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The goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of the experiences of mathematics anxiety that some women elementary preservice teachers encounter while learning mathematics during their own K-12 years. Specifically, this chapter is an analysis of the personal well-remembered events (WREs) told and recorded by women during their preservice teaching professional sequence. These narrative writings provide a powerful voice for the degree to which mathematics anxiety shape preservice teachers’ beliefs on what it means to learn mathematics. This intersection of teacher knowledge is important, as these are women who are on the professional track to teach mathematics. The focused analysis for this chapter is aimed at ways in which teacher preparation programs could broaden current views of women who have anxiety and confidence issues in mathematics.

This chapter is about the multiple forms of collaboration that are crucial to designing and implementing a school and community-based early childhood teacher preparation program. Maintaining quality in education and teacher education is a systemic, interdependence among individuals, institutions, and local, state, and national policy makers. We conclude that teacher education redesign is less about courses and pedagogies and more about systemic relationships, routines, and evaluations over time.

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.

This paper examines the corporate policies on workplace relationships in the insurance industry. It consists of identifying whether the 48 insurance companies found in the Fortune 500 have any policies that restrict employees from dating each other within their organization and if so, what were these restrictions. In addition, 235 employees in the insurance field were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the positive and/or negative effects of romantic relationships had in their workplace environment. These results were examined from a Platonic perspective with a recommendation for a code of ethics developed from policies existing in other insurance companies and suggested by the current literature.

A growing number of human rights NGOs have placed international volunteers in conflict zones from Guatemala and Colombia to Palestine and Iraq. This study samples from contemporary high-risk transnational activists and highlights the variation in biographical steps taken toward the shared outcome of participation in human rights work (HRW). Data was collected through 6 weeks of participant observation in Israel-Palestine, 21 in-depth interviews, and 28 shorter focused interviews with human rights workers (N=49). Oversampling from the International Solidarity Movement reveals how the unique constraints and opportunities presented by a particular conflict zone and NGO culture impacts self-selection into HRW. Grounded theory and Boolean methodology aided in identifying four main pathways (the nonviolent activist, peace church, anarchist, and solidarity pathways) to HRW as well as biographical patterns and complexities that have been underemphasized in the existing literature. These include the salience of transformative events and attitude changes in the process of constructing a cosmopolitan identity and committing to high-risk transnational activism.