Changing Our Schools From the Bottom Up: Educators Challenge Educational Reform in Canada and the United States

• In Event: Thinking Global/Acting Local: Teaching in Global Contexts

Abstract

In this session, we will explore three distinct ethnographic studies conducted in the urban schools in United States and Canada that illustrate the possibilities and limitations of educational practice and reform from the bottom up. Building on the scholarship of school reform and educational practice, our panel examines whether teachers have the authority and legitimacy to alter the trajectory of school reform and educational practice. In doing so, we pay careful attention to the ways in which teachers, often in partnership with youth, families, and communities, fit within a broader context of social justice movements that promote educational opportunity for low-income youth in these three distinct, but surprisingly similar, research sites.

Authors

• Erika Kitzmiller, Harvard University

• Rhiannon M Maton, University of Pennsylvania

• Nina Bascia, University of Toronto - OISE

• Rand Quinn, University of Pennsylvania