In today’s neoliberal educational climate that puts privatization and profit above children and learning, critical pedagogies are sorely needed so that schools may instead serve as vehicles for social change. Data from research using grounded theory methods with eight P-12 critical educators across the United States were used to construct a framework for teaching for social justice. This framework consists of listening to students’ voices, inserting missing voices, and co-constructing agentic voices.

This book review examines First Generation College Students a new book published by Jossey-Bass publishers. An offering of a reframing of the book's main arguments through Critical Race Theory and Community Cultural Wealth frameworks provides for a holistic and anti-deficit framing of this population.

Campus diversity efforts are central to a growing number of institutions of higher education. In spite of the inclusive connotation of the term, race takes precedence over other components of diversity. The emphasis on race can be understood in light of the unfortunate history of slavery and excessive injustices experienced by African Americans and other racial minorities in the U.S. Yet, there is a critical need to embrace a broader range of social identities if diversity efforts are intended to promote social justice for various minoritized groups. This article calls attention to religion as an overlooked component of diversity. It presents personal narrative showing discriminatory practices experienced by Muslim female graduate students at an U.S.institution of higher education. The article discusses how institutionalized marginalization of subordinate groups negatively impacts their civic engagement. The paper contributes to enhancing the campus climate for students with diverse religious preferences by offering recommendations for creating inclusive environments that recognize and welcome students from diverse religious orientations.

This qualitative research seeks to understand how students’ experiences in service-learning contribute to their understanding of and commitment to social justice. Sensemaking theory is applied to unpack how students make sense of social justice—expressly, how the service-learning experiences (both community and classroom processes) provide students the opportunity to consider and conceptualize issues of justice. The findings demonstrate that students’ experiences in service-learning facilitated a more complex understanding of and expressed commitment to social justice. Key to this process of social justice sensemaking were six properties: students’ developing understandings of themselves and their role (identity); revisiting and reconsidering their positions (retrospect); connecting to new concepts and understandings that they wished to integrate into their own (referencing); recognizing conflicts between what was expected and what was experienced (contradiction); interacting with others (social); and developing confidence in their understandings, even if they were unsure about the accuracy of meaning (plausibility). These properties also reveal the aspects of a service-learning experience that provide the needed environment to enact social justice sensemaking.

This conceptual framework examines how the evolving literature on authentic leadership and development can be problematized and further clarified by looking at the identity development of trans* and genderqueer students. It begins by examining the components and factors of authentic leadership, and its strengths and weaknesses. As a newly emerging leadership model, and one that is gaining attention within the fields of leadership and higher education, there are opportunities to refine and bolster it to make it applicable and useful for the leadership development of a diversity of student populations from the onset. With that in mind, this paper considers the developmental milestones of trans* individuals, specifically those who identify as genderqueer, and how some of those milestones and experiences, as well as other people’s interpretations of them, might complicate how we define and understand authenticity.

The question posed here is if authentic expression of self and relational transparency are key components of authentic leadership, ones that need to be validated by leaders as well as followers, then how might binarist constructions of gender influence cisgender and gender-conforming followers to reject genderqueer people’s authentic self-expression and thus them as leaders? The conceptual framework offered provides higher education and student affairs administrators a lens through which to support the authentic leadership development of trans* and genderqueer students.

A Note About Language

This article utilizes the terms trans* and cisgender. The asterisk following the term ‘trans’, which is short for ‘transgender’, signifies an understanding that the term is still limited in describing all those that do not conform to an essentialist gender binary system where sex, gender identity, and gender expression align. As ‘trans*’ is not yet widely used in scholarly writing and research, it is used interchangeably with ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ to mirror the language used in the cited studies and literature. ‘Cisgender’ refers to people who generally experience congruence between their assigned sex at birth and the gender they are expected to identify with by extension.