding of the development of design principles.
Findings
Three design principles of collaborative coaching grew through this research – a need for shared understanding and valuing of a coaching model amongst participants to guide decision making; a partnership between CTs and FSs in centering the PTs’ reflection on problems of practice, including the need for CTs and FSs to continually reflect on how their shifting roles toward this goal; and a relational framework including transparent communication. The authors extend these principles through two narrative vignettes and a framework that focuses on hybrid spaces for coaching.
Research limitations/implications
The research questions and design did not inquire into the relationship between collaborative coaching and PTs’ teaching practices.
Practical implications
Each narrative serves as a coaching model of how PTs, CTs and FSs, or triads, worked toward resolving practical challenges in coaching to better support PTs. The authors provide practical tools for teacher preparation programs to build collaborative relationships with teachers and schools.
Originality/value
Placing the PT into an active, leadership role in reflection on practice disrupts expert-novice and other binaries that may not serve programs that seek to prepare reflective practitioners. Previous studies have identified tensions when mentoring is not a collective process, but few studies have explored models that disrupt the two activity systems that often operate separately.
This paper aims to consider how students and teachers engaged in political work in their design and enactment of critical literacy workshops in one US elementary school facing pressures of accountability and standardization.
Design/methodology/approach
As a collaborative team of university researchers and classroom teachers, the authors used a qualitative, thematic approach to analyze data collected across a two-year, ethnographic case study.
Findings
Drawing on Janks’ (2012) conceptualization of p/Politics, this analysis identified three ways in which teachers approached their teaching politically: constructing flexible and broad definitions of readers and writers; blurring hierarchies between teachers, students and texts; and viewing literacy as a tool of power. In addition to elaborating on these themes, the findings illustrate how these political teaching practices supported students’ engagement with explicitly Political topics.
Originality/value
The era of Trump and “fake news” calls for people to not only start discussions about important social issues but also be able to engage in these discussions diplomatically and critically – in other words, to not only respond to the world but also to reconstruct it (Luke, 2004) and to imagine it better (Greene, 1995). This study offers a timely examination of ways to reshape reading and writing workshops in more critical ways, helping to prepare students for participation in the civic, career and personal worlds within and beyond school.