Volume 50 Issue 2 of NYU Metro Center’s open-access journal, Voices in Urban Education (VUE) is now available. Voices in Urban Education is a journal published semi-annually by the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
VUE endeavors to serve as a “roundtable-in-print” by bringing together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers, as well as essential but frequently overlooked voices in educational scholarship, such as students, parents, teachers, activists, and community members.
Each issue of Voices in Urban Education is organized around a theme, representing an innovative analysis of a vital issue in urban education. This edition of VUE entitled, “Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (Part II): Toward Agency, Abolition, and Freedom,” features the work of scholars, practitioners, youth development and community based organizations sharing valuable insights on what we at the NYU Metro Center define as “student-centered learning environments that affirm cultural identities; foster positive academic outcomes; develop students’ abilities to connect across lines of difference; elevate historically marginalized voices; empower students as agents of social change; and contribute to individual student engagement, learning, growth, and achievement through the cultivation of critical thinking.”
VUE is published amid countless anti-equity campaigns targeting public schools. This targeting is occurring across the United States at this very moment, ranging from efforts limiting instruction on race and race-related topics, to banning books that tell the truth about U.S. history. In stark opposition to those inauspicious facts, this new issue of Voices in Urban Education stands in solidarity with and complements the work of fellow equity advocates, as well as all the school transformation champions across the country who remain ever persistent in securing students’ access to culturally responsive and sustaining education.
The articles in this issue of VUE are organized into three sections: Commentaries on Urban Education, which consist of technical comments, opinions, and narratives of experience and/ or guidance from leaders at the forefront of important conversations and issues in urban education; Conversations in Urban Education, consisting of interviews (in-person transcripts or electronic correspondence) with thinkers, leaders, advocates, and students at the forefront of struggles for equity in schools; and Research Perspectives in Urban Education, which consist of more traditionally academic research or theoretical pieces.
We at NYU Metro Center are extremely proud of the ideas shared within this latest edition of Voices in Urban Education and hope our readers will feel inspired and affirmed by the wisdom found within the pages of this journal. In addition to thanking each one of the journal’s contributing authors, we would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation to Voices in Urban Education’s Managing Editor, members of the Editorial Board, the reviewers, the student contributors, and Copy Editor. Lastly, we reserve our highest gratitude for VUE’s Editor-in-Chief Fabienne Doucet, for not only steering the entirety of the publication process for this edition of Voices in Urban Education, but also for providing and ensuring a unifying vision for each aspect of the production of this journal.