This conceptual article aims to clarify the important relationship between the fields of social foundations of education (SFE) and urban education (UE). We argue that SFE (a) enables more precise understandings of urban in one’s preparation to practice in or conduct research with implications for urban schooling contexts and (b) strengthens one’s capacity to identify the questions and pedagogical and methodological approaches central to enacting justice-oriented education research and practice. This article calls attention to three specific SFE subdisciplines—history, philosophy, and sociology of education—as necessary complements to any education program of study, building our argument from an examination of SFE’s relationship to UE specifically. Accessing multidisciplinary perspectives to deeply understand and address vexing challenges posed by (urban) space and place is a central feature of this article.
In this article we extend Bell's work on interest convergence by using Harris' work on whiteness as property to articulate a cycle of interest convergence, interest divergence, and imperialistic reclamation, or convergence-divergence-reclamation (C-D-R, pronounced 'cedar'). We then apply the C-D-R cycle lens to the evolution of federal race-conscious affirmative action legal cases in higher education and state anti-affirmative action policies that have emerged since the implementation of Civil Rights Act of 1964, and how these legal cases and policies are emblematic of the convergence, divergence, or reclamation periods. We also explore the incessant legal and political debate regarding race-conscious admissions policies.
Previous work on racial opportunity cost—that is, the price that students of color pay in their pursuit of academic success—is extended here using organizational culture literature to more closely explore the interplay of school culture with the racial opportunity cost experienced by the study participants. Eighteen African American and Latina/o underclassmen at two elite private colleges were interviewed about their experiences as high-achieving students of color in high school and college. Our analysis of the data revealed five interrelated school factors that both alleviated and exacerbated students’ racial opportunity cost. Findings regarding the critical influence of school culture on students’ experiences highlight the importance of school leaders creating supportive, whole school cultures to foster school engagement and academic achievement for all students.
Drawing from two separate case studies, one on lower track African American students and another on gay and gender nonconforming African American male students, this article explores how students with multiple stigmatized identities make sense of and respond to their marginalization, a process we term making space. In particular, we consider how making space can support students’ psychosocial needs and at the same time work against school engagement and academic striving. We describe types of “making space” strategies: sociospatial, performative, and political/institutional, and use these categories to describe the ways students in our projects responded to their perceived marginalization. Institutional processes that make these responses necessary are addressed as well as how schools can either mediate or intensify students’ feelings of marginalization and therefore their perceived need to “make space.”
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