21st Century Scholar

  Gil Scott Heron once said: “The revolution that takes place in your head…nobody will ever see that.” As I approach the 4th year in my doctoral program, I find more conflict with this statement than resolution. The revolution taking place in my own mind is now evidenced in my writing, research, advocacy, and practice. But [...]

Summer is here and it’s time to change things up. While it doesn’t have quite the same ring as, Thursday is TechDay, from here on out, Thursday will be WriteDay. The new theme focuses attention on Pullias’ annual SummerTIME Writing Program, an academic writing intervention to support the high school to college literacy transitions of [...]

If our commitment is to understanding complex and diverse millennial identities….We have a lot of work to do.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of my favorite plays. At the beginning of the story, Faustus, surrounded by countless dusty tomes, declares that he has read everything about everything. I’m not sure what it says about me (especially given Faustus’ fate), but I frequently think about that scene. I read a lot. I eagerly [...]

I wrote the Foreword to Damon William’s Examining Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2013). Here’s what I said: In his epic The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois commented that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Damon Williams [...]

Several weeks ago I had the honor of hosting a presidential session at AERA. Henry Jenkins, James Paul Gee, and S. Craig Watkins joined me to discuss how the conference theme—education and poverty— intersected with new media literacies. The session was designed around the premise that social media, the Internet, and online games have the [...]

Today’s post offers follow-up commentary on the IGNITE format I introduced in a previous post. To quote myself: IGNITE is… a [new] format for good ol’ fashioned PowerPoint. Nothing fancy, just some new rules. The parameters are simple: (a) presenters are limited to 20 slides, and (b) the time allotted to each slide is 15 seconds, no [...]

As faculty members and co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, we lead action research using CUE’s Equity Scorecard. The mission of our center is to create the “tools” needed for colleges and universities to bring about racial/ethnic equity in students’ collegiate experiences and outcomes. In the action [...]

AERA’s 2013 theme is centered on the issue of “poverty.” It is spurred by President Bill Tierney’s provocation that despite education’s ability to lift students out of poverty, schooling is often mired in economic relations surrounded by the debilitating effects of poverty. There are at least two senses of “poverty” invoked here, to which I [...]

Great relief swept over me when I saw the theme for this year’s AERA—finally, we are led by a team of scholars who recognize the intimate connections between our educational institutions and broader societal structures, and encourage us to talk about those connections without fear that we are downplaying the urgency that schooling requires. I [...]