Rodney K. Hopson

Centering Love, Hope, and Trust in the Community Transformative Urban Leadership Informed by Paulo Freire

In this article, we suggest that communities must explore alternative leadership ideologies, actors, and venues to make meaningful academic and social improvements in our cities. We examine how themes from Paulo Freire’s critical ideology can help expand our conceptualizations of educational leadership and facilitate pragmatic responses to complex urban dilemmas. To illustrate our claims, we provide two case examples of urban educational leadership that is guided by Freirean dialogical tenets of love, faith, humility, hope, critical thinking, and solidarity.

The Problem of the Language Line: Cultural and social reproduction of hegemonic linguistic structures for learners of African descent in the USA

This essay uses W.E.B. Du Boiss prophetic analysis of the color line problem to forecast the problem of the 21 st century: the problem of the language line. In this analysis, the centrality of language for learners of African descent in the US is front center as well as the relevant conceptual lenses that help to comprehend hegemonic linquistic structures in schooling and society. Namely, I juxtapose language beside cultural and social reproduction, hegemony, and race, and articulate the complex nature of knowing how and why the language issues continue to surround the American learner of African descent. These linguistic conceptual lenses help to refute the often narrow and simple explanations and suggest where Du Boiss legacy remains both unfulfilled and compounded by the language line.

Minority Issues in Evaluation Revisited: Re-Conceptualizing and Creating Opportunities for Institutional Change.

This paper, while a commentary on Professor Stanfield’s plenary presentation, is as much a critique of how evaluation researchers, the larger profession, and professional organizations come to terms with research on, issues about, and interests that impact people (and scholars) of color. First, I suggest that we revisit minority issues within a broader context of our American educational and social structure. Second, I focus on ways to create institutional change, such as through recruiting and mentoring junior evaluation researchers of color and from other underrepresented groups. Hardly complete, the ideas in this commentary are intended to highlight encouraging vehicles and initiatives from other educational scholars and peer associations, in the hope of contributing to the rethinking of minority issues in evaluation.

Tales from the ‘Hood’: Framing Hiv/Aids Prevention Through Intervention Ethnography in the Inner City

The need for HIV/AIDS public health researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to address and understand the social environment of certain groups of people can not be overstated at the beginning of the third decade of AIDS. Particularly in America where inner-city living conditions have worsened over the last quarter century, the resulting devastation of lives of young adults, many of whom are members of minority ethnic and racial groups, compounds the AIDS epidemic. Of the rampant spreading of AIDS in many metropolitan areas (CDC, 1997), almost half of the people diagnosed as having AIDS in the United States are African Americans and

Evaluation Roots Reconsidered: Asa Hilliard, a Fallen Hero in the “Nobody Knows My Name” Project, and African Educational Excellence:

Asa Hilliard has left his mark, and his name belongs in the pantheon of esteemed African American scholars, educational researchers, teachers, and activists. Although his work has served as a clarion call for an Afrocentric orientation in psychology and education to address the needs of African American students, his contributions to the field’s thinking about educational evaluation date back 30 years and have seldom if ever been noted. For nearly three quarters of a century, issues of fairness and equity have guided and driven the work of African American scholars in educational evaluation. These issues remain uppermost in their minds today as they investigate society’s woefully inadequate schools for children from racial minority and/or poor backgrounds. It is within this space that this discourse links the legacy of African American educational researchers and evaluators during the pre-Brown era to Hilliard’s later contributions to the field’s thinking about educational evaluation.

What’s Educational Leadership Without an African-Centered Perspective? Explorations and Extrapolations

This article provides an overview of current issues confronting educational leaders dedicated to the fundamentals, curriculum, pedagogy, and practices of African-centered education (ACE) and its evolving nature in the 21st century. By considering and situating African-centered leadership in the discussion of educational leadership generally, and within the expanding and prescient notions of leadership for social justice specifically, the article offers useful connections to educational leadership scholars and practitioners who straddle these interdisciplinary domains of scholarship and action as an opportunity to build from the emerging literature within the extant fields of study and to push urban educational leaders and practitioners to think more critically about the direction of ACE theory, practice, and praxis.

Why Are Studies of Neighborhoods and Communities Central to Education Policy and Reform

To understand the long shadow of education policy and reform in the United States, especially in the urban core, requires a full and elaborate understanding of the neighborhoods and communities that have transformed in the last 20 or 30 years. Studying classrooms and educational spaces without concomitant understanding of the dynamics and facets of neighborhood life render educational, political, and policy analyses potentially incomplete. This afterword serves to remind the reader of the key issues in each article and identify the key issues raised from the authors for implications for more robust study of neighborhoods, communities, and education policy.

Intersections, theories, and meanings of race, racism, and educational ethnography

The history of race and racism in our contemporary social world is geographically and globally far-reaching and particular to local contexts, not entirely understood, accepted nor obvious by all. The study of racial and racialised constructions, discourses, and production in schools, in education, and our larger social spheres is hardly new, however. This historical scholarship on race and racism is not confined to the Americas and western Europe (Anderson 2003; Bangura and Stavenhagen 2005; Fanon 1967; Painter 2010), although a number of scholars from these particular parts of the world have written on these issues (Anderson 2003; BonillaSilva 2003; Dávila 2003; Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003; Jackson 2010; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). That educational ethnographers, researchers, and other social scientists are integrating and interrogating race theories and meanings into their historical, conceptual, and methodological lenses in schools and other educational settings is relatively recent (Connolly and Troyna 1998; Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Dyson 1993; Hartigan 2009; Klaas 2006; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Leonardo 2009; Pérez Huber 2010; Solórzano 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2002; Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings 2009; Wright 1998). Worthy of significantly more study, this research is occurring despite the emergence of post-racial discourses that pervade following the appointment and election of key executive offices in North America and western Europe such as the most recent and high profile election of Barack Hussein Obama as the first President of the USA of African descent and Michaëlle Jean, the first African Canadian governor general, and the concurrent election of other non-Whites to major political, religious, corporate, and military positions. This special issue on race and ethnography addresses two significant issues. First, this special issue will explicate the complicated nature of race intersections, theories, and meanings in educational ethnography by some of the leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field. Deliberately, the ethnographic accounts include but go beyond schooling and extend to larger educational settings bounded by unique and peculiar histories and locations. Ultimately, by blending this collage of articles into this issue by those who deliberate on the role of race in schooling and/or education, this special issue both challenges the effects of educational histories, policies, and practices by interrogating theories and meanings of race and positions race and racism in ethnography in hope of presenting new applications and developments in ethnographic methodologies, theories, and practices. This special issue only continues the conversation when it comes to developing work in understanding race meanings, intersections, and theories in educational and social sciences. With the thrust of attention given to the study of race scholarship in recent years, there is still considerable information scholars in the field need to know about how Ethnography and Education Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2011, 1 7

University-School-Community Partnership as Vehicle for Leadership, Service, and Change: A Critical Brokerage Perspective.

ABSTRACT Using a critical brokerage perspective to advance theoretical insights in the development of a community university partnership and understanding of the organizational embeddedness of a community empowerment agency in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, this article suggests that partnerships between American universities and communities are perfect vehicles for envisioning engaged scholarship rooted in neighborhoods and communities. The article concludes that diversely positioned leaders and scholars in universities and schools, and indigenous leaders in the community, can learn from and apply principles of partnership and critical brokerage to work together to forward justice and change in their own neighborhoods and settings.

Addressing Social Injustices, Displacement, and Minority Rights Through Cases of Culturally Responsive Evaluation

Evaluation of programs that address the lingering effects of human rights abuses during times of conflict is necessary to improve program sustainability and create a knowledge bank about the effectiveness of strategies. Outcomes, however, are hard to measure. Evaluators have to gain understanding of the roots of a conflict, surrounding events, histories, and cultures. Discussed is the concept of culturally responsive evaluation (CRE). A pipeline program, which supports graduate students from traditionally underrepresented population groups in acquiring CRE skills through apprenticeship learning, seminars, and mentorship, is described. The work of 2 program participants, who evaluated programs—1 serving survivors of torture and the other children of refugees—are given as examples.