Advancing Educational Equity For Students Of Mexican Descent

Drawing on participatory action research conducted with students, parents, families, and school staff in a Southwest community in the United States, this volume contests the interpretation of the achievement gap for students of Mexican descent in the American education system and highlights asset-based approaches that can facilitate students’ academic success. By presenting the Asset-Based Bicultural Continuum Model (ABC) and demonstrating the applications in a variety of family, school, and community-based initiatives, this volume demonstrates how community and cultural wealth can be harnessed to increase educational opportunities for Latino students. The ABC model offers new strategies which capitalize on the bicultural and linguistic assets rooted in local communities and offers place-based strategies driven by communities themselves in order to be tailored to students’ strengths. The text makes a significant contribution to understanding the social ecology of Latinx students’ experiences and offers a new direction for effective and evidence-based academic and health programs across the United States. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in the sociology of education, multicultural education, urban education, and bilingual education. It will be of particular interest to those with a focus on Hispanic and Latino studies.

This text offers a hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of the lived experiences of Filipinx American teachers in U.S. schools, classrooms, and colleges. By drawing on one-on-one dialogues, group discussion, and reflective writing, the text identifies racial, cultural, and linguistic barriers that members of this minority group have faced in their training and practice as educators. The text questions the underrepresentation of Filipinx Americans among U.S. teaching staff and identifies causes both within the Filipino community and via external factors, including the absence of Filipino culture in curricula, as well as a lack of peer support in the development of Asian American teacher identities. This timely volume highlights the need to expand diversity teacher education to create a more racially diverse and inclusive workforce. Offering rich insight into the experiences of Filipinx American teachers, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers drawn to studies of multicultural education, as well as teacher education.

This book recognizes microaggression as a pervasive issue in colleges and universities around the world and offers critical analyses of the local and institutional contexts in which such incidences of violence and discrimination occur. Authors from Egypt, Barbados, South Africa, Canada, and the United States explore the origins and forms of microaggression which impact students, faculty, and staff in higher education and address issues including xenophobia, sexual violence, linguistic discrimination, and racial prejudice. Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks and utilizing empirical, qualitative, and ethnographic methods to consider microaggressions perpetrated by both students and staff, each chapter proposes practical ways to prevent violence through education, student agency, policy, and leadership. This book offers a contemporary global dialogue with educators and is vital reading for educators and administrators in higher education.

This book offers a unique focus on the well-being of Chinese and South/Southeast Asian students in the context of Hong Kong, and in particular the experience of integrating these young people into its schooling system. Yuen uses a narrative method that captures and offers a vivid insight into the actual experience of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, whilst providing fascinating comparisons between students coming from Mainland China and those whose parents are South/Southeast Asian immigrants. Readers will be particularly interested in the attention given to spiritual well-being and how religious participation and affiliation make a difference in giving meaning to life and in creating a positive mindset, as viewed and explained by students themselves. This well-organised volume begins by laying out the major themes relating to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, followed by a richly elaborated theoretical chapter which defines core concepts and their interconnection. This is followed by substantive chapters where the voices of each of the different diverse groupings of students, Chinese Mainland immigrants, Chinese Cross-boundary youth, South/Southeast Asian ethnic youth and mainstream HK youth from underprivileged backgrounds, are heard and interpreted in relation to themes of inclusion and well-being. It then builds upon the narratives to provide bottom-up solutions and pathways towards the inclusion and well-being of all students, as well as the professional development of teachers who can take up the challenge of ensuring that all young people are nurtured to fulfil their potential. Providing readers with practical implications and takeaways for education practice, this must-read work will appeal to a wide range of education practitioners and students involved in providing or researching inclusive education relating to mainstream and non-mainstream Chinese, South Asian, and other ethnic minority students.

Foregrounding diverse lived experiences and non-dominant forms of knowledge, this edited volume showcases ways in which narrating and sharing stories of pain and suffering can be engaged as critical pedagogy to challenge oppression and inequity in educational contexts. The volume illustrates the need to consider both the act of narrating and the experience of bearing witness to narration to harness the full transformative potentials of counternarratives in disrupting oppressive practices. Chapters are divided into three parts - "Telling and Reliving Trauma as Pedagogy," "Pedagogies of Overcoming Silence," and "Forgetting as Pedagogy" - illustrating a range of relational pedagogical and methodological approaches, including journaling, poetry, and arts-based narrative inquiry. The authors make the argument that the language of pain and suffering is universal, hence its potential as critical pedagogy for transformative and therapeutic teaching and learning. Readers are encouraged to reflect on their own lived experiences to constructively engage with their pain, suffering, and trauma. Focusing on trauma-informed non-hegemonic storytelling and transformative pedagogies, this volume will be of interest to students, faculty, scholars, and community members with an interest in advancing anti-oppressive and social justice education.

This edited volume is about diversifying the teaching profession. It is unique in its inclusion of multiple dimensions of diversity; its chapters focus on a wide range of under-represented groups, including those from lower socio-economic groups, Black and minority ethnic groups, migrants, the Travelling community, the Deaf community, the LGBTQI+ community and those of mature age. The book includes contributions from Australia, England, Iceland, Portugal and Scotland, as well as a number of chapters from the Irish context, mostly emanating from projects funded under Ireland’s Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Access to Higher Education (PATH): Strand 1—Equity of Access to Initial Teacher Education. The book also critically engages the rationale for diversifying the profession, arguing not only that representation still matters, but also that ultimately teacher diversity work needs to encompass system transformation to achieve a diverse, equitable and inclusive teaching profession.

This monograph describes implications for public schools of rapidly growing populations of Mexican-Americans and other language minorities and recommends ways to eliminate institutional barriers to equity and excellence in education. It presents current information about such issues as dropout rates, reading levels, and participation in advanced mathematics and science courses. It includes a synthesis of research about current trends, including the growth of this population, changes in immigration patterns, and changes in the segregation of this population. Chapter 1 describes Mexican-Americans and other language-minority groups in terms of levels of educational attainment, cultural and language diversity, and population trends and projections. Chapters 2-4 address personal, instructional, and school factors important for the success of language-minority students and examine trends and issues in bilingual education. Chapter 5 discusses ways to create school systems that support instruction of language-minority students including: (1) knowing student rights; (2) imparting high expectations; (3) ensuring appropriate student placement; (4) working to reduce the achievement gap; (5) taking an advocacy position in testing and grade retention; (6) improving staff development and minority teacher recruitment; and (7) involving parents in meaningful activities. Chapter 6 covers policy recommendations that include disaggregating student data, demonstrating commitment to uphold civil-rights laws, pursuing excellence and equity (not simply compliance), identifying a top-level administrator as an equity advocate, and joining the equity network. Desegregation assistance centers and other organizations providing information about educational equity are listed. Contains 99 references. (LP)

In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.