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Attacks at Montréal École Polytechnique and Columbine High frame a decade of school shootings and may offer insights into some other rampages. Though times, rationales, and sites of peer-group production differed at these two sites, "school shooter" encoded ways to react in situations where some young men felt unfairly subordinated in society; shooters used deadly violence to assert and reclaim the "rightful" places they felt denied. "School shooter" seemed to borrow from violent masculinities, common socioculturally produced images, or tropes, for acting, implicating not only shooters (who take up extreme versions of these tropes), but also simultaneously everyday sociocultural contexts where violent masculinities are produced, reinforced, and valorized. This article suggests the importance of context to the production of shooters and as such competes with attempts to develop remedies to school shootings grounded in de-contextualized, individualistic approaches that focus only on shooters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considered a successful university-operated, urban middle school serving an overwhelmingly African American student body, "Charter" Middle School was dechartered suddenly, then merged a year later with students from a neighborhood school to become "Choice" Middle School, a school of choice in the urban district. Using a situated learning framework and an ethnographic methodology, this paper examines teacher teams in the school — one aspect of the schooling model the urban district promised to continue — before and after restructuring. Charter was almost a textbook case of a professional learning community before restructuring, but after restructuring leadership lacked a deep understanding of the interconnected nature of the model of schooling and of teacher teams' function therein. Over time, teacher teams lost their place in and importance to the school's operation. In particular, the school lost teacher empowerment, focus on all students, and communication within the building and between school and families. Restructuring destabilized reform and diminished the likelihood that teachers could meet the needs of students. Implications for teacher teams in middle grades education during times of administrative change and school restructuring are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that offering African American students an African-centered education is one way to promote social justice in public education. We begin with a summary of the inadequate educations offered to many African American students, and then use philosophical interpretations of equal educational opportunity to delineate the requirements of participation in a democracy. From this position, we contend that forms of schooling that teach subordination and alienation undermine democratic participation -- the ability to advocate for one's bests interests and accord others respect for doing likewise -- and that this is unjust. One way to counter social injustice and regain a sense of community and ethnic self-worth is African-centered education, which we describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all student teams are created equal. Some manage to produce excellent engineering results, others fabricate it. Social interactions in some teams are respectful, while on other teams some members expect others to carry the load, but take credit for it later. With engineering teamwork becoming more prevalent on engineering campuses, knowing more about student design teams that work is especially important. This article uses two teamwork cases from a large-scale ethnographic study of an engineering design program to describe not only the ways that student engineers practiced design teamwork, but also how campus culture reached into social interactions between teammates via engineering identities produced on campus. A model for effective teamwork emerged that implies producing high quality engineering products, and doing so through respectful social interactions. Implications for teaching about teamwork, teaching with teams, and thinking about ways to change campus cultures to better promote design engineering are developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore how a professor of Educational Foundations, living in Colorado, preparing preservice classroom teachers for schools like Columbine, and raising her children in the same school district, made sense of the Columbine attack. After characterizing the peer-group culture, I illuminate the ideologies that framed the social organization of the school. By comparing Columbine to examples from educational anthropology, I make clear that racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, supremacist ideologies underpin mainstream schools and that these were at the heart of the Columbine attack. Although often held up as the preferred sort of U.S. school, White, middle-class-identified, academic-prep high schools might not promote the values needed to live harmoniously in a diverse society. In fact, at Columbine, the social production of difference, where so little should have existed in a school serving a remarkably homogeneous community, suggests the centrality of privilege as an ordering principle in U.S. schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore how a professor of Educational Foundations, living in Colorado, preparing preservice classroom teachers for schools like Columbine, and raising her children in the same school district, made sense of the Columbine attack. After characterizing the peer-group culture, I illuminate the ideologies that framed the social organization of the school. By comparing Columbine to examples from educational anthropology, I make clear that racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, supremacist ideologies underpin mainstream schools and that these were at the heart of the Columbine attack. Although often held up as the preferred sort of U.S. school, White, middle-class-identified, academic-prep high schools might not promote the values needed to live harmoniously in a diverse society. In fact, at Columbine, the social production of difference, where so little should have existed in a school serving a remarkably homogeneous community, suggests the centrality of privilege as an ordering principle in U.S. schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]