International Journal of Qualitative Studies In Education

https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2233912 Anti-oppressive global citizenship education (GCE), a specific strand of critical GCE, is a new field, especially concerning empirical studies within English classrooms. Based on an anti-oppressive GCE framework and the research question, “what does anti-oppressive theory look like in practice in English classrooms and how can this be woven into GCE?”, this paper explains the results of a project which used a portraiture methodology to collect and analyze approximately 6 hours of semi-structured interviews, detailed impressionistic records, and several lessons collected with one secondary school English teacher in Ontario, Canada. The portrait showcases how the educator implements a three-pillar approach to anti-oppressive GCE language education and the need to shine light on minoritized identities, create healthy soil for the foundation of learning about systemic oppression, and give the proper amounts of water/support to each student.

The Intergenerational Reflections technique was developed to bring together the voices of connected stakeholders of different ages and positions—in this case, students and teachers—to create recommendations that build on both groups’ perspectives. This article describes its use and results as piloted in the Time to Teach about Gender-Based Violence in Canada project. The project gathered 11 teacher participants in a partic-ipatory workshop to mobilize teachers’ reflections on student-produced cellphilms responding to the prompt: “What do you want your teachers to know when teaching about gender-based violence?” Framed using hooks’ engaged pedagogy, analysis describes teachers’ identification of potential pedagogical adaptations responding to student recommendations, demonstrating Intergenerational Reflections’ value in getting teachers to actively listen to student messages in educational research and practice. Results identify the need to involve other educational stakeholders in Intergenerational Reflections, particularly in addressing a lack of multi-level institutional support to enhance pedagogy about gender-based violence.

The concept of “spirit-murder“ reminds us that the violence Black girls and women suffer in academic spaces travels beyond the mental and emotional; it manifests on a spiritual level as well. Consequently, spiritual healing is a priority for Black girls and women to traverse the world whole and worthy. This paper intends to first, theorize endarkened third spaces, sites fashioned to enact healing through the Divine and resistance against White supremacy. We, then, explore a set of extraordinary literacies—cleansing, language making, and sister circles—that prepare these endarkened third spaces as transient sites of spiritual rejuvenation. To examine these extraordinary literacies, both authors investigate their respective spiritual practices in the context of their roles as students, educators, and researchers in communion with each other. The authors commit to a joint self-study, using the methods of educational journey mapping, unstructured interviews, and Archaeology of SelfTM to elicit insights from their histories and present. Second, this paper considers what these endarkened third spaces and extraordinary literacies offer Black girls and women attempting to thrive in various academic spaces. We contend that practicing these extraordinary literacies build an endarkened third space that operate as a site to re-imagining and re-conceptualizing of self as being communicative with the present, ancestral past, and the greater Divine, which thus free Black girls and women to heal from the harms of the world.

This conceptual and theoretical paper seeks to analyze the dynamics and consequences of psychologization and therapization, key mechanisms of the therapeutic turn in education. In particular, it focuses, on how the pathologization of social problems occasions individualization and the production of self-reliant and inward-looking subjects trained to maximize human capital according to the tenets of neoliberalism. Second, it explains the principles of a critical approach to education that is informed by the concept of intersectionality. It shows how this concept might be helpful in interrogating and addressing structurally embedded inequalities and injustices. Informed by the insights of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, this approach engenders a contextualized and nuanced analysis of social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. To further illustrate its importance, insurgent citizenship education, a concept drawn from the experiences of a Philippine school for displaced indigenous groups will be discussed.

This research explores teachers’ development of their understandings of teaching for justice and equity on days after critical current events, traumas, and tragedies. In particular, I ask: How, if at all, are teachers prepared to engage in Days After Pedagogy? How do their preparation experiences influence their feelings about utilizing Days After Pedagogy in their classrooms? Grounded in the theory of Days After Pedagogy and grounded in the literature on social justice teacher preparation, this qualitative study of more than 50 social justice oriented pre- and in-service teachers around the U.S. reveals four key findings about teachers’ (lack of) preparation to engage in DAP and the implications of this for equitable education in current and future classrooms.

In this article, we use the framework knowledgeable agents of the digital to understand the agentic experiences of one adolescent Black girl’s digital and STEAM literacy practices. After discriminatory acts deterred Star’s interest in exploring STEAM literacy practices in school, her involvement in a digital application workshop for Black girls and their fathers and a robotics club for Black girls reshaped her understanding of herself as a leader and innovator. Through qualitative data sources, including surveys, interviews, observations, photos, audio/video recordings, focus groups, vision boards, and digital app making, we explore her actions as a knowledge maker, creator, and producer. These roles (re)affirmed her interests in STEAM and her racialized and gendered identities as a Black girl. This study is important for rethinking collective educational efforts to disrupt systems that discourage and marginalize Black girls and women of varying identities in digital and STEAM literacies.

ABSRACT Using Octavia Butler’s prophetic writing, specifically, passages from her Parable series, as a conceptual lens, this article will explore the ways one Black girl uses multimodal literacies to imagine new worlds that center and celebrate her Black girlhood. An exploration of her multimodal literacies shows how she simultaneously confronts reality, what exists under this earthly sun, and, in turn, also imagines and shares a new world, under a new sun, built for and by Black girls. This article builds on data collected from a practitioner research study of writing collaborative for girls of Color and applies feminist of Color analyses to create a narrative portrait that explores Black girl literacies as portals to new suns.

This practitioner inquiry article examines the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in the U.S. Co-written by two of the youth who participated in this research, alongside the fellow immigrant activist who designed and carried out the year-long study, this paper analyzes a subset of qualitative data from the research and argues that young Latinx immigrant organizers are organic intellectuals who, as grassroots educators, mobilize their coalitional multimodal literacies to critically examine the common sense, meaning the dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions, of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., and transform it into one that is inclusive, intergenerational, and challenging of colonial logics that separate oppressed and racialized communities from each other. Implications include conceptualizing socioemotional relational intuition as a component of multimodality and engaging young Latinx immigrants as grassroots educators whose coalitional multimodal literacies envision and enact a decolonial world.

In this article we explore pláticas as a method of refusal for educational practice that embodies a type of Indigenous cosmopolitics that undergird communities we come from. Such an understanding of pláticas generates working towards praxis informed by a refusal that avoids recognition by the university, much like we learn through pláticas the intimate ways our caretakers resist sovereign state power. Such an understanding of pláticas demands a realist practice where we recognize the limits of the work in the university, our capacity as faculty to affect change in a racial capitalist, settler colonial nation. Consequently, pláticas as a method specifically require refusal of the modes of the academy and the neoliberal model of productivity that captures minoritized experiences for the benefit of white, settler society and the university. We describe how these actions inform our academic practice, demonstrating how our research and teaching are not in isolation from the humble communities that birthed us.

This article documents the process I, as a teacher educator at UCLA’s History Geography Project, went through to develop my lesson for centering Salvi history, “Reclaiming Our Stories Con Pláticas y Fotos: Pláticas as Pedagogy In K-12 History Classrooms.” Inspired by the scholarship of feminist women of color who have shaped and informed my teaching practice and my views on the purpose of history education, I make the case for why Salvi communities in Los Angeles need a lesson like this to intervene in the erasures of Salvi communities in the history-social science framework for California public schools. These overt silences that I, and an entire generation of Salvi students, have faced at home and in school motivated this lesson, in which I use pláticas as pedagogy in an effort to move towards healing in our community. Specifically, I narrate how my lesson draws on the five principles outlined in the Chicana/Latina feminist plática methodology as well as the ways my lesson aimed to meet the specific needs of my Salvi community and history instruction. I conclude by reflecting on how I made this lesson accessible to educators through various professional developments and reflect on the process of working with educators.

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public education sector. This paper argues that in order to introduce neo-liberal policy models, the Bank first created a structure of knowledge around the Romanian system of education, which diagnosed it as inefficient and underperforming. Specific representations of domestic institutions, bureaucratic processes, and actors were used to legitimate the forms of intervention proposed and the role of the Bank in internal governance. I argue further that the main stake of the project was reforming governance in education as new mechanisms for power distribution and money allocation were set in place. By manufacturing their role as impartial, apolitical “experts,” and by ignoring the political nature of government, they created a niche in governance and imposed neo-liberal understandings in education.

This study examined factors that impact Black middle and high school students’ academic and psychosocial well-being. Qualitative analysis of focus group data using grounded methodological approach on 51 middle and high school students in a predominantly White urban school district. Findings show Black students are constantly exposed to racial microaggressions (i.e. microinvalidation, microinsult, microassault) which impact their overall academic performance and psychosocial well-being. Use of request to use the N-word was a common and stressful form of microaggression encountered by Black students. Overall, racial microaggressions (e.g. use/request to use the “N” word) are common, stressful and begin early among Black students attending predominantly White schools. Black students recognize the commonplace nature of racial microaggressions and actively identify coping mechanisms (e.g. safe shared on-campus spaces, identifying concrete steps schools can take to create safe environment). Concerted efforts by schools are needed to prevent/mitigate the harmful effects of microaggression exposure to students.

This qualitative, descriptive single case study examined Black graduate students’ perceptions of campus racial climate at a predominantly white institution (PWI) and how they were shaped by a president’s response to racialized incidents. A greater understanding of how Black graduate students’ narratives reveal how whiteness inhabits the PWI and the president’s responses to racism presented. Guided by the Multi-contextual Model for Diverse Learning Environments (MMDLE) and Critical Race Theory, I unpack whether or not Black graduate students are prioritized in presidents’ responses to racialized incidents and larger campus racial climate conversations. This study’s findings further illustrate the significance of the role of the presidency when addressing issues of race and racism, and how their responses have the power to disrupt or harm both the personal experiences of individuals and the broader campus racial climate for Black graduate students.

This article conceptualizes “possibilities” as a challenge to the ways that Black boys are constructed and arrested through their engagement in educational spaces. Critical race scholars have deployed counter-stories to disrupt deficit framing of Black boys by discussing their possibilities, promise, and potential. Similarly, we weave these insights and analyses of Black boys’ lives to identify how multiple possibilities contribute to Black boys’ thriving in education. The seven dimensions of the Possibilities Framework include dreaming (related to aspirations and fantasy), caring (e.g., cared for and cared about), belonging (related to mattering and feeling connected), enjoying (related to joy), agency (their actions and autonomy), protecting (feeling safe), and affirming (related to being valued). Each of these dimensions can inform pedagogy and praxis and empower Black boys and young men in educational settings.

When we started the Anzaldúing It podcast in 2017, we were trying to find a healing space outside of academia to process our everyday experiences as first-generation queer Latina/xs in graduate school. We chose the medium of podcasting as our platform because of our shared experience of pláticas being transformative spaces of knowledge sharing, consciousness-raising, and connection. Drawing on the tenets of Chicana/Latina Feminista Pláticas and coupling it with jotería identity and consciousness, and literature on academic counterspaces we conceptualize five tenets that make up what we refer to as digital jotería counterspaces. As co-creators and co-hosts, we engage in digital pláticas to enact self and community care through co-learning and co-construction of knowledge, this digital presence affirms our commitment to centering queer and trans Latinx identity and consciousness. We share our pláticas with the public through the digital and host them on an online repository, and as a result, create opportunities for multiple pláticas and consciousness-raising to occur.

Leading for racial equity in public education involves courageously addressing entrenched systems of racism and oppression that routinely advantage White students and disadvantage students of color. Engaging in uncomfortable discussions about race and racism amongst colleagues within an organization can generate internal struggles of fear and anxiety of negative reactions. This study employs a constructive developmental lens, specifically the Immunity to Change (ITC) Mapping process, to understand the connections between racial identity development and intrinsic barriers to leading for racial equity of White leaders. Through examining 18 ITC maps, we identify anxieties and fears that create significant barriers for White education leaders who intend to champion racial equity. Our study reveals that White education leaders, regardless of their progress on the continuum of White racial identity development, struggle with courageously leading for racial equity because they are firmly planted in the socializing mind, limiting their effectiveness because of self-constructed, cognitive fears of negative reactions from others. Practical implications for education leaders, education policy makers, and students are also provided.

One of the first ways some trans youth narrate their gender is through the process of choosing a name. Trans youth’s negotiation of naming is particularly complex as they juggle family affinities and independence, as well as try on new identities and build relationships with peers. In the midst of transitioning, and often while still materially and emotionally dependent on their families, trans youth re-write their birth stories through, in part, the process of choosing a new name. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 racially and gender diverse trans youth in Canada, I explore how trans youth choose a name in relation to their family. I analyze these stories using Cavarero’s theory of the formation of the self to think about what the work of names and naming exposes about how trans youth navigate their relationships with their family and their identity development. In their naming practices, trans youth discussed the relationship they have with their family and their negotiation of family reactions to the disclosure of their trans identity. Their narratives about naming and family challenge the binary discourse about family reactions as acceptance or rejection and provide stories about the complex ways trans youth navigate their relationship with their family in their daily lives.

Following the tradition of Chicana/Latina feminist nuevas teorias and methodologies, I offer walking pláticas as a qualitative research methodology that honors the brown body and facultad to examine our relationship to the spaces we traverse, live within and mutually shape. Walking pláticas is a reclamation of research methodologies that dismantle the white colonial gaze through a recentering of the brown body as a critical corporeal, political, and geographic site of analysis. In this article, I propose to move beyond the understandings of space as the neutral and apolitical backdrop on which life occurs. The strengths of walking pláticas include the consideration of spatiality as key to exploring how people make sense of, are influenced by, and shape space—a great methodological tool for critical educational researchers seeking to understand the role of geography and the physical and social places and spaces on Communities of Color.

Rooted in the history of women of color feminisms along with the everyday pedagogical practices that occur in Chicanx/Latinx communities, CLF plática methodology stems from the recognition that Chicanx/Latinx communities are experts of their lives who engage in knowledge production and theory every day. In this conceptual essay, we explore how utilizing a CLF plática methodology while working as contingent faculty at a PWI in north Texas helped us to craft a praxis of solidarity that: developed community; provided a relationship and the space to strategize on how to respond to white supremacist violence; presented opportunities to discharge and heal; as well as opportunities to celebrate and engage in collaborative mentorship and now, collaborative research with each other.

Rural India is witnessing a surge in the number of low-cost, poor-friendly private schools that seemingly offer quality alternatives to government schools. Untangling stakeholders’ viewpoints, this research explains how outcome and performance-focused learning, broadly known as neoliberal performativity in education, is enacted in these institutions. It was discovered that parents’ and students’ distinct livelihood risks and worries encourage performativity in the teaching-learning process. Performativity was recognized as an instrumental tactic for avoiding the temporal uncertainties and worries that come with low-income status. School administration practices performativity because it aligns well with the objective of administering schools at a low cost. Teachers, on the other hand, argued that such enactment deprives children of the essential and enriching learning experiences needed for long-term success. The study advances understanding in the field of low-cost rural education and its long-term effects on quality education. It also explicates how such schooling practices enact performativity through some local learning practices.

In the western academy, scholarly research is pre-dominantly informed by Euro-western philosophical understandings which in turn influence methodologies, and methods used. Assumptions made that researchers categorized as the Other apply similar paradigmatic lenses create tensions for these researchers whose ways of being, doing and viewing the world diverge from the mainstream. Using narrative and poetic reflections, a Par/des(i) approach to qualitative inquiry provides an onto-epistomological lens for those existing in liminal spaces whose experiences have been influenced by geographical, spiritual, histo-political, emotional, familial, and spiritual disruptions and dislocations.

Composing lives that have a sense of coherence is part of the identity making of refugee families and shapes their attempts for social inclusion. Their struggles for narrative coherence are shaped by the bumping places and tensions that they experience as their lives bump against dominant narratives that structure the policies and practices of many institutions including schools. Using narrative inquiry, we inquired into the experiences of three Syrian refugee families as they bumped against institutional policies and practices. Drawing on two years spent alongside children and their parents we composed field and research texts that showed the importance to understand social inclusion in school settings through the experiences of individual children and families. It is important to focus on experience to redefine the significance of narrative coherence in relation to social inclusion and to create spaces for telling stories that can help transform school policies and practices.

Two years ago, I began a project based on the question, “If online platforms are providing more access for hate groups to recruit and radicalize members, then is it possible to use online platforms to combat discrimination, racism, and hatred?” Educating public audiences and promoting positive social change were laudable goals, but this article explores the idea of how this was done in ethical ways. There were challenges encountered “along the way” when attempting to create a project from personal stories, including issues of ethical storytelling, respectful data management, community engagement with marginalized communities, complications of “going viral,” and more. In this article, I document the process of how four anti-racist videos were created, some of the challenges encountered along the way, methodological maneuvers, and suggestions for further methodological and ethical consideration. I explore two levels of analysis. First, by looking at methodological considerations, I detail the importance of community consultation, the need for research findings to be accessible, useful, and meaningful to the community, and how the decisions and planning around “going viral,” were further complicated by funder requirements and other ethical considerations. At the second level of analysis, I use autoethnography to explore how my own positionality factored into decisions about the project.

This study argues that the long-standing difficulties in addressing educational disadvantage point to the need to change the analytical categories used and takes territoriality as an analytical lens to explore how students perceive their place in the world. The study presents the results of a qualitative study investigating how 222 14–19-year-old vocational education students in Italy, France and Greece perceive a scenario of possibility. The results from reflexive cartographies and elicitation interviews show that a significant percentage of students with similar socio-economic characteristics have difficulty imagining and narrating scenarios about their possible future selves, and that there are similar themes and patterns in all three countries. The article argues that the above findings reveal hidden forms of vulnerability that impact on students’ academic trajectories and concludes by pointing out the analytical value and policy implications of the above findings in discussing educational disadvantage.

The promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives has become routine within Anglophone universities in the Global North. However, critical race scholars have demonstrated that these well-intentioned policies are often formulated in ways that transact empty performatives, where discussions of racism are deemed too challenging. Moreover, the dynamics of social class are often missing from university diversity regimes. Using autoethnography as methodology, we suggest that the practices of “border crossings” of intersectional academics can help track the multidirectional impacts of institutional diversity and inclusion discourses within Australian universities. As class and race intermix, we operate in a metaphorical “shadowland”; our border criss-crossings and places of dwelling highlight the blurriness of privileged and marginalised identities, with some minoritised statuses seemingly too visible while others are obscured. Despite this, and albeit brought into being through largely unrewarded emotional labour, our emphasis is on demonstrating how intersectional subjects’ dialoguing in academe is a form of quiet resistance, offering hope for creating new becomings.

While dominant narratives about multilingual students position them as deficient, translanguaging theory has played a critical role in making space for the languaging practices of multilingual students in education. However, we know little about how to best support mathematics teachers’ learning about translanguaging. Working with a group of accomplished mathematics teachers taking part in professional development on culturally sustaining pedagogies, in this paper we use frame analysis to examine the ways language ideologies shape teacher sensemaking about translanguaging. We then investigate affordances of classroom video for reframing teachers’ conceptualizations of language. We find that although teachers initially framed students’ language as a barrier to their success, with the introduction of video clips from mathematics classrooms, teachers began to frame students’ language as a tool for productive disciplinary engagement. These findings suggest that video may serve as a valuable resource for reframing teachers’ conceptualizations of students’ languaging practices in mathematics classrooms.

We use Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) asset-based framework to make sense of the cultural capital of Leyla, a student who recently arrived in the USA from México. Drawing on counterstory methodologies, we illustrate how Leyla uses multiple forms of capital (aspirational, familial, linguistic, social) to navigate within and resist oppressive schooling structures. Her resistance capital could be seen through the application of her different forms of cultural capital, in which she critiqued the structures of her schooling experiences and engaged in actions that may function as a way to pursue her aspirations. We end with a discussion that elaborates on Leyla’s story in light of our experiential knowledge to suggest implications for teaching and research.

This research explores how educational leaders in Texas navigate issues of anti-Black racism. In this Grounded Theory study, 19 participants engaged in a 90-min interview. They offer firsthand accounts of their experiences in navigating issues of anti-Black racism as well as strategies that they perceive to be necessary in interrogating and rooting out deeply entrenched anti-Blackness even in the face of salient opposition and demand to maintain the status quo. The participants also discuss relevant challenges and benefits to taking such an approach. The themes resulting from this study include: Name it and call it out, Facilitating courageous conversations with faculty, students, and community, Racial equity focused problem solving, and Challenges and benefits of anti-racist school leadership.

In this article, I will do two things: (1) synthesize existing literature exploring critical methodological frameworks that center race and hip-hop in educational contexts; and (2) propose future considerations for research for research, and introduce a new qualitative methodology called mixtaping. The aim of this article is to contribute to a growing body of scholarship supporting the decolonization of methodological practices, by framing minoritized voices – which are in this case, Black men in higher education, who identify as hip-hop artists – as both the subject of research and the producers of new knowledge.

First Amendment protections for blackface in U.S. higher education have for too long fostered hostile educational environments for Black women and other racially minoritized and marginalized communities. Institutions dedicated to inclusive learning environments can no longer ignore these abuses and have an opportunity and obligation to challenge and disrupt the protections long afforded to assaultive speech. However, overturning these problematic gendered-anti-Black racist narratives of interpreting caricatures of Black women's bodies with blackface and exaggerated body parts as harmless entertainment of means centering the voices, perspectives and lived truths of Black women. I use what I call an Intersectionality Discourse Analysis to analyze two subsequent federal court cases involving a white fraternity's ugly woman contest at a public U.S. university and free speech theory. In my recommendations I urge institutional leaders to take an unapologetic stance in sanctioning assaultive speech and to petition the courts to support their decision-making.

Research examining detained or incarcerated youth (“youth”) within the juvenile justice system often focuses on outcome data associated with youth or adult recidivism. However, there is a dearth of juvenile justice system research examining the lived “voice” of detained or incarcerated youth. This lack of examination fosters an incomplete understanding of the juvenile justice system experience and can lead stakeholders to make uninformed decisions on behalf of youth. Moreover, incomplete examination and understanding of disparities and inequalities within the juvenile justice system, a system that often has racial/ethnic disparity within program placement and outcomes, mirrors historical problems evidenced in Plessy v. Ferguson by propagating racial disparity, inequality, and segregation. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for conducting qualitative inquiry within juvenile justice system placements and to develop a critical framework for high-quality indicators within qualitative studies that examine youth experiences.

This autotheoretical paper exploring a collaborative project we engaged in during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020) is structured as two intertwined stories. The first, a series of autotheoretical vignettes, expresses our process of sense-making about affect as well as multiple affective productions that spurred learning, personal and relational growth, and becomings-otherwise. The second delves into posthuman methodology, autotheory, affect, and affirmative ethics. Together these highlight the ways that our collaborative work of attending to affect helped us enact an affirmative ethics by tapping into traumatic lived experiences of COVID-19, isolation, and academic work, and transforming them into knowledge-producing, connection-creating, hopeful encounters. These encounters gesture to ways that enacting affirmative ethics as a collaborative critical posthuman praxis can help us collectively thrive in neoliberal conditions.

In 2021, former President Donald Trump issued a presidential memo halting and prohibiting “divisive” and “anti-American propaganda” in federal contracting--described as “any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training and propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil”. Unsurprisingly, the concerted attack against CRT grossly misunderstands what CRT is and often equates teaching about individual racism, privilege, unconscious bias, systemic racism, and U.S. history with the teaching of CRT. As of October 2021, 28 states have restricted education on racism, bias, and the teaching of CRT.

Our essay provides a provocation supporting the special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education’s titled “Why antiracism and critical whiteness now?” As editors, we circulated its call knowing that the conditions of our work in race and whiteness studies had changed. In our essay, we work through the special issue’s central question via the critical psychoanalytic notion of identification ruptures. Autobiographically and then historically-socially un-suturing ourselves and work, we subjunctively sketch a conceptual geography of the empire of whiteness on-the-rise.

Language teacher agency (LTA) remains understudied in ESL, EFL, and bilingual contexts. Less is known about affordances and constraints of diverse methodologies that are used to explore this concept. This study, therefore, aims to examine how collaborative autoethnography as a methodology plays a role in LTA research. Specifically, three language teachers, through writing reflection journals and conducting group meetings, reflected upon and discussed the use of collaborative autoethnography to examine LTA. This study explores the following research question: What are the affordances and constraints of collaborative autoethnography as a research methodology to examine LTA? The findings demonstrate that collaborative autoethnography can be a productive tool to yield meaningful findings regarding LTA, as shown in the three emerging themes: (1) promoting intentional reflections on teaching and positioning, (2) promoting rigorous research process, and (3) posing potential methodological and ethical issues. Implications regarding research and professional development are also discussed.

This study reconsidered educational materials by analyzing educators’ opinions regarding handmade manipulative materials (HMMs) for children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in Japan. Instead of concurring with the view that educational materials are static and inert products, the author adopted an agential realist perspective and considered them as agencies working and becoming with teachers and children. The author interviewed two retired teachers who had spent more than 30 years in HMM production and analyzed the obtained data using a diffractive methodology. Findings showed that making and remaking HMMs allowed teachers and children to engage with actualizing concepts without language and demonstrated the open-ended nature of learning for teachers and children with HMMs.

LGBTQ students often have a secondary school experience fraught with bullying, mental health struggles, and marginalization. In this qualitative study, we examined teacher and administrator perspectives on school supports for LGBTQ students using data collected for a larger project on early college high schools (ECHS) in Texas. Using an ethic of care in education as a conceptual frame, our findings revealed that participants perceived ECHSs as safe and accepting spaces for sizable populations of queer youth, even in a restrictive state policy context. We suggest that because ECHSs were not intentionally designed to serve LGBTQ students—yet staff perceived to be serving them well—the characteristics embodied by ECHS faculty and staff may serve as aspirational aims for educators in other school contexts.