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The purpose of this article is to share a year-long initiative of a predominantly white liberal arts college library that fostered relationality and inclusive culture through an understanding and critique of White Supremacy Culture.

This case study presents the development and implementation of a library-wide reading group to discuss Okun's (2021) White Supremacy Culture Characteristics through relational meetings (Chambers, 2003). Relational-cultural theory provided a guiding framework for implementation of relational meetings in the context of conversations about race.

After participation in the reading group, participants reported their ability to identify characteristics of White Supremacy Culture in their lives and a greater preparedness to participate in work related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The authors suggest vulnerability, consideration of power and privilege and observations of White Supremacy Culture within the local context frequently occurred in the reading group conversations.

This work operates as an opportunity for library staff to learn about White Supremacy Culture in a way that helps to undermine white privilege and, therefore, holds similar aims to anti-racist affinity work (Michael and Conger, 2009). However, the library staff only has one person of color and, therefore, the authors cannot speak to engaging a more racially diverse staff. The authors include reflections on how their racial identities impact their engagement in this work.

Attention to White Supremacy and white privilege is, according to Gulati-Partee and Potapchuk (2014), an overlooked part of diversity, equity and inclusion work. This case study demonstrates a path toward inclusive culture that focuses on the identification of White Supremacy Culture Characteristics (Okun, 2021) in the authors’ local context and provides rationale for utilizing relational meetings (Chambers, 2003) to emphasize individual and collective reflection.

While many works have reported adopting exploratory practice (EP) principles in language teaching research, only a few studies have explored the enactment of EP in an online extensive reading of students majoring in English education. Given the relative paucity of attention to the use of EP as the practitioner research in English language teaching (ELT), the present EP investigates how students understand online extensive reading practice mediated by online group discussion and extensive reading logs, where the first author served as the online extensive reading practice instructor.

The exploratory practice focuses on incorporating research into pedagogy and fastens the importance of the quality-of-life in the classroom. The data were collected through students reading logs and semi-structured interviews. The collected data were analyzed using the thematic analysis. In this case, there were six phases including familiarizing with the data, generating initial codes, searching for the themes, reviewing the themes, defining the theme and writing up.

The findings reveal that online group work driven by EP enables everybody to engage in learning activities. EP assists the students in perceiving their potential and gaining a better awareness of the need to devote themselves to the class. In the EP activities, they work together to build a peaceful situation to advance the quality of learning in EFL classrooms.

The present study’s limitation is the small sample. Apart from that, the research results cannot be generalized to other places.

This study suggests that EP is suitable to create a mutual understanding among the learners and teachers. To conclude, English language competency can be achieved in a pleasant atmosphere through EP.

The present study succeeded in adding new literature studies related to EPs by discussing online group discussions and their challenges during the learning process. These aspects were identified through reading logs and interviews with students. Thus, it focuses on the implementation and challenges of online group discussions.

Empirical validation of educational technology is critical for best practice, particularly when courses are delivered online. This study aims to investigate the predictive relationship of usage behaviors on perceptions of 30 preservice special education teachers while reading in an online social annotation reading tool.

In this single-group quasi-experimental study, participants completed two readings in Perusall, once individually and once in small groups, then took a researcher-created survey after each reading. Descriptive data and paired sample t-tests were calculated. Predictive relationships between usage behaviors and survey results were analyzed with linear regression models.

Participants thought Perusall was useful for their learning and easier to use in small groups and that guided reading prompts were helpful. Usage behaviors did not significantly account for participant beliefs about Perusall. Instructors may wish to use guided reading prompts and small groups to maximize student learning and engagement.

This study addresses gaps in the literature (Suhre et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2023) by following one group of students over two semesters, using a commercially available tool, measuring actual usage behaviors and not solely student perceptions and analyzing instructor perceptions of the tool. The authors contribute further evidence that group-constructed knowledge is valuable for undergraduate learning (Kalir et al., 2020b). The authors also provide data-based suggestions for the use of social annotation tools that maximize student learning and engagement.

In describing these projects, the authors hope to encourage academic librarians and archivists to participate in, and even facilitate, similar work at their own institutions. Although both of these projects began in the library and included readings and discussions related to library and archival practices, the most generative conversations rapidly shifted from “how should the library handle these materials?” to “what might this institution do to reckon with its history?” When traditional library practices were de-centered and community perspectives were sought on the college archive, the authors were able to have more inclusive, authentic conversations about the college's history and future.

This case study explores two projects undertaken at a liberal arts college: a working group and a credit-bearing course intended to reckon with racist, xenophobic or otherwise harmful materials in the college archive. Both projects were informed by the authors' engagement with Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture and guided by inclusive pedagogies and practices that participants had explored in workshops and within the context of the college's Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

The working group and the course underscore the centrality of relationships, trust-building and time to the work of addressing difficult histories. The “campus-wide conversations” the authors had hoped to have about the college archive evolved into smaller spaces developed with intention and care. The diverse perspectives of working group members and students in the course demonstrate the value of bringing together viewpoints from outside the library and beyond institutional or disciplinary silos, to consider far-reaching systemic issues.

Many US colleges and universities have begun, or will begin, to investigate the myriad ways in which racism, racial exclusion, or racial violence have marked their institutions and how these troubled legacies persist in the present day. This case study proposes possible approaches that academic libraries and librarians may take to contribute to this essential work.

These two projects propose that work that typically happens solely within libraries and archives (cataloging and description of potentially harmful materials) or within institutional or disciplinary silos (reckoning with legacies of racism and bias) can be discussed, debated, and shared among the campus community. All of the participants in the working group and the course, regardless of their title, role, or academic credentials, bring necessary expertise and experience to these projects. Inclusive practices, when paired with grassroots energy, suggest ways in which a college archive can be used as a site of evidence, reflection, interrogation, and repair.

The paper aims to explore the intergenerational maps project that set out to map the Brimbank and Moonee Valley residents' awareness of their favourite aspects of their local community. In reflecting on the way this project enabled local knowledge exchanges between different age groups, the paper examines the way intergenerational interactions become pedagogical and make public and public pedagogy visible.

This research paper employs the theoretical and methodological framework of performance (Charman and Dixon, 2021) to read the author's experience with the intergenerational maps project. Insights gained from performance framework are shared to illuminate the complexity of public pedagogy and its entanglement with place, public and knowledge.

The critical reflection on the author's encounter with a pedagogical event points to the importance of using a new theorisation of public pedagogy (Charman and Dixon, 2021) as a useful generative method to guide the reading, learning and research within the fields of public pedagogy and intergenerational relations.

The practical implications of this paper centres on its deployment of a new theorisation of public pedagogy as a useful framework for studying intergenerational interactions. This places these intergenerational interactional dynamics in the field of public pedagogy and can be practically applied to further develop desirable public pedagogical practices within the arena of public pedagogy.

The paper offers a subjective interpretation of the author's experience with an intergenerational interaction project and presents an application of a theoretical framework to read events as pedagogical performances that brings insights into the pedagogical potential of these public performances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

The purpose of the study was to explore and articulate how Socratic seminar might be considered more completely as part of justice-focused social studies classroom disciplinary practices.

The authors reviewed the literature on Socratic seminar and developed a model for its practical use. The authors used the model to demonstrate its use in teaching civil rights history, as an example for implementation.

Socratic seminar is an instructional method that layers several disciplinary literacy skills within social studies that have the combined potential to create a transformative dialogue within the classroom and communities, especially when leveraged in more complex multi-text ways. Through the seminars, students can better understand what the authors name horizontal historical analysis, the perspective on concurrent social justice movements and vertical curricular analysis or how social justice movements experience continuity and change over time.

The authors provided an accessible model for teachers and students to use Socratic seminars as part of transformational social studies practices.

The authors demonstrate how the Socratic seminar model can provide students with the intellectual foundation for considering social action as more critically informed civic agents.

The authors examine and offer a model of how Socratic seminar can engage students in vertical and/or horizontal historical analysis for transformational purposes. Further, the authors identify how Socratic seminar can build the skills and dispositions of social studies, provide space for knowledge creation through critical historical inquiry and help reframe how teachers and students understand learning and human relationships by shifting the classroom power and promoting student agency through dialogue.

This paper shares findings from a multi-year literacy professional development partnership between a school district and university (2014–2019). We share this case of a Literacy Cohort initiative as an example of cross-institutional professional development situated within several of NAPDS’ nine essentials, including professional learning and leading, boundary-spanning roles and reflection and innovation (NAPDS, 2021).

We asked, “In what ways did the Cohort initiative create conditions for community and collaboration in the service of meaningful literacy reforms?” Drawing on social design methodology (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), we sought to generate and examine the educational change associated with this multi-year initiative. Our data set included programmatic data, interviews (N = 30) and artifacts of literacy teaching, learning and leading.

Our findings reflect the emphasis areas that are important to educators in the partnership: diversity by design, building relationships through collaboration and rooting literacy reforms in teacher leadership. Our discussion explores threads of reciprocity, simultaneous renewal and boundary-spanning leadership and their role in sustaining partnerships over time.

This paper contributes to our understanding of building and sustaining a cohort model of multi-year professional development through the voices, perspectives and experiences of teachers, faculty and district administrators.