Since the implementation of a voluntary peer-led team-learning program in introductory biology courses at a selective liberal arts college, the persistence of students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups as life sciences majors and minors has improved dramatically and is now equal to the persistence rate of non-URM students.

This is a movement about teachers stepping into their power. Make no mistake; we have powers that are vast and deep. We have accrued this power over the hours and days and years that we have spent with students. We have built it up over countless nights contemplating our students' lives. We have stifled it and shoved it down in staff meetings when we chose to "grin and bear it" rather than prolong a dreary and disheartening afternoon. We have shared it in brief moments of connection with our colleagues, rare moments that ignite our common strength and then flicker out as we rush back to our own isolated classrooms. We have hewn it out of mountains of ignorance. Teacher leadership is about harnessing this power that exists in every teacher, latent in some, obvious in others. It is about collecting this power and exercising it in ways that will make schools places that honor the critical perspectives and rich possibilities of teachers and students alike.-Kathleen Melville, teacher leader and founding member of Teachers Lead Philly, July 3, 2013Scott Storm, an English teacher, does action research in his classroom, and he has helped to start a new public school in New York City. Kathleen Melville teaches English and Spanish; she is a founding member of a teacher leadership group in Philadelphia that aims to bring teachers together to share ideas and contribute to district policy decisions. Maeve O'Hara, a math teacher, after hearing about a colleague's writing center in another school, started a math center at her school, in which student tutors help their peers do test corrections to demonstrate mastery of material. Over the course 8

This study uses data from a 10-year longitudinal study to explore how women graduates of a liberal arts college experience the gendered construction of teachers and teaching as they make life and career choices. These women respond to the expectations and pressures of families and teachers, renegotiate their own definitions of success and achievement, and reconstruct definitions of teaching and themselves as teachers. Despite their understanding of the status of other possible career choices, and their resistance of gendered frameworks of career and success, the women in this study ignore the rhetoric of teacher professionalization that might provide them with an alternative definition of teaching. Instead, they reframe teaching as a political act, one through which they can address issues of social inequality and social injustice.

This study explores how twenty-eight women graduates of a liberal arts college renegotiate personal and professional identities over a ten year period. Approximately half of these women entered college planning to pursue a career in medicine; the other half indicated some interest in the field of education. Each participant was interviewed six times over the course of ten years. Analysis suggests that prior designations of women's careers as "traditional" (i.e. teaching) and "non-traditional" (i.e. medicine) no longer apply as women actively reconceptualize their lives, their identities, their definitions of success, and the meaning of their chosen career. Prior studies that examine the balancing of personal and professional lives also simplify a more complicated process experienced by women who explore multiple understandings of themselves within personal and social structures. The women in this study draw on the critical perspectives learned in college as they recognize and respond to competing social and cultural definitions and discourses of success, work, and self.

No abstract