In this article, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine introduce critical bifocality as a way to render visible the relations between groups to structures of power, to social policies, to history, and to large sociopolitical formations. In this collaboration, the authors draw upon ethnographic examples highlighting the macro-level structural dynamics related to globalization and neoliberalism. The authors focus on the ways in which broad-based economic and social contexts set the stage for day-to-day actions and decisions among privileged and nonprivileged parents and students in relation to schooling. Weis and Fine suggest that critical bifocality enables us to consider how researchers might account empirically for global, national, and local transformations as insinuated, embodied, and resisted by youth and adults trying to make sense of current educational and economic possibilities in massively shifting contexts.
In this article, Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Linda Powell juxtapose three different school communities and the schools' various approaches to dealing with differences among their students. They use notions of equal status contact theory, supplemented by three literatures — those of community, difference, and democracy, to discuss three desegregated spaces on a continuum, from one in which racial differences are unquestioned and racist discourse uninterrupted by faculty or staff to one in which teachers are actively working toward creating a space where differences are acknowledged and respected. Through this contrasting of desegregated spaces, the authors challenge readers to "imbalance privilege, incite community, to both value of pluralize difference" — to create teaching and learning spaces that nurture multiracial and multiethnic communities.
In response to numerous calls for more rigorous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to improve US competitiveness and the job prospects of next-generation workers, especially those from low-income and minority groups, a growing number of schools emphasizing STEM have been established in the US over the past decade. However, existing STEM schools vary substantially in the way they are organized, the students they attract, and the outcomes they advertise, and there have been few empirical studies of their effectiveness. This comparative case study examines the opportunity structures for STEM at eight public high schools, four in Denver, Colorado, and four in Buffalo, New York. All of the schools were "inclusive" (no admission requirements) and served predominantly lowincome and majority minority students. All but one school had been designated "low-performing" for failure to meet federal accountability requirements. In each city, two of the study schools had recently been reorganized to be "STEM-focused" in some way, and two were traditional, comprehensive high schools. We found that the STEM-focused schools were launched with much enthusiasm and high expectations. In both cities, STEM-focused schools achieved some modest success initially but were unable to maintain their gains. Overall among the schools in this study, the STEM-focused high schools did little to improve STEM opportunities compared to the comprehensive high schools. We do not mean to suggest that STEM schools are a bad idea, but that claims and expectations for them must be examined in the context of their implementation, and STEM schools for low-income and minority students are unlikely to be successful without more attention to systemic issues in urban education. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach, XXX-XXX, 2015.
Inspired by Laurel Richardson's (1995) call for "writing stories," the authors of this essay struggle with how to produce scholarly texts drawn from narratives of over 150 poor and working-class men and women—White, African American, Latino, and Asian American. They unveil a set of knotty, emergent ethical and rhetorical dilemmas they have encountered in their attempt to write for, with, and about poor and working-class informants at a time when their lives and moralities are routinely maligned in thepopular media; when the very problematic policies that may once have "assisted" them are being abandoned; and when the leverage of and audience for progressive social researchers and policy makers has grown foggy, and weak in the knees. Writing with a desire to create a conversation about ethics, writing, and qualitative research, the authors worry about the contemporary role of qualitative social researchers.
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