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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.

Background: Veterans have a high prevalence of opioid prescriptions to manage chronic low back pain (CLBP), resulting in increased risk of becoming addicted and overdosing. It is important to identify effective and safe mind–body interventions to reduce opioid use for veterans with CLBP. Qigong, a mind–body therapy, is a promising approach to manage CLBP in veterans. This study assessed the feasibility and acceptability of qigong and examined whether pain is reduced after a qigong intervention. Methods: In this randomized controlled trial, 31 participants were randomized to the qigong intervention (n = 15) or a wait-list control group (WLCG; n = 16). The qigong intervention was conducted twice weekly in 45-minute sessions for 8 weeks (total of 16 sessions). Participants who completed the qigong intervention were invited to participate in a focus group conducted through videoconferencing. In addition to assessing feasibility and acceptability of the qigong intervention, pain intensity, pain interference, and low back pain and disability were measured at baseline and postintervention. Results: Qigong is a feasible intervention for veterans with CLBP, based on retention (83%), attendance (70%), and fidelity (100%), with no injury or other adverse events. Qigong was acceptable to the veterans with CLBP, who reported that they would continue to practice qigong to manage CLBP for long-term effects. Statistically significant differences in reduction in pain intensity (p =.047), pain interference (p =.04), and pain-related disability (p =.028) between the qigong group and WLCG from baseline to postintervention were identified. Conclusion: Qigong is a mind–body approach to manage CLBP in veterans who receive care through the Veterans Health Administration and in the community. For future studies, a larger sample would provide a higher level of empirical evidence to support qigong practice for CLBP in veterans. Future studies should assess sustainability of the intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.