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"Al Éxito" supports the leadership development, post-secondary education, and civic engagement of Iowa Latina/o youth. In the summer of 2015, it piloted "Movimiento Al Éxito," a "pop up" summer program. In this article, we detail the innovative components and curriculum and describe our journey with "new diasporic" Latina/o youth learning about their place in Iowa and developing "testimonios" which challenge existing narratives. We explain how emergent critical consciousness led to the program's continuation and expansion the following school year.

In this reflection on Carolyn Parker's article, I connect to my own professional work at the intersection of Latino education and science education as well as to my own personal interest in liberation theology. I use constructs central to liberation theology to indicate what a liberationist science might look like and push us, in doing so, to put learning, not teaching, at the center of our efforts.

This article presents a case study of academic language instruction in a high school "English Learner Science" course. It illustrates how a teacher's understanding of academic language affects her instruction and students' opportunities for learning. We examine a transcript of classroom discourse for the "didactic tension" that exists between this educator's teaching of science vocabulary and students' development of conceptual understanding in science. We assert that the teacher's emphasis on vocabulary serves to obscure important semantic relationships among the phenomena she is teaching about in her lesson, as well as ignores the linguistic resources needed to express those relationships. We propose that the social action accomplished by this didactic tension may be to produce an economy of discourse for English Learners which, contrary to the goals of academic language instruction, serves to withhold from them opportunities to not only to talk, but think, like scientists. We use our findings to call for further research into teachers' beliefs, practices, and discourse related to academic language instruction and the impact of these on students' language as well as content learning.

The term 'upstanding' encompasses actions and behaviors grounded in one's defense of their own beliefs and others. While such broad application of the term has merit, from a critical education perspective it lacks direction. To efficaciously address injustice, upstanding action must go beyond one's beliefs. A directional application of upstanding behavior, or the notion of 'upstanding for justice,' frames upstanding as action to address chronic social victimization via systems of oppression. In this article, we describe the development of a new heuristic to support students' understanding of upstanding and detail the university honors course in which we used the heuristic to explore the phenomena of 'bullying' and historical injustice to expand ideas of 'upstanding'. Results indicate that students in the course broadened their conceptions of justice and the use of historical cases aided in their understanding of the interplay between individual agency and social structure in social justice efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the ISU 4U Promise, an innovative college access and affordability initiative. Through this early-commitment partnership program between Iowa State University and Des Moines Public Schools, youth from two urban elementary schools are eligible for tuition awards when they enroll as undergraduates at Iowa State University. Drawing on a review of promise programs in the educational scholarly literature, this article identifies what makes the ISU 4U Promise distinctive among promise efforts in terms of contextual antecedents, implementation processes, and potential institutional outcomes. Unique features include its early childhood focus; sole university sponsorship; "wide-net" reach; and collaborative, critical orientation to education and evaluation. With a bidirectional understanding of knowledge and a bivalent orientation to social justice, the ISU 4U Promise is a promising pathway for universities aspiring to update their approach to college access outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]