A Radical (Re)Imagination for Urban Education: Practicing Justice in PK-20 Contexts

Dear Colleagues,

For much of recent history, urban education has been framed in public discourse, primarily through a deficit lens, as the site of an intractable educational problem yet to be solved. However, researchers and communities have continuously rejected this narrative, arguing instead that urban educational spaces—K12 schools, yes, but also higher educational spaces and outside-of-school spaces—can be sites of resistance, liberation, genius, creativity, critical inquiry, sociopolitical consciousness, and community. Urban educational spaces and the communities in which they are embedded have been undeniably shaped by systemic inequities and deeply entrenched structures of racism, but this context is not the entirety of the urban educational experience, and to center only this context in our research is to perpetuate those inequalities. As Eve Tuck has said, “This is to say that even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that—so much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression” (p. 416).

In this Special Issue of Education Sciences, “A Radical (Re)Imagination for Urban Education: Practicing Justice in PK-20 Contexts,” we aim to center counternarratives of urban educational spaces, especially research that contributes to the “freedom dreaming” of what urban education can and should be. We invite contributions that address critical questions about urban education, including, but not limited to, the following:

• How do urban students exercise voice & agency? What can educators learn from this expression of agency?
• How do critical research methods (e.g., QuantCrit, community-engaged, participatory, and critical narrative) influence the stories we tell about urban education? What is uncovered in urban educational spaces when research begins from critical positioning?
• What is critical and liberatory pedagogy in urban educational spaces?
• How do urban students/youth engage in critical inquiry?
• How are urban educational spaces sites of resistance, community, and liberation…for students, for families, for educators, for communities, and for educational spaces themselves?
• What do urban educational genius and creativity look like?
• What are the freedom dreams of urban educational communities?
• What is educational justice in an urban educational environment?
• What does “success” look like to urban educational communities? How can we measure that vision of success?
• How do educational justice and freedom dreaming shape relationships within and across educational spaces?

We are particularly interested in submissions that move beyond the theoretical to the empirical: documenting, analyzing, and interrogating what is actually happening in urban educational spaces and demonstrating through lived reality what is possible, even within deeply entrenched systems of inequality. This is the radical (re)imagination at the heart of this Special Issue’s theme. We invite submissions across the PK-20 spectrum, including research that looks at urban education outside of traditional spaces of schooling.

Prospective authors are encouraged to reach out to the Guest Editors before the submission deadline to assess the alignment of their work with the scope of this Special Issue. We look forward to your contributions.

Dr. Melissa Gibson
Dr. Derria Byrd
Dr. Blake O’Neal Turner
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• liberatory education
• urban education
• urban schools
• social and educational justice
• counternarratives
• critical pedagogy
• higher education