Daring to care: the role of culturally relevant care in mentoring Black and Latino male high school students

This study seeks to challenge the uni-dimensional way care in school is written about by highlighting an often overlooked aspect of care – the kind that students do for each other. Data is drawn from focus groups conducted with the youth participants and founder of Umoja Network for Young Men (UMOJA), an all-male, school-based mentoring program for over-aged and under-credited (OA/UC) high school students. The authors draw on theories of culturally relevant pedagogy, care, and critical pedagogy to present the findings and propose a form of culturally relevant care (CRC) that entails warm demanding and building mutual trust. This study highlights the humanizing experiences of the Black and Latino male transfer students and their mentor. This focus on the experiences of young Black and Latino male participants seeks to shift the discourse from one focused on deficits to one that recognizes their agency and capacities for social and academic success.     

Missing misters: uncovering the pedagogies and positionalities of male teachers of color in the school lives of Black and Latino adolescent boys

ABSTRACT

Educational stakeholders often recruit male teachers of color as solutions to the problems facing Black and Latino boys and young men in PreK-12 schools. However, given the assumptions made of these teachers’ role in the lives of boys of color and their disproportionally low presence, few studies have considered what boys themselves report as missed because of the absence of Black and Latino male teachers. This case study drew from the voices of five Black and Latino adolescent boys in one urban secondary school in the United States to theorize what the participants missed (e.g. yearned for connections, reflections of self) and missed out on (e.g. seeing positive images of men of color) by not having a more robust presence of Black and Latino male teachers of color or misters. Findings indicated the need for boys’ voices in advancing nuanced recruitment and retention discourses for their male teachers of color.     

An exploratory study of the academic engagement and beliefs of Latino male high school students

This study provides insights to the school experiences of Latino male students through an exploration of how they describe their beliefs about education and how they engage in school for academic success. Data is drawn from interviews and surveys conducted with Latino males that participated in New York University’s Black and Latino Male School Intervention Study (BLMSIS) between 2006 and 2011. The findings revealed a dynamic interplay among how the students ‘do school’ (behavioral engagement), their intellectual involvement (cognitive engagement), and their strong beliefs in the education for social mobility shaped schooling for them. This focus on the experiences of young Latino males seeks to assist researchers, policymakers, and practitioners alike design and implement programs and policies to promote their educational progress and success.     

The salience of Black mentors on the teaching praxis of Latino male teachers

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing population of Latino students, little has been done to recognize the potential cultural assets and resilience that Latino communities and Latino teachers can bring to the educational environment. Using Critical Race Theory, in this article, each participant shares their experiences with their Black mentors. This article shares the ways in which Black teachers continue to exemplify Black teaching excellence now with a group that isn’t Black.     

Three cultural models of teacher interaction valued by Mexican students at a US high school

Using students’ interviews as data source, this study explores the interactional experiences of several Mexican students at a US high school in the Midwest with their teachers and discusses how three cultural models of teacher interaction valued by the students impact their affiliation, motivation, and engagement with school. Emphasis is given to the students’ voices to explore how teachers are perceived by them. The study found that several teachers displayed negative stereotypes influenced by cultural and social biases toward Mexicans and the anti-immigrant climate in society. Insights are provided regarding the manner in which Mexican students’ teacher interaction influences their high drop out rate, their low academic achievement, and their low graduation statistics. The findings suggest that there is an urgent need to improve teachers’ cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity toward Mexican students.     

Uncertain aspirations: Latino students and dropout in the United States

ABSTRACT

Latinos are one of the fastest growing and most racially diverse students in American schools. Driven by immigration, they account for more than 24% of the kindergarten to high school population. Despite their numbers, the achievement gap between Latinos and their non-Latino peers remains wide since they have the highest rate of dropout. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we find that Latino students who attend more than one school during their academic career are more likely to dropout than those who do not. We also find lower rates of dropout among children of parents who stated that they did not have difficulties interacting with school administrators due to language barriers. With regards to migration, we do not find immigrant status to be significant in dropout – a noteworthy effect given the increases in raids and deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.     

Border stories: using critical race and Latino critical theories to understand the experiences of Latino/a children

The number of school-age children of color in US schools is increasing, while the teaching force continues to be dominated by white teachers. According to the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics in the 2011–2012 school year, 81.9% of public school teachers were white, while the projected number of Hispanic students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools is expected to increase 33% between 2011 and 2022. In my experience, the issue of immigration is often ignored by the majority white teacher population, but, as I will share in this article, it is part of the lived experience of Latino children. I present my students’ border stories as discussed in relation to Latino children’s literature. I am using the words ‘border stories’ to represent the narratives my students shared about their families’ experiences crossing the US–Mexico border as well as what they felt about the societal discourse around ‘illegal immigrants.’ Critical race theory (CRT) and Latino critical theory (LatCrit) are used to frame these border stories to speak against the majoritarian story.     

全球化中的文化霸权与回族学的历史使命

本文从全球化的视野中,分析了以美国为首的西方文化霸权主义的兴起、表现以及它对社会公正和人类多元文化现状及发展的威胁,并探讨了文化霸权对回族社会带来的负面影响。文章还着重阐述了回族和回族学面对文化霸权的应有态度和应对措施,具有较强的现实意义。     

Thinking through the flesh: a critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education

Although the ubiquitous nature of whiteness has been scrutinized in research on teacher preparation in the United States, scholarship on how this concept impinges upon the field’s overall culture, as well as on pedagogy, is scarce. Thus, I perform a critical autoethnographic study on the relationships among whiteness, pedagogy, and urban teacher education. The inquiry threads Critical Race Theory and feminist theorizing on (Black) bodies, affects, and assemblages, and extends from extant literature illustrating that the dichotomous thinking characteristic of whiteness undergirds the disembodied approaches to teaching and learning prevalent in teacher education programs. This, I discover, leaves one White pre-service teacher ill-equipped to discern and disrupt the materialization of whiteness in an (inter)corporeal encounter with a Black youth in an urban classroom. Additionally, a pedagogy of disembodiment hinders this pre-service teacher from developing robust understandings of how latent within his lived-in, socio-historically situated White body is the potent potential to exacerbate the psychic pain that racism inflicts upon the racially othered children and youth who navigate urban classrooms under the scorching glare of whiteness. These findings underpin my call for urban teacher educators to embrace a pedagogy of embodiment in order to build pre-service teachers’ capacities to teach racially marginalized children and youth in ways that broaden the boundaries of the human beyond the scope of whiteness.     

Racing tradition: Catholic schooling and the maintenance of boundaries

This article seeks to add to the underdeveloped strain of inquiry on the raced social experience of students in private and parochial institutions. We examine the role Catholic schools in the city of Chicago play in the maintenance and creation of racially problematic policies, spaces, and rhetoric. The research uncovers a multitude of responses framing African American students as an exotic other in mission and action through the leveraging of liturgical, ideological, and political language and practice. Using Cultural Studies and Critical Race Theory the work seeks to create a discursive space for representation and resistance in the repositioning of dominant and sanguineous narratives about Catholic schooling both in the US and globally. We use moments when race became particularly and often painfully salient in our experiences of Catholic schooling to expose the structural and racial inequity perpetuated in establishing and enforcing racial barriers to success through religion-for-segregation educational policies.     

Using our voices,losing our bodies: Michael Brown,Trayvon Martin,and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy

Abstract

The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

Partisans of Nation-States: Comparing the Role of Minority Identities in New Zealand and Finland

Cultural diversity and the decentralisation of cultural self-determination are principal aims in the cultural strategies of modern western countries. However, there is no general agreement as to which groups should be granted such autonomy, or about who should be regarded as the authentic spokesmen for their groups. This article asks how two smallish but developed countries, Finland and New Zealand have historically arranged the status of their cultural minorities. The comparison is based on the cultural differences between these two countries, which have similar views on political rights and share a similar dependence on a limited number of economic sources. The chief guides of my reasoning have been Michael Volkerling's notion of cultural policies as ‘difference-engines’ and Alessandro Pizzorno's conception of ‘partisan identities’. The analysis showed that the State has, in both cases, actively interfered with the construction of sub-identities. This was done by carefully creating the channels of negotiation, and specifying the individuals actually involved in the negotiations about minority rights. These ‘appropriate national sub-identities’ have ensured a stability for the state, but have simultaneously led to enormous social concentrations of power within and between the groups themselves.     

‘We can’t just put any belly-dancer into the program’: cultural activism as boundary work in the city of Bratislava

Festivals are an increasingly more popular form of contemporary cultural activism. Countering prejudice through arts, using culture as a tool of communication, and creating an opportunity for marginalised groups to participate in public life, they represent a specific and novel means of civic activism. In this paper, I introduce a case study of the multicultural festival [fjú?n], aiming to enhance the public visibility of ‘new minorities’ and bring attention to the ethnic and cultural diversity in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia. Building on a festival ethnography and drawing on the perspective of boundary work [Jaworsky, B. Nadya. 2016. The Boundaries of Belonging: Online Work of Immigration-related Social Movement Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan], I show how the festival organisers work towards crossing and blurring symbolic boundaries in society. I offer a close interpretive reading of their attempts at capturing public places and cultivating a diverse language-scape, while showing how they simultaneously maintain, solidify, or even inscribe new boundaries. I conclude by raising critical points about the potential of activist cultural festivals to shift symbolic boundaries in the long run and serve as tools of social inclusion.     

Fetal citizenship in the borderlands: Arizona's house bill 2443 and state logics of racism and orientalism

In 2011, Arizona passed the ‘Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011’, which makes it a felony for doctors to knowingly perform an abortion for race or sex selective reasons. To convince the House and Senate to pass House Bill 2443, advocates constructed African American, Asian American and Asian immigrant women's reproduction as troublesome: these women were either victims of a racist, eugenicist family planning organization that sought to limit fertility or they were victims of a sexist heteropatriarchal family structure that prefers male sons. Or, in another rendering, Asian women were cast as ‘backward’ migrants who have not assimilated to American gender equality. My essay argues that House Bill 2443 appears to be about reproduction, but must be understood with a lens that is attentive to racism, colonialism, and anti-immigrant sentiments in Arizona's past and contemporary moment. In other words, state measures that criminalize abortion need to be read against the on-going cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples and recent laws that criminalize Latin@ migrants. In the borderlands, reproduction is intimately tied to citizenship and state repression.     

从牧民到农民——对甘肃裕固族黄土坡-双海子移民项目村的一项人类学考察

肃南是甘肃省重要的牧业基地之一,但近年来伴随着生态环境恶化,西部裕固族生产与生活面临困难与问题,生态移民成为政策选择的重点。文章以从莲花乡黄土坡村到明花农业开发区双海子村移民为个案,对移民的过程及文化适应与整合进行了描述与分析,对移民遇到的困难与问题以及进一步发展的对策进行了一定思考。     

女学：经堂教育的拓展与文化传承角色重心的位移——以兰州、西安、临夏调查为个案

2 0世纪 90年代前后 ,在西北地区城市回族穆斯林社区中作为传统经堂教育的拓展———女学的兴起与发展成为一个令人瞩目的文化现象。本文追溯了清真寺女学的历史 ,特别是在城市文化镜像中分析了西北地区城市回族穆斯林女学生长的背景 ,认为这是一场浸染着浓厚救亡意识和洋溢着发展理念的文化自觉     

回族现象观察的"点"与"面"--从三本回族调查资料的研究取向谈起

本文主旨系探讨当代回族研究在方法与方法论的讨论里,有关民族志建构过程中的一个基本议题即在观察当代回族现象时,以单独或若干个"点"的田野研究,如何呈现出"面"的意义与重要性.本文主要透过近年来三本新出版的调查资料为探讨重点,并尝试以"边缘性回族"的概念,来提供出"点"与"面"之间另一种"线"的分析与观察角度.     

Social network evolution during long-term migration: a comparison of three case studies in the South Wales region

Ten years after Poland joined the European Union (EU), a sizable number of the once considered short-term migrants that entered the United Kingdom (UK) post-2004 have remained. From the literature, it is known that, when initially migrating, social networks composed of family and friends are used to facilitate migration. Later, migrants’ social networks may evolve to include local, non-ethnic members of the community. Through these networks, migrants may access new opportunities within the local economy. They also serve to socialise newcomers in the cultural modalities of life in the destination country. However, what if migrants’ social networks do not evolve or evolve in a limited manner? Is cultural integration still possible under these conditions? Using data collected from three case studies in the South Wales region – Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil and Llanelli – from 2008–2012, the aim of this article is to compare Polish migrants’ social network usage, or lack thereof, over time. This comparison will be used to understand how these social networks can be catalysts and barriers for cultural integration. The findings point to the migrants’ varied use of their local social networks, which is dependent upon their language skill acquisition and their labour market mobility in the destination country.     

Preserving white comfort and safety: the politics of race erasure in academe

ABSTRACT

In this paper four critical scholars/ activists reflect on the complex institutional and public responses to recent white supremacist events on Canadian campuses and the equity discussions they have affected. Specifically, we interrogate practices, which reify and reinsure positions of dominance and human/social hierarchy in four ways. To begin, (1) we interrogate freedom of speech and freedom of expression positions, as well as the reliance on critique of neoliberalism to supplant analyses of racism and colonial logics, to identify their role in preserving white fragility. Next, (2) we provide a local media analysis of academe’s responses to white supremacy on campus to trace the discursive moves that obscure institutional racism. Following these contextual scaffoldings, (3) we explore the ways equity projects within institutions remain projects protecting and preserving whiteness while exploiting the politics of identity. Finally, (4) we carefully reflect on the various modes of inclusion in the academy, which produce racialized scholars(hip) to be complicit in the reproduction of racial thinking, alongside and occluded by institutional narratives of equity and progress. Critical questions are raised regarding the possibilities, complicities and complexities of achieving equity and transformation in the academy, as well as the role of racialized scholars(hip) in this work.