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.
