Megan Blumenreich

City College of New York | CCNY · Department of Curriculum and Instruction

This paired-format article describes how one of the authors (Rodriguez) undertook a teacher research study of homework in the urban first-grade classroom in which she was a paraprofessional. Her findings influenced her to broaden her perspective on homework. Her graduate professor (Blumenreich) discusses the challenge of supporting a student to mak...

This article draws on oral history testimonies to examine the experiences of participants in the inaugural 1990 cohort of Teach For America (TFA)—a group of young people dubbed the “best and brightest” of their generation and tasked with “saving” urban education. For 25 years, TFA has operated according to the principle of the “best and brightest,”...

Montclair Cares About Schools (MCAS) is a citizen-activist group in Montclair, N.J., that used Facebook, emails, and online petitions to inform and organize citizens on local educational policy issues. Emerging in response to a new superintendent's plans to reshape Montclair schools with new teacher evaluations, administrative hires, and extra dist...

This article reports on a study of teachers who have engaged in systematic research about their practice. It describes the inquiries of two urban teachers into challenges and dilemmas common to many who work with diverse groups of students. The accounts presented reveal how teachers are able to construct new knowledge about teaching when they engag...

Background/Context: Researchers have examined the challenges of staffing urban, underserved classrooms primarily through large-scale data sets; policymakers have responded with strategies intended to recruit more or “better” teachers into the classroom through programs such as the popular Teach for America. Yet there is little qualitative evidence...

HELPING TEACHER CANDIDATES REASSESS THEIR EDUCATIONAL philosophy is a vital aspect of preparing the current generation of candidates to become innovative teachers. Because of federal mandates that have emphasized accountability for the last two decades (Ravitch 2010), this generation of American teacher candidates, most often educated in schools th...

This article explores how classroom-based teacher inquiry research supports teachers in constructing understandings about teaching and learning that are uniquely applicable to their own contexts in American urban schools. This study was conducted by two teacher educators in their year-long classroom-based inquiry research classes with approximately...

In this article, we examine a set of 26 children’s books on HIV/AIDS published between 1989–1999 to identify the ways in which these texts construct HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS. We explore how this marginalized group is depicted in these books, and how well-meaning teachers may in fact be reproducing dominant discourses about HIV/AIDS...

The Power of Questions makes connections between investigating issues related to practice and designing research curricula for students. The authors carefully illustrate and scaffold the research process by breaking it into smaller steps. They cite examples of real teacher researchers' studies as they provide advice, study questions, and exercise t...

The purposes of this article are to acknowledge challenges to traditional narrative inquiry raised by poststructural theory, and to demonstrate how poststructural thought can guide narrative research. After placing narrative inquiry within the broad historical context of educational research, and offering a poststructural critique of ‘traditional’...

The current generation of urban pre-service teachers attended K-12 schools under the increasing influence of a testing and standards-based, market-driven education, a trend that has been growing since the 1990s (Ravitch, 2010). Because of this, I argue here that exposing these pre-service teachers to an inquiry-driven learning experience, in this c...

Includes tables. Issued also on microfilm. Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-253).