Transforming an Academy through the Enactment of Collective Curriculum Leadership

Although the transformation of relevant curriculum experiences for African American youth from impoverished backgrounds in large urban high schools offers many leadership challenges for faculty, few studies have focused on the roles of students and teachers in the creation of distributed leadership practices to build and sustain improved learning environments. Through ethnography we explore the leadership dynamics in one academy within a large urban high school whose students are mostly African American. Students in some classes had opportunities to participate in cogenerative dialogues and, in so doing, learned how to interact successfully with others, including their teachers and peers, and build collective agreements for future classroom roles and shared responsibility for their enactment. The study highlights the centrality of successful interactions among participants and the extent to which co-respect and co-responsibility for goals occur. Initially, a lack of trust within the community undermined tendencies to build solidarity throughout the community despite a commitment of the academy's coordinator to be responsive to the goals of others, listen to colleagues and students, and strive for collective goals. We argue that all participants in a field need to take responsibility for accessing and appropriating structures to achieve positive emotional energy through collective curriculum leadership and climates that create and sustain educational accomplishments. Furthermore, we suggest that individual and collective actions should be studied dialectically in subsequent research on leadership dynamics in schools

Creating participatory discourse for teaching and research in early childhood science

This paper presents the results of a study conducted with second grade students and pre-service teachers. This study examined the possibilities for engaging children in critical discourse about their classroom science experiences. At the heart of this discussion lies the desire to provide a space for teachers and children to develop relationships and to explore the learning of science together. Findings include: (1) on-going, focused, critical dialogue between children and teachers supported children in developing agency in the classroom, and (2) on-going conversations created the opportunity for children to reveal their ways of knowing and developing interpretations of the practice of science