Beth C. Rubin

Unpacking Detracking: When Progressive Pedagogy Meets Students’ Social Worlds

Despite heated debate over detracking, little research exists on how the reform plays out in the classroom. This article, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth-grade program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the “official” practices of the detracked classrooms under study and the “unofficial” social worlds of the students taking part in those practices. The author describes how aspects of the overall school context framed and permeated students’ interactions in their detracked classes, at times leading to a reiteration of the very inequalities that detracking was designed to address.

Tracking and Detracking: Debates, Evidence, and Best Practices for a Heterogeneous World.

Although debate over tracking continues, many schools and districts have attempted various detracking reforms. Detracking efforts vary greatly in method and scope. Assessments of detracking are widely divergent as well, making it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the reform. Evidence suggests that when implemented well, detracking opens new academic opportunities for students. Additionally, as difference and equity are, arguably, issues in all classrooms, detracking best practices are potentially helpful for teachers and students in tracked and detracked settings. This article provides an overview of (a) the debate over school tracking, (b) various attempts at detracking, and (c) best practices in detracked classrooms and schools, highlighting instructional practices, institutional structures, and belief changes that best support learning in heterogeneous settings.

Realizing the Equity-Minded Aspirations of Detracking and Inclusion: Toward a Capacity-Oriented Framework for Teacher Education

Abstract Inclusion and detracking policies seek to remedy the pervasive inequality of educational opportunities in U.S. schools by building classrooms that are integrated across the lines of race/ethnicity, class, and disability and that offer all students access to a rich and challenging curriculum. In practice, however, teachers often struggle with the implementation of these reforms. Drawing on ethnographic research in detracked and inclusion classrooms, this article analyzes the nature and sources of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous settings. It argues that the implementation of these policies is not often accompanied by a serious interrogation of the taken-for-granted understandings of ability, standards, and structural inequality that pervade educational discourse inside schools. This failure to challenge dominant discourse about these three issues is at the root of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in detracked and inclusion classrooms. Drawing on lessons learned from research, the authors propose a capacity-oriented framework for teacher education that might better prepare teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous classrooms to meet the equity-minded goals of these reforms.

Student Action Research: Reaping the Benefits for Students and School Leaders

Recent years have seen a proliferation of student action research both nationally and internationally. Going by various names—participatory research, action research, participatory evaluation—student action research is research that (a) is conducted by youth, within or outside of schools and classrooms, with the goal of informing and a fecting school, community, and/or global problems and issues and (b) contributes to the positive development of a variety of academic, social, and civic skills in youth. This article reviews research and writing on student action research, describing di ferent types of student action research initiatives, the benefits of this powerful practice, and how principals can manage implementation challenges.

“It's the Worst Place to Live”: Urban Youth and the Challenge of School-Based Civic Learning

One of the primary aims of education in the United States is to prepare youth to contribute to civic life in a democracy. Urban youth have daily school and community experiences with poverty, violence, and injustice that complicate their relationship with civic life. In this article the authors explore the ramifications of these experiences for youth civic identity development and consider how new understandings of the civic learning and identity development of urban adolescents might be used to rejuvenate civic education practices and, by extension, the civic mission of schooling.

We Come to Form Ourselves Bit by Bit Educating for Citizenship in Post-Conflict Guatemala

Over the past several decades, the implementation of democratic citizenship education has become a common prescription for the civic reconstruction of post-conflict societies. Across the globe, educational changes are seen as fundamental to the creation of peaceful, tolerant, and democratic civic identities, the key to “social reconstruction, a better future, and a lasting peace.” Drawing on qualitative data from varied schools in postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates a critical dilemma in post-conflict civic education: the difficulties of engaging directly with past and present injustice while moving toward a shared national identity. Global models of democratic, multicultural, and human rights education alone are inadequate for creating a new sense of citizenship in a country in which young people’s sense of belonging and their interpretations of the past are deeply connected to how their communities are positioned within a profoundly inequitable power structure.

Confronting the Urban Civic Opportunity Gap Integrating Youth Participatory Action Research Into Teacher Education

This article considers how youth participatory action research (YPAR) can be used to build the civic teaching capacities of preservice teachers working in urban settings. In the final semester of an urban-focused teacher education program, preservice teachers led YPAR programs in the urban schools in which they student-taught the previous semester. This article analyzes what preservice teachers learn through the process of YPAR. Specifically, we found that YPAR supported teacher learning in three areas: cultivating student-centered teaching practices, observing and documenting students’ strengths and capacities, and developing new understandings of the structural inequalities that shaped the lives of the students in urban schools. Drawing on data collected over the past 6 years, we argue that leading children and young people in participatory action research projects can contribute to the creation of the transformative civic educators so sorely needed in urban settings.

Learning the Colonial Past in a Colonial Present: Students and Teachers Confront the Spanish Conquest in Post-Conflict Guatemala

In Guatemala, three centuries after Spanish conquest and in the wake of more than three decades of internal conflict, the framers of the 1996 Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace placed educational reform at the center of efforts to make peace with this contentious past. This article, based on a multisite qualitative study, describes how Guatemalan teachers, working within an ostensibly standardized national curriculum aimed at creating a common historical narrative, differed in their presentation of Spanish colonialism. In the social studies classrooms of two different settings, a private school serving affluent Ladino students and a public school serving low-income indigenous students, young people constructed usable pasts amid distinct approaches to this era. In the first, a static, fixed version of colonial history distanced these young people from their indigenous cocitizens; students described the colonial era as part of a completed and distant past. In the second classroom, the teacher framed colonialism as an enduring part of students’ lives; students articulated the continued reach of the colonial era through language loss, structural inequality, and cultural devaluation. In this postconflict setting, curricular attempts to use historical study to create a new, unified, national identity were met with local challenges embedded in distinct historical memories.

Authenticity, aims and authority: Navigating youth participatory action research in the classroom

ABSTRACT Motivated by the addition of a curriculum standard for active citizenship into New Jerseys social studies standards a group of educators and researchers set out to integrate an action research curriculum, based on a youth participatory action research (YPAR) model, into social studies classrooms. Adapting YPAR, with its promising blend of critical thinking, civic engagement, and democratization, for use as in the classroom is appealing to those seeking to use education as a means of social change. But activism does not always translate neatly to the classroom; melding multiple purposes into one approach, particularly amidst the current push for standardization and accountability measures, is complex. This analysis considers three challenges to navigate when reshaping YPAR into a curriculum for classroom use - preserving authenticity, conflicting aims, and tensions around authority. Drawing upon qualitative data from the social studies classrooms of two public high schools, this article engages directly with the difficulties inherent in adapting a methodology premised on action, authenticity, and youth empowerment to the adult driven, extrinsically oriented, skills and content-focused world of the classroom. Understanding this shift, and the epistemological tensions underlying it, is essential for those wishing to integrate action research with youth into social studies classrooms.