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In this article, we explore community schools, as first theorized through community organizing, in relation to movements for racial justice in education to address the following question: How has educational equity been radically imagined by the community school movement in New York City to reframe how we understand success, meaningful school experiences, and the possibility for hope, healing, and racial equity in education? Using ethnographic methods, we answer this question by examining what went into the grassroots commitments of organizers and the grasstops implementation of the community schools' strategy at the district level. This examination sets a context for exploring what we saw happening at the school level, where we observed community meetings with organizers and district officials and interviewed key stakeholders about their deep histories of advocating for equitable reform. Drawing on an abolitionist paradigm, we describe how organizers such as those in NYC, who were interested in transforming systems as a prerequisite to advancing freedom, were the first major advocates of the original community schools project. Valuing the knowledge and strength of communities that have survived and thrived in the face of centuries of oppression, we conclude that community stakeholders in collaboration with education workers, from organizers to students, envisioned a blurring of communities and schools as part of a strategy to build collective power that both exposes and challenges injustice.

In this theoretical article, the authors elaborate a revisited theory of Third Space from a BlackCrit/Afropessimist stance, exploring Black youth ethnic and racial identity formation searching for place and belonging in the context of a raced world. To illustrate their theoretical contributions, the authors draw on empirical research conducted with Haiti-born and U.S.-born Haitian immigrant high school students and their teachers. They argue that, as Third Space, Haitian ethnic clubs were sites of sanctuary where students felt free to challenge, play with, and question complex ideas about racial identity, sites of resistance to test and exercise resistance against demoralizing forces, sites of fluidity for Black adolescent development, and sites for regulating and protecting Blackness. Thus, Third Space Theory from a BlackCrit perspective can offer an anti-racist approach to capturing how Black youth become aware of contradictions and ambivalence in the worlds they inhabit and their acceptance of situations where ambivalence helps in their learning and also their survivance.

This article suggests pedagogical naming matters to the education of Black people. It refuses the idea of a universalist pedagogy for all, and thereby unmasks that which has been rendered invisible in teaching and learning, i.e., the Black self--so as to recover it so that it might be nurtured. In doing so, the article illuminates an important set of elements that a pedagogy for Black people must possess--such as a rootedness in a freedom that goes beyond justice; the development of critical consciousness, or "wokeness"; and a value for Black life and Black lives--answering Dumas's (2010) question, what is "Black" in Black education? It concludes by suggesting that Black education must hold in place the possibility for Black futures without clinging to "an organic Black conservativism" that mythologizes and tragically over-romanticizes a fictive Black past. Thus, even when looking back, a pedagogy for Black people must always peer forward while simultaneously resisting the impulse for erasure, where race gets lost in the muddling stew of pluralism, or what is considered here to be false collectivism. By this, a pedagogy for Black people is about Black people, useful for the social, emotional, intellectual, physical, and political emancipation of not only the bruised Black body but also the tethered Black souls.

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.

This article examines how two African American females composed counter-selves using a computer motherboard and a stand-alone microphone as critical identity texts. Situated within sociocultural and critical traditions in new literacy studies and black feminist thought, the authors extend conceptions of language, literacy and black femininity via the agentic, powerful and knowledgeable selves of African American women, constructs that are often missing from the scholarship on young African American women and their practices of self-definition. The motherboard and microphone serve as analytical constructs for understanding critical new literacies and subject malleability, which crisscrosses in complex configurations across the experiences, histories and relationships that carry meaning for those who struggle through scenes of silence. Motherboards and microphones act metaphorically as technologies of the self, which resist and reformat cosmologies of black femininity that have long patterned gender oppression. The findings suggest that technologies exist everywhere, and technology related to literacy and language exists in many forms, including vocabularies of motherboards and microphones. The authors conclude that using such vocabularies for expressing identity can work through the power of metaphor in its richest sense to offer new conceptions of self, whereby the subject becomes a personal artifact capable of immense transformative potential.

This article investigates three teacher learners' service learning experiences, in order to explore the extent to which approaches to service learning can lead to legitimate learning outcomes tied to transformative teacher growth and situated in tenets of social justice. Using student interview data, the author posits that service learning fails as a social justice methodology for preparing teachers when it fails to interrupt biases in ways that transform teacher learners into learning servants. The findings suggest that in order to prepare educators to serve, more work needs to happen prior to sending teacher learners into the field, as some of the biases we wish to interrupt may be firmly in place before these new teachers enter the field. The article concludes by reframing service learning through the conceptual methodology of learning to serve.

Education scholars and practitioners have much to learn about engagement and motivation of Black males by directing their inquiries to more organic sites of hip-hop cultural production outside of schools. One such site is the hip-hop's informal labor economy where Black males engage in earning money through hip-hop cultural production. Labor practices include a myriad of activities such as beat making, promoting shows, teaching dance classes, managing studios and recording sessions, artist development, visual art, and other modes of hip-hop cultural production. Through exploring the decision-making process of Black males that opt to participate in informal labor in lieu of formal labor, we examine what it is that compels their engagement and motivation efforts in hip-hop production. We find that participating in hip-hop cultural production gives Black males: (1) the autonomy to control their own image and maintain their individuality and (2) a sense of worth and belonging to something positive. From these findings, we discuss the need for schools to model themselves after such fields where Black males demonstrate high levels of engagement, motivation, and mastery.

Using 18 weeks of classroom data from a much larger ethnographic study, Kirkland examines the reading ideologies influencing the literacy engagement of a young Black male, Derrick. (To protect participants' identities, this article uses pseudonyms in place of participants' actual names.) In doing so, Kirkland theorizes about how young Black males express thoughts about reading through specific statements of identity--what he calls genres of self. He concludes that many Black males read or don't read based on their thoughts about particular reading tasks--which include complex and layered beliefs around texts, contexts (of instruction), and the subtexts that permeate both. Kirkland suggests that young Black men often express such beliefs through grammars of acceptance/rejection. However, when the situation of reading fits them (i.e., corresponds with their reading ideologies), Black males read and find pleasure, interest, and purpose in doing so.

The default image to which many ELA standards adhere lacks the complexity and sensitivity to account for the diverse range of students that occupy ELA classrooms. For young Black men, such standards poise a unique threat as they fail to reflect the social and cultural dimensions that factor into Black male literacy practices. In so doing, Kirkland argues that ELA standards help reproduce the dissonance and chronic failures that characterize Black male school experiences and shapes the tragedies that further burden Black male life. Kirkland complicates the notion of standards by offering the narrative of a young Black male, Rashad, illustrating how his practices of literacy are found in the echoes of an older brother, but leveraged against the standardized literacy practices of the classroom. In order to be useful to Black males, Kirkland concludes, ELA standards must be rewritten with Black males in mind, drawing from their literacy biographies and offering opportunities to reformat the echoes that hide in the pulse of their beings into a rich range of socially and culturally sensitive practices that promote healing, hope, and justice. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public and private transactions, have constructed a world of their own, governed by what Bakhtin calls "new socially typifying languages." In this article, the author draws on data taken from his two original research studies conducted on literacy and urban youth--"Boys in the Hood" and "Literacies in Online Social Communities" projects. In the "Boys in the Hood" project, the author examined how six young Black men practiced literacy from 2003 to 2006. In the "Literacies in Online Social Communities" project, his most recent study spanning more than two years, the author examined the discourses of urban youth in online social communities. Using these studies, the author seeks to answer the question: How do urban youth use languages for social, cultural, and political purposes? The author analyzed data, using ethnographic and critical discourse approaches. Blending the two approaches, he explored emergent patterns in the data to chart the expansion and intensification of variance in the youths' language practices. Implications for English education research, policy, and practice are presented.

David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students' diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space. (Contains 3 figures.)

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of a group of 11-14 year-old Black males who defined themselves as "the cool kids." The study is framed using theories that view literacy as a social and cultural practice involving multiple sign and symbol systems. Two research questions guided the study: How did coolness relate to literacy among the young men who called themselves "the cool kids," and what symbolic patterns helped to shape these relations? The findings describe how the group's use of language and style involved issues of race, gender, and pop culture and reveal how coolness, as a pop cultural artifact of Black manhood, contributed to the literacy practices of the young men and to the construction of their symbolic selves. These findings contribute to building a theory of Black masculine literacies. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)

David E. Kirkland turns our attention to the ways tattoos can represent "human" stories of literacy through the power of inked flesh, the self-portrait it creates, and the words and worlds that surround the body. The body, for Kirkland, is an important site of cultural production that represents the transformative, political, and personal terrains of literacy. (Contains 4 figures and 3 notes.)

For David E. Kirkland, the New English Education locates English language arts in the realities of youth, where texts emerge from students' lives, and the notions of reading and writing in English classrooms are open to revision. Kirkland reflects on how "postmodern Black experience, especially as seen in hip-hop, gives English teachers one way of envisioning the New English Education." (Contains 1 figure.)

This article examines one major research journal from China and one from the United States. The study compares the two journals with regard to three questions: 1) Who is doing research published in the journals? 2) What are the major issues and concerns represented in the journals? 3) What research methodologies are favoured in the journals? The authors believe that understanding another country's educational research practices, through addressing these questions, can better enable domestic researchers, educators and policymakers to acknowledge the major educational concerns and issues that exist across countries. As boundaries between national borders continue to blur, this understanding can help educational researchers better interpret and present their findings with greater international relevance. (Contains 11 tables and 6 notes.)