Many charter schools have arisen in urban areas, and they appear to enroll more students of color and low-income youth. In this article, the authors investigate the implications of charter school choice for equity. Three standards of equity—racial balance, resources, and outcome—are discussed. The authors review (a) the equity provisions of state charter legislation, (b) research on who may be choosing to send their children to charter schools and why, and (c) analyses of the demographics characteristics of charter schools' students. These analyses suggest that charter schools have not overcome racial isolation. The authors conclude the article with a discussion of the complexities of applying the three equity standards to charter schools.

My struggle to promote critical consciousness, dialogue, creative and critical thinking and collaboration in my class led me to turn the classroom into a lab where I would experiment with action research as pedagogy. I began my course by asking students what they wanted, what would they contribute and how we will implement their recommendations. More importantly I invited them to be my co-inquirers in what they perceived to be a radical approach to instruction. This article is an account of what took place specifically the way we all experienced the process.

The Kwithu project started when a volunteer who joined Kwithu, a community-based organization in Mzuzu, Malawi (Africa), to teach English gave a diagnostic test to a random group of forty 7th and 8th graders (20 boys and 20 girls) and discovered that most of them could hardly read or write in English. The test results prompted Maureen, the Kwithu director and co-founder, the teacher and myself to meet with the headteachers of the three schools mostly attended by Kwithu children. The headteachers appreciated our concerns about the English proficiency of the children, but they advised us to focus on more urgent matters if we truly wanted to help, e.g., lack of teaching and learning materials, lack of running water in schools, hunger, teacher qualifications, etc. This advice shifted our initial inquiry goal-from English language teaching-to a community-based participatory action research project designed to address the school conditions in Luwinga. In this paper, I describe the communitybased participatory action research inquiry and I reflect on the process of participation.

In this paper, we describe pivotal experiences that have shaped our respective professional journeys when teaching action research. We situate these experiences in relation to how they have contributed to our collective living theory of practice. This discussion unfolded as we explored ways to improve our own practices and the practices of our students. We conclude that this and similar questions can only be authentically answered when we as practitioners and faculty in higher education settings are willing to interrogate the contexts within which we interact and the complex intersections between our own intentional practices and selves and our students' willingness to engage in critical discourse.

No abstract