Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, responsive teaching in mathematics may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-generated inputs and ideas. Although prior experimental work has demonstrated teacher biases against racially minoritized learners in the context of incorrect or partially correct student mathematical work, less is known about the potential for biases to emerge when teachers are presented with students’ correct and nonstandard mathematical ideas.

In this preregistered experiment, we investigate teacher biases in (a) expectations and judgments about student capabilities in math and (b) teacher responsiveness to students’ mathematical thinking.

Through a between-subjects design via an online survey, we randomly assigned N = 312 teachers to a simulated classroom composed of predominantly Black, Latinx/e, or White students and prompted them to respond to six vignettes featuring correct and nonstandard student solutions to mathematics problems. Teachers’ responses to each vignette were recorded, transcribed, and coded. We also prompted teachers to judge the quality of the students’ mathematical thinking and rate their expectations about the difficulty of the problems for a typical student. Finally, we ran a series of regressions on our outcomes of interest to understand how teachers’ responses to and thinking about student work in the vignettes might systematically vary depending on student race-ethnicity.

Our findings show teachers expected greater task difficulty in both the Latinx/e and Black classroom conditions relative to the White. We did not find significant differences by condition in other dimensions, although we found trend-level evidence to suggest that teachers may be more likely to support student sense-making and provide more positive, substantive affirmations to Black students relative to White students for the same mathematical solution. Our findings have implications for research and teacher training in reform-oriented mathematics instruction.

Black women remain significantly underrepresented among tenure-track and tenured faculty in U.S. higher education, despite decades of graduate preparation initiatives. Graduate preparation programs provide invaluable resources and experiences that support historically minoritized students’ pathways into the academy. Prior research focused on navigational challenges and barriers, but there is less insight regarding the role of graduate preparation programs in shaping academic pursuits and faculty bidirectional trajectories. The landscape for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has endured cataclysmic shifts in recent years, so understanding the impact of prefaculty’s exposure to academia through undergraduate research preparation and resource opportunities is critical to their long-term success in higher education.

To better understand the influence of preparation programs, more understanding is needed on how to create academic spaces for Black women academics to flourish and not simply survive. Inquiring how Black women faculty persisted through programs that increased their cultural and social capital needed to navigate higher education into faculty careers is one way to reveal pathways for meaningful inclusion and retention. As such, in this paper, we asked: How do Black women faculty reflect on their graduate preparation program experiences? In what ways, if any, did their experiences in these programs facilitate their pathways into the professoriate?

We combined Black feminism and a bidirectional socialization model to contemplate the racialized and gendered experiences Black women faculty encounter during their socialization through the academy. This analysis drew data from a larger, explanatory sequential, mixed methods study focused on the ways that racial stress in the academy relates to Black women faculty’s health outcomes. We focused on the qualitative component, which consisted of two rounds of interviews with 54 faculty; in this analysis, we focused on the 17 participants who discussed graduate preparation programs and identified participation in these programs on their CVs.

This article asserts that through these experiences a bidirectional possibility exists where Black women faculty are affirmed in their backgrounds, identities, and research interests through early exposure to be socialized as valuable knowledge producers. We recommend institutions and practitioners review missions and visions to ensure a bidirectional socialization is embedded where the Black women who are matriculating through these programs into the academy are also challenging and changing the program to be more intentional. As the sociopolitical landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming has continued to shift in recent years, it is crucial to understand how the norms and resources needed to thrive in the academy influence Black women who participated many years after initial exposure.

While Japan consistently ranks among the top-performing nations in international academic achievement surveys, its teachers work the longest hours globally. Although international research has increasingly centered teacher working conditions in students’ academic success, these studies have not addressed the role of the Japanese legal system in perpetuating long working hours.

This study examines the legal mechanism that has led to Japanese teachers working the longest hours globally and explores why the Japanese government has not effectively addressed this issue.

The study examined a series of court decisions in teacher overtime cases, highlighting the specific causes and challenges of extended working hours to address how courts could help mitigate the problem.

A national statute exempting teachers from general labor laws is not the sole reason for long working hours; rather, administrative misinterpretation is the primary issue. These lawsuits could trigger changes in subsequent education policy; however, passive court decisions render reform efforts insufficient and ineffective. This study advocates for a “colloquy model,” emphasizing the need for active judicial involvement in education policymaking as a crucial tool for addressing critical educational issues.

Burnout in higher education is widely documented, yet it is most often framed as an individual or occupational condition rather than as a consequence of institutional design. This dominant framing obscures how organizational structures and prestige-oriented priorities in higher education shape contingent faculty experiences. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory and scholarship on gendered organizations, this study situates burnout within broader institutional logics exacerbated during prestige-driven striving.

This study examines how women contingent faculty experience burnout within the context of institutional striving for Doctoral Universities–Very High Research Activity (R1) status at one institution. It centers how organizational cultures, recognition practices, and legitimacy structures shape everyday academic work. The analysis foregrounds the intersection of gender, contingency, and institutional ambition in producing uneven conditions of labor. By focusing on women contingent faculty, the study highlights how burnout is differentially experienced and mediated across academic roles.

Using a qualitative heuristic approach, the study draws on extended interviews and contemporaneous diary reflections from 12 women contingent faculty. Participants were employed at an R2 institution in the northeastern United States during its transition to R1 status. Analysis attended to patterns across narratives while preserving the depth and complexity of participants’ accounts, culminating in a creative synthesis entitled, “A Day in the Life of Women Contingent Faculty in Transition.”

Findings indicate that burnout is produced through gendered organizational cultures, perfunctory recognition, and constrained professional legitimacy that render teaching-centered and care-oriented labor invisible. Institutional striving redistributes risk from the organization onto individual faculty, normalizing burnout as a functional outcome of striving. Disciplinary valuation further mediates how women experience and navigate these pressures. The study reframes burnout as an institutional design problem, challenging deficit-oriented narratives of individual resilience and extending scholarship on gendered academic labor.

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an obdurate injustice, particularly for Indigenous youth who experience systemic exclusion and punitive treatment in educational spaces. Although interventions such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) have helped reduce exclusionary practices, they have not adequately addressed racial disparities. Emerging scholarship calls for race-conscious, locally grounded approaches that move beyond universal, technical solutions to foster systemic transformation. In response, the Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), a participatory co-design intervention, was launched with a rural high school to develop a culturally responsive and inclusive behavioral support system that addresses school discipline disparities affecting American Indian students.

This study examines how a rural school community, serving students across 12 townships and an American Indian reservation, engaged in critical implementation praxis, iterative cycles of collective reflection and action, to enact a new behavioral support system co-designed through the ILL. Specifically, it investigates how school community members, including students, families, educators, and Tribal partners, collaboratively refined the system through reflective dialogues and design experiments that responded to the school’s sociocultural and political realities. The study explores how the school community addressed systemic contradictions that emerged during implementation, disrupting and reimagining punitive disciplinary structures.

This study employs Critical Design Ethnography to analyze the participatory co-design process led by the school community. Data generation focused on the implementation phase of the ILL and included video/audio recordings, field notes, session artifacts, and weekly memos. An abductive analytic approach was used to identify patterns of reflective dialogue and collective action across 11 implementation team sessions, involving educators, students, Tribal partners, and university researchers.

Findings indicate that critical implementation praxis enabled the school community to (1) continually revisit and concretize core principles of dignity, equity, and Indigeneity into actionable policies and practices; (2) work through systemic contradictions by transforming germ-cell ideas into context-specific programs and relational practices; and (3) build bottom-up, community-led forms of implementation that redefined discipline as community building rather than exclusion. Through ongoing reflection and iterative refinement, the behavioral support system was reconceptualized as a dynamic, evolving artifact, positioning systemic change not as a one-time intervention but as a sustained commitment to educational justice. This study illustrates how context-specific, community-led implementation praxis can catalyze systemic transformation and suggests that future discipline reform efforts should prioritize relational trust, the school community’s agency, and critical reflection to develop locally meaningful responses to racialized school discipline.

Emerging educational technologies like artificial intelligence, automated assessment, and online proctoring have been adopted quickly across higher education, often without enough critical examination of how they affect disabled students and faculty. No comprehensive framework has existed to analyze how these technologies, as designed, marketed, and implemented by institutions, both reflect and shape understandings of disability. Technologies designed for disabled people often view disability as a problem to fix rather than a valued aspect of human diversity, thus reproducing the inequities institutions claim to address.

This paper introduces DISCO-Tech (DISability COnservation Technology Framework), a conceptual tool for critically analyzing how educational technologies position disability. The framework synthesizes Shew’s critique of technoableism, Costanza-Chock’s design justice principles, and crip technoscience into a unified analytical structure grounded in higher education contexts. DISCO-Tech considers not only whether a technology is accessible but also whether it conserves disability as a valued aspect of human diversity and whether it reflects disabled people’s lived experiences rather than idealized narratives of unrestricted access.

This paper employs theoretical analysis grounded in critical disability studies, interpretive scholarship, and disability activist knowledge. DISCO-Tech is organized around two intersecting axes (Conservation versus Normalization and Lived Experience versus Idealization), creating four analytical quadrants. The framework is illustrated through applied analysis of learning management systems, AI tutoring tools, and proctoring platforms, showing how it reveals ableist assumptions that single-axis evaluations overlook.

We argue that moving beyond accessibility compliance requires analytical tools that center disability as a valued form of human diversity rather than a deficit to be fixed. DISCO-Tech shows how technologies that appear inclusive can simultaneously erase disability identity, impose normative expectations, and create new burdens for disabled people, contradictions only visible through multidimensional analysis. We suggest this framework for faculty development, institutional technology review, vendor evaluation, and research at the intersection of disability and educational technology.