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The increase in the female inmate population in the United States has brought attention to issues related to women's incarceration. Due to a host of reasons--some personal, some based on society's view of female inmates--many women find it challenging to speak about their experiences prior, during, and after their incarceration. This article explores the challenges postincarcerated women face as they engage the process of speaking their stories into life. The participants' stories suggest silence as a necessary, valuable, and protective strategy for women who are living through a process of reconnecting with themselves, their families, and their communities. (Contains 2 notes.)

The focus of this article is the experiences of three undergraduate students who engaged in a participatory action research (PAR) project with a group of preadolescent Latina girls attending a public school in Boston, MA, USA. The aim of the 2-year project was to explore how the girls constructed knowledge about girlhood and other gender-related issues. In this article, I (Alice) briefly describe the PAR project. The remaining sections focus on the research team's reflections. Julieta, a native of Romania, discusses how her life experiences growing up in Romania during the Communist regime helped her to identify with some of the girls' life experiences. Anastasia, who was born and raised in Greece, describes how dialogue, a basic tenet of PAR, assisted her in developing collaborative relationships of trust with the research participants. In the third section, Nikos, who is also a native of Greece, describes how participating in a collaborative process with a group of girls from a dramatically different background than his own challenged him to reflect on his maleness, his ethnic beliefs, and his assumptions about public education in the US. The last section states the importance of teacher educators pursuing PAR-type experiences with college-aged students. The team's reflections offer insights into how engaging in participatory experiences with school-aged students can provide rich, informative, and effective opportunities for non-United Statesian students to gain a better understanding of the many issues related to public education in the US.

Unlike school-aged youth attending well-resourced suburban schools, working-class poor students attending inner-city public schools are oftentimes denied the opportunity to develop a sense of agency within their schools and communities. In this article, the author addresses one way that educators and researchers can encourage young people to engage in participatory processes of teaching and learning aimed at developing personal and collective agency. In addition, she describes how a group of university-based students participated in on-the-ground experiences that contributed significantly to their understandings of how individual and collective agency energizes teaching and research processes. The author embeds those discussions within the framework of a participatory action research project she engaged in with a group of middle school adolescents in the northeast region of the United States. (Contains 3 notes.)

In this paper, the author considers three key issues, which she suggests can contribute to developing 21st century teacher preparation programs that are committed to preparing competent, well-informed, reflective teachers, particularly for students attending inner-city schools, in the context of participatory action research (PAR)--an approach to research that challenges prospective educators to reframe what they know, and what they "think" they know, about teaching, learning, and research. By exploring the relationship between PAR and teacher education, the author responds to the current debates about how to assist prospective teachers in gaining knowledge about urban schools and communities with the aim that such knowledge will assist them in understanding--and taking action to improve--the social, cultural, and educational systems that mediate the lives and educational opportunities of urban youth. Before she describes PAR as a tool for creating new knowledge about teaching, learning, and research, she provides a brief overview of the graduate program in elementary education that she directed for five years and taught in for six. She then describes the strategies she used to assist prospective educators in developing a critical approach to understanding themselves and urban communities through engagement in a PAR project. Lastly, she argues that PAR is a useful approach for linking theory and practice, teaching and learning, and reflection and action in a teacher preparation program. (Contains 6 notes.)

This action research project investigated young urban adolescents' perceptions of violence in their school and community. The project involved gathering information about the community; engaging adolescents in creative, interactive activities; collaborating to develop a community photography project to help adolescents represent their perceptions of community via visual stories; and co-creating student-initiated intervention or action programs to promote community well-being. (SM)

To confront racial issues in their classrooms, white student teachers reflected on their identities as white teachers and their understandings of multiculturalism. By confronting their identities and challenging the meaning of being white teachers, they could better pursue teaching practices to alter the way white students are educated about themselves and about multicultural education. (SM)