Seldom is the practicing P-12 educator, the P-12 practitioner, considered a scholar. R.A.C.E. Mentoring and P-12 Educators: Practitioners Contributing to Scholarship explores the unrecognized and infrequently considered teacher scholar, principal scholar, counselor scholar, librarian scholar - the practitioner scholar who if provided the platform and access can produce a unique and complex narrative and knowledge base to fields of study. This volume extends the current Research, Advocacy, Collaboration, and Empowerment (R.A.C.E.) knowledge in educational leadership, theory and practice, curriculum and instruction, teaching and teacher development, social justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion. R.A.C.E. Mentoring and P-12 Educators: Practitioners Contributing to Scholarship presents ways to conceptualize quality in educational research by engaging practitioners, researchers and policy makers in cross-disciplinary partnerships to provide an intentional platform for scholars and researchers in the P-12 school systems and pre-service programs, particularly those with/or seeking an active and emerging research and publishing agenda. This volume is divided into four interrelated sections. Section I focuses on mentoring practitioners as scholars during pre-service and in practice. Chapters in this section promote the use of methods coursework, narrative analysis and culturally relevant pedagogy to enhance practitioner agency and roles as scholars. Section II includes Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) as a way to recognize and address the historical examples and barriers to practitioner social justice activism. These chapters center the school setting and graduate coursework, using practitioner scholarship as a way to cultivate critical consciousness and the use of counter-narratives to combat racism, settler colonialism, and classism among school staff. Section III engages practitioner scholarship as a revolutionary approach through case study, auto-ethnography, review of literature, mental models, and phenomenological study. This section fosters the value of practitioner voice as agency to disrupt oppressive ideologies and beliefs that sustain inequitable and unequal school environments. Section IV provides curriculum, instruction, and parent involvement as examples of practitioner advocacy via personal and collective identity development, Black/Crit, Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and engagement strategies. These final chapters provide details of policy and practice transformation methods that empower practitioner sustainability of student and parent access to equitable and inclusive school experiences.

Effective leadership is the necessary ingredient in achieving educational improvement in schools; everything rises and falls on leadership. For School Leaders of Color, this leadership imperative is more difficult than it is for their White counterparts. Concomitantly with this leadership necessity are the social and academic disparities of racism, student poverty, lack of resources, just to name a few. Yet these leaders have courageously accepted their role to disrupt low performance and thus they have created environments where students learn and professors teach. These leaders are “purveyors of change.” The purpose of this educational preparation supplemental text is to share stories of these exceptional leaders in the field and in the academy. The experiences shared by the various authors cover four important areas in leadership: Culture & Climate; Student Success; Resilience, Persistence, & Turnaround; and Social Justice. The authors have shared some deeply personal issues and triumphs. These are the stories that resonate more deeply with students and that with these types of stories, the theory to practice bridge is successfully crossed. While many of the chapters include narratives of resilience and triumph in the context of the P-12 education system, the overarching themes and suggestions can be transmuted to any industry.

Debates regarding the qualities, skills, and dispositions of culturally relevant teachers and teaching have raged in teacher education for several decades. Ladson-Billings' (2009) The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children was a groundbreaking work that has become a foundational study that informs the work of culturally-relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and culturally-sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) teaching. In her book The Dreamkeepers she describes effective teachers who are able to draw from the cultural wealth, knowledges, and heritage of Black communities. The Dreamkeepers ensured that their Black students were academically successful, retained, and grew both in terms of their cultural competence and their sociopolitical awareness. In other words, according to research by Ladson-Billings (2009), effective teachers possessed both pedagogical and relational dispositions, which leave lifelong impacts on the academic and social lives of the students they teach. While being a foundational text, what remains missing from the research on culturally-relevant and even culturally-sustaining teachers are "narratives" (read: stories, testimonios, etc.) related to how the race of particular E-12 teachers positively impact the lives of their students. For instance, Dr. Antonio Ellis (the first editor of the proposed book) describes his high school music teacher Mr. Linard McCloud) as "a highly effective African American music educator who changed the course of his life" (p. 170). Ellis (2016) describes McCloud as being loving, caring, creative, culturally sensitive, attuned, hopeful, flexible, organized, and thoughtful. Because Mr. McCloud possessed the aforementioned characteristics and dispositions, Ellis contends that he was motivated to achieve academically and socially in his urban high school. In addition, according to Ellis (2016), Mr. McCloud was a highly impactful educator because he went beyond the call of duty as a teacher-a practice that is not so common in schools, particularly urban ones. Not only did McCloud teach in the classroom setting, but he also built strong relationships with families, community members, and external stakeholders including local businesses, colleges, and universities. Mr. McCloud used these networks to leverage opportunities for his students academically, personally, and professionally. Like many of his high school classmates, Ellis (2016) contends that he would not have graduated from high school if it were not for the care and mentorship he received from Mr. McCloud. In this proposed edited volume, it is the editors' goal to honor teachers like Mr. McCloud who have made a difference in the lives of their students by learning from their impactful practices. Employing a "critical storytelling" methodology (see Hartlep & Hensley, 2015; Hartlep, Hensley, Braniger, & Jennings, 2017), each chapter contributor will use his or her own narrative to show the power of influential teachers in classrooms. While this framework centers race, lived and learned experiences, the storyteller is the most important unit of narrative; hence, The Impact of Classroom Practices: Reflections on Culturally Relevant Teachers will include African-American storytellers who reflect on the impact of classroom practices of teachers from diverse backgrounds who they deemed culturally relevant and responsive to both their academic and social needs. This work will offer recommendations to pre-service teachers and in-service teachers who desire to leave a lasting impact on the students they teach.

The issue of social justice has been brought to the forefront of society within recent years, and educational institutions have become an integral part of this critical conversation. Classroom settings are expected to take part in the promotion of inclusive practices and the development of culturally proficient environments that provide equal and effective education for all students regardless of race, gender, socio-economic status, and disability, as well as from all walks of life. The scope of these practices finds itself rooted in curriculum, teacher preparation, teaching practices, and pedagogy in all educational environments. Diversity within school administrations, teachers, and students has led to the need for socially just practices to become the norm for the progression and advancement of education worldwide. In a modern society that is fighting for the equal treatment of all individuals, the classroom must be a topic of discussion as it stands as a root of the problem and can be a major step in the right direction moving forward. Research Anthology on Instilling Social Justice in the Classroom is a comprehensive reference source that provides an overview of social justice and its role in education ranging from concepts and theories for inclusivity, tools, and technologies for teaching diverse students, and the implications of having culturally competent and diverse classrooms. The chapters dive deeper into the curriculum choices, teaching theories, and student experience as teachers strive to instill social justice learning methods within their classrooms. These topics span a wide range of subjects from STEM to language arts, and within all types of climates: PK-12, higher education, online or in-person instruction, and classrooms across the globe. This book is ideal for in-service and preservice teachers, administrators, social justice researchers, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how social justice is currently being implemented in all aspects of education.

Creates a new model of mentoring where guided, flexible structures unleash the creative capacity of the group. Approaches include the use of lifelong mentoring, professional peer networking and the creative use of collaborative teams.

This book examines both the promise and complexity of diversifying today's teaching profession. Drawing from a 5-year study of 21 new teachers of colour working in urban, hard-to-staff schools, this book uncovers a systemic paradox that the teachers confront. They are committed to improving educational opportunities for students of colour by acting as role models, culturally/linguistically responsive teachers, and change agents. The teaching profession encouraged such commitments and some teachers acted with support from individual, organizational, and community-based sponsors. However, many of these new teachers work in schools that are culturally subtractive and have restrictive accountability policies that challenge their ability to perform cultural/professional roles to which they are committed. Many teachers internalize the contradiction, resulting in their becoming changed agents within the educational system they sought to change. This book is essential reading for educators, leaders, and policymakers.