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Creating safe and productive environments with a diverse student population requires more than the strategies recommended in the original classroom-management literature. Drawing from the literature on culturally responsive classroom management, psychologically supportive classroom environments, and building resilience, the authors describe the practices used by three effective novice teachers in urban elementary classrooms during the first 2 hours of the first day of school. The study was based on videotape and interview data that were qualitatively analyzed using an inductive approach. The novice teachers focused on developing relationships and establishing expectations through the use of “insistence” and a culturally responsive communication style. The study provides clear pictures of the ways in which teachers teach and insist on respectful behavior and establish a caring, task-focused community. As such, it demonstrates how teachers create environments of success and resilience for students who have historically floundered in school.

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In the course of an ethnographic study of an intergenerational Geriatric Remotivation Program in a Southeastern U.S. nursing home, we encountered difficulties in interviewing institutionalized elders that threatened the validity of the data. The purpose of this paper is to explicate the difficulties and to recommend strategies for overcoming them. Four main clusters of elder characteristics threatened the validity of data: (1) physical characteristics; (2) cognitive characteristics; (3) affective characteristics; and (4) personal characteristics. Problematic data were categorized as "insufficient," "unclear," "nice" and "emotionally charged." Strategies for increasing validity when interviewing impaired institutionalized elders included increasing the sample size, returning to the setting frequently, lengthening observation periods, recognizing the value of stories, recognizing the value of socializing, using videotapes, collecting both interview and observation data, and having elders view and respond to videotaped recordings.

Special education researchers have used considerable financial and human resources to work with teachers to close the gap between knowledge of research-based practices and their sustained use in classrooms. While some researchers have been successful in collaborating with teachers to achieve sustained use of classroom interventions, the gap between research and practice has remained a source of considerable concern to the special education community. In this paper, we use Cochran-Smith and Lytle's (1999) conceptual analysis of teacher learning to argue that the perceived research to practice gap may be the result of how many educational researchers have conceptualized and operationalized their research with teachers. Instead, we propose a more collaborative way of approaching research that involves teachers in the generation of new knowledge, not just its application to the classroom. We offer this collaborative approach as a way to transform practices in schools and classrooms and better meet the substantive intent of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

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This article examines the social justice dispositions that, when honed and developed over time, enable prospective teachers-and teacher educators-to embrace social justice praxis and persist in their everyday quest for equitable educational conditions, opportunities, and outcomes. Developed through work in a Community of Practice (CoP), these dispositions include radical openness, humility, and self-vigilance. In this article, we define each disposition and explore how they may be cultivated, enacted, and modeled in teacher education. These dispositions, we argue, serve as reminders of the unfinishedness of our work and the effort required to stay the course of equity and justice in the rough waters of the status quo.

This paper draws on the literature on effective African American teachers of African American students to investigate the enactments of culturally relevant critical teacher care (CRCTC) in two fifth-grade teachers' classrooms in a large, urban school district. Using interview and observation data, the findings illustrate the teachers' knowledge of the constraints upon their students' futures. This knowledge catalyzed their enactment of a particular kind of care designed to prepare their students with the dispositions, knowledge, and skills to achieve flourishing lives. The teachers' practices illustrate classroom spaces ripe for high quality teaching, learning and liberation of students of color. The study reveals the transformative potential of teacher care explicitly linked to a larger social justice agenda.