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This study aims to understand the impact of a pilot of the actions against racism (AAR) intervention, aimed at enhancing educators’ multicultural efficacy and attitudes in a mid-Atlantic K-8 charter school.

AAR included eight sessions delivered over one school year. Experienced facilitators led these sessions, focusing on combating racism, prejudice and discrimination. Of the 84 school staff, 56 completed a baseline survey and 33 completed a postintervention survey.

Paired sample t-tests revealed a significant increase in multicultural attitudes, t(29) = 2.55, p = 0.016, whereas the increase in multicultural efficacy was not significant, t(28) = 1.93, p = 0.063. The authors examined cultural and emotional intelligence as moderators of the intervention’s impact. Higher baseline cognitive reappraisal scores (an indicator of emotional intelligence) were linked to a larger increase in multicultural efficacy from pre- to postintervention, B = −0.59, t (27) = −2.20, p = 0.037. The number of sessions attended was unrelated to the intervention’s impact.

This study was a single-site, uncontrolled pilot of AAR with a small sample size. Further research in additional settings with appropriately powered samples is needed to validate these results and extend findings to examine the impact of AAR on the student experience.

The study demonstrates the promising potential of AAR in improving teachers' multicultural attitudes and efficacy. Exploratory findings highlight the role of cognitive reappraisal in enhancing multicultural efficacy, contributing valuable insights for designing effective teacher training programs. This research supports the implementation of critical, identity-centered and asset-based pedagogies in education.

Of all the major, global professional sports where women have made inroads, striving toward equality in terms of status, earnings and media attention, tennis stands at the forefront. This chapter traces this historical development, outlining the sport's earliest socio-cultural features that afforded the inclusion of female players and charting the progress of notable women who thrust tennis into the limelight and turned themselves into commodities – the essence of professionalisation. Suzanne Lenglen blazed the trail by becoming, in 1926, the principal attraction in the sport's inaugural professional tour. Female players were encouraged to cast aside the shackles of restrained femininity and chart their own courses in a sport still dominated by men and played according to male standards. The rise of ‘Open Tennis’ in 1968 removed the playing restrictions and stigma of professionalism, but by opening up to the male-dominated corporate world, unsurprisingly it was the male players who initially competed for the lion's share of new money. Billie Jean King's efforts to galvanise her fellow female professionals to compete on a rogue tour sponsored by Virginia Slims left them ousted by the sport's main officials, but the tour's commercial success propelled them toward equality in terms of prize money and status. Still more or less a white, middle-class-dominated pursuit, the arrival of Venus and Serena Williams in the late 1990s turned tennis toward new markets, and the sport's significance for women remains apparent in the fact that its leading players are the most recognisable and well-paid of all professional female athletes.