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Indigenous students that live in poverty experience contextual socio-economic factors with residual effects of lower educational outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Indigenous children that live in poverty often have fewer resources, are segregated, and continue to be marginalized in the classroom. The vicious cycle of low education levels for Indigenous peoples confines them to low paying employment or unemployment that results in ongoing poverty or being a statistic categorized as the working poor. The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of the strategies that teachers have animated in their classrooms, which they perceived to be successful in encouraging Indigenous students to attend school, remain in school, complete course credits, and persevere to graduate from high school. The intent was to discover the how-to strategies and advance working knowledge of pedagogical practices leading to improved educational experiences and achievement levels for Indigenous students. This chapter will present the observations and qualitative findings of the case studies conducted in New Zealand and Canada, wherein 14 teachers described what they did and what it looked like in their classrooms. A constructivist approach was utilized to make meaning and gain the interpretations from the participants. This was achieved by first viewing the interactions in the classrooms and, through the interview process, being able to garner a better understanding of what was witnessed from the point of view of the participants.

Wangari Maathai – environmentalist, political activist, human rights champion, and international spokesperson for environmental justice – combined scientific expertise with traditional African respect for the land and compassion for individual persons. She was thus able to build a movement to preserve the land, foster citizen empowerment, and inspire activism to effect systemic change. Her legacy is both local and international, with more than 5,000 active citizen networks in Kenya having planted more than 51 million trees.

As a child, Maathai was taught to revere the earth as infused with divine presence. Through study, she added knowledge of scientific principles that govern the natural world, as well as complex interactions between humans and earth. What she saw was the delicate and essential interdependence of environmental and social needs.

Over the course of 45 years of activism, in Kenya and on the world stage, she learned to address individual human suffering and challenge the systems responsible for the pain, including political and economic corruption. Maathai was, in many ways, a prototypical grassroots leader in the heroic vein. She insistently rebuffed attempts to romanticize poverty or consider it inevitable; she refused to surrender to oppression and exploitation – sometimes at significant personal risk.

Maathai left rich resources – a memoir and handbook, essays, speeches, papers, editorials – plus an active Movement. Emphasis in this essay, which draws on those resources plus insights of scholars, journalists, filmmakers, family, friends, and critics, some through personal interview, is what her strategies and achievements suggest for ongoing leadership for Africa.

To the Most Rev. M.A. Corrigan, Archbishop of New York:

We discuss a recent effort of institutional resistance in the context of the 2008–2011 Apostolic Visitation of U.S. women religious motivated by Vatican concerns about perceived secularism and potential lack of fidelity among Catholic sisters. We examined the process of and women’s responses to the Visitation to shed light on the institutional work associated with productive resistance and the role of identity and emotions in transforming institutions.

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

– Lisa Miller, Female Troubles, Newsweek, May 27, 2010

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

Research on Economic Inequality Volume 12 is the outgrowth of University of Alabama Poverty and Inequality Conference, May 22–25, 2003. The motivation for the conference was to honor John P. Formby upon his retirement. The conference, funded by the University, was designed to bring together three groups of people; first, some of the most recognized scholars in the field, second, current and former colleagues of John Formby’s working in this field, and third, Dr. Formby’s former Ph.D. and post-doctoral students. Seventeen papers were presented, 11 of which are authored or co-authored by Dr. Formby’s former students. Peter Lambert and Yoram Amiel also participated in the conference. Dan Slottje, John Creedy, Shlomo Yitzhaki and Quentin Wodon did not attend but contributed papers.