Rebecca A Smith

The study this proposal describes focuses on a culturally relevant text, Kurusa's (2008) “The Streets  are Free,” presented to primarily Latino students in a 5th grade classroom in the United States.  This lesson was taught as part of a social justice unit to explicitly demonstrate how children can become activists in their community.  The study asks the questions: (a) What social justice categories and actions does the text talk into being; (b) How do the students and teacher further these categories and actions in classroom discussion; and (c) How do students remember the categories and actions well after the lesson was taught?  During the lesson, the text introduced the binary of city/nature and the accompanying classroom discussion developed the category-bound activity of children’s play in those locations.  As the lesson progressed, I observed the teacher privileging the character’s feelings and actions, demonstrating the category bound activities associated with the social activist child (SAC).  Finally, the teacher reflected on the placement of this child in an adult world by developing the role of adults in relation to the character’s abilities to complete their goal of building a playground. 
The analysis of the lesson included a multilayered analytic approach: (1) critically deconstructing the text to examine social justice themes used by the teacher to explicitly focus on the categories employed in this social justice text; (2), applying membership categorization analysis to the transcribed classroom discussion to locate implicit/unexplained/unnoticed work that goes into the production of creating a social activist child; and (3) using discourse analysis to unpack a post interview with the teacher after the reading to explore the development of children’s membership categorization.
The analysis revealed that during the lesson the text, teacher, and students’ categorizations work together to create identities and actions for the SAC and prompted discussions to clarify social justice themes.  Another finding was that the SAC should be free to play in natural settings and allowed limited emotions including sadness and disappointment, but not anger.  In addition, the SAC is categorized as helpless and dependent on adults for protection.  Finally, students recalled prior social justice issues including juvenile hall and striking to help formulate social acceptable actions during discussion.
The analysis of the post interview showed the students’ ability to retell parts of the story but also revealed their weakness in recalling social justice themes and the impact of the characters in the text.  The interview revealed the membership categorization and category bound activities used to develop children’s social justice reasoning.  Interestingly, however, what seems to have really stuck with the students was not the lesson of social justice intended by the teacher but the character of a corrupt mayor who was lying to win an election.
Kurusa. (2008). The Streets are Free. Buffalo: Annick Press.

The study this proposal describes focuses on the pervasive use of educational data a means to categorize and normalize children’s identity development.  Using Foucault’s method of genealogy to make strange the concept of data, the analysis answers the following: (a) What documents, policies, and reports legitimize the use of data and  (b) What discourses have been introduced into the classroom as a result of data collection.
The documents for this analysis include Thorndike's (1918) chapter “The Nature, Purposes, and General Methods of the Measurements of Educational Products”, The Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965, Gardner's (1983) “A Nation at Risk”, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and No Child Left Behind Annual Reports to Congress from 2001 to 2012.  The analysis revealed the legitimization of data as evidence, the creation of categorizational funding to label, track, and monitor marginalized students, and specific discourse designed to maintain data monitoring.

The session will provide a review and critical analysis of the literature describing boundary spanners between schools and university settings as pivotal agents of change in professional developments schools, university curriculum, and teacher development.  During the session, we will consider how the roles of boundary spanners and the term “third space” have been characterized in the literature.  Traditionally boundary spanners’ experiences have been assumed to be essentially similar across all contexts, while, our experiences have shown nuances , variation, and complexity in this heterogeneous role.  Secondly, our experiences reveal the typically static description of third space to be overly-simplistic.  We have found this space to be far more complex, existing on a continuum, and shifting or changing over time as boundary spanners and their partners’ actions change the relationships between the two institutions.  Finally, we will also  acknowledge the inequalities in power of different boundary spanners and describe how these inequalities affect their abilities to function effectively and  be successful  agents of change in the partnership.

Responding to Alfredo Artiles’s (2011) call for research on “the racialization of disabilities,” this paper draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of four African-American children from low-income families, who have been either diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or considered at-risk of having the disorder. In particular, the paper challenges binary perspectives on these children’s characteristics held by their teachers by examining the focal children’s responses to daily routine in early childhood settings. The findings of this study point to the importance of understanding children’s engagement in school activities on a continuum and in context. We present these findings with relevant video clips, photos, and interview transcripts and discuss the implications of the study.

This study explores how four teacher educators - an African American lesbian, a Deaf White man, a multilingual Muslim woman, and a White woman – created culturally sustaining pedagogy by co-teaching an undergraduate education course intentionally focused on embodied representations of diversity and practice, and engaged in collective teaching dialogues with predominantly White pre-service women. In doing so, this study contributes to the conception of culturally sustaining instruction as not only an ideological representation, but also as an embodiment of practice in teacher education programs centered on social justice.

Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault’s genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century.

There are two voices represented in this space.  One is of Becky Smith, PDSD Fellow, a second year doctoral student who as part of an assistantship exchanged places with Bashie Ebron, Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA) a fifth grade teacher at an elementary school.  This exchange allowed Bashie to be released from classroom duties to supervise undergraduate students in the field twice a week.  We are using this space as a way to reflect on our experience, explore the entanglement of our roles, and demonstrate our arrangement as a small part of the partnership whose purpose is to integrate theory and practice to facilitate the growth and achievement of the elementary and pre-service students.