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Democracy is learned through doing, not telling. The purpose of this paper is to report the findings from an action research project where a group of fourth-grade students participated in a simulation that explored the possibilities and the constraints of acting democratically, while faced with the dilemmas of environmental disaster and establishing a new society.

The authors studied how participating students engaged in deliberations and self-directed inquiry. The authors focused the data collection on the responses of students to the challenges presented in the simulation.

Based on the analysis of student work during the simulation and reflection on the simulation after the project, the authors documented the ways in which students critiqued authority or expressed their distrust in it, engaged in difficult deliberations around controversial issues, and developed expanded agency through inquiry-based learning.

This paper presented a model of inquiry learning that can be critical, i.e. examining issues of power and justice, while engaging in deliberation via a simulation that integrated social studies and English language arts. Creating space for young students to deliberate issues, steeped in values, and ethics, allows them to recognize the inherent tension and dissension necessary to a healthy democracy.

There is an urgent need for teacher preparation programs to equip teachers to teach in innovative and transformative ways, meeting the needs of diverse learners. Coaching is an instrumental tool for supporting change and development, especially in contexts with decentralized teacher preparation guidelines.

This multicase study examines cross-institutional programmatic innovations for coaching teacher candidates (TCs) and centering equity using improvement science and equity coaching. The authors explore the networked improvement community’s (NIC’s) examination of problems of practice through plan–do–study–act cycles in three coaching contexts within and across seven institutions.

Qualitative methods revealed that adapting coaching protocols can center equity and build equity-focused practices. This work highlights revisions to coaching within and across teacher preparation programs (TPPs), which the authors hope inspires extending equity-centered coaching and improvement science to new contexts. This cross-case analysis revealed program innovations for coaches, digital technologies and alignment.

This study addresses ongoing challenges faced by TPPs in the United States, including TCs' understandings of equity in teaching and decentralized teacher preparation that results in varied and incongruent understandings about quality teaching. This study builds on previous scholarship that examines shifts in coaching practices by disrupting silos in TPPs as examined innovations.

The paper offers a unique view of cross-institutional collaboration in coaching to improve transformative teaching experiences in teacher preparation field experiences.

In this chapter, we analyze and reflect on how our cultural identities and educational experiences as international students who pursued a doctoral degree in the United States affected and influenced our teaching philosophy and praxis as professors and educators. In this sense, we examine how our cultural identities and experiences help us define and shape our teaching praxis in the contexts in which we teach. We both are professors of color – Latino and Latino-Japanese – who graduated from doctoral programs in the United States. Currently, we work and serve culturally and linguistically diverse students, including first-generation students, in public higher education settings in Chile and the United States. We used a collection of narratives to delve into the significance of these events in our praxis. As theoretical lenses, we analyze these narratives using cultural identity and the reflecting teacher to examine our practices and identities as educators. We both conclude that our reflections, experiences, and cultural identities have been instrumental in the process of developing a professional identity that guides our teaching praxis in ways that are critical and social justice oriented.