Decolonizing Study Abroad Through The Identities Of Latinx Students

This book counters the common understanding of study abroad in Latin America as a White and middle-class colonizer practice and re-imagines it to fit the needs of Latinx immigrant/transnational higher education students. The book centers Latinx youth inhabiting familial heritage spaces as a pathway toward a deeper understanding of themselves as racialized and colonized individuals, reframing study abroad for Latinx youth as a way for them to reclaim, negotiate, and strengthen their own immigrant/Latino/a/Chicano/a and other identities. The text is undergirded by a theoretical argument based on decolonial methods in education and Critical Race Theory and draws on counter-stories, rich descriptive interviews, and participant observations across 26 years of combined experience leading educational trips to Latin America. The authors analyse, reflect, and critique the field of study abroad to advocate for the rethinking of recruitment strategies, pedagogical experiences, language practices, and community partnerships that include Latino/a, Chicano/a, and Latin American immigrant youth and their families from the beginning. They present a new conceptualization of Latinx immigrant students studying abroad as engaging opportunities for reclaiming heritage, culture, histories, and language, for exploring a sense of identity and obligation to Latin communities, and for healing from the effects on Whiteness and ethnocentrism in ways online possible outside the continental United States. As such, the book shifts the gaze of the entire field toward new diversities showcasing examples of how educational trips abroad can be re-envisioned to suit the needs of ethnically minoritized students in the United States. This volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, educators, and education officers working across higher education and international education, looking for contemporary, global. and forward-thinking decolonial methodologies.

This book reconceives the internationalization of higher education from the perspective of Global-South researchers, empowering and giving visibility to this discourse. Challenging the first assumptions of internationalization of higher education (IHE) as something overwhelmingly positive owing to the way it directly impacts the university activities and their world rankings, it instead takes a critical perspective, acknowledging that this process is associated with a neo-liberal and colonial orientation that focuses on the maintenance of historically sustained hierarchy, oppressive relations that stimulate the production of knowledge, and education as a commodity and not as a factor of social transformation. As such, it challenges recent trends towards an increase in internationalization strategies within higher education that privilege Global-North outgoing mobilities and research collaborations to sustain the position of the educational institutions in the international rankings. From this locus, IHE is seen to evolve not only in the fields of teaching, research, and service of an educational institution but also to boost the world’s social development. The book thus illustrates how IHE should be guided by Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL) and Global South’s principles: applied linguistics, praxis, critical thinking, micro and macro relations, critical social inquiry, critical theory, problematizing givens, self-reflexivity, preferred futures, and heterosis. Comprising chapters that discuss academic, political, and administrative issues arising specifically from the internationalization process of Global-South higher education institutions as well as themes such as critical language education and language policies, it will appeal to faculty, researchers, and scholars with interests in higher education, international and comparative education, and the decolonization of education.

Decolonial Arts Praxis: Transnational Pedagogies and Activism illustrates the productive potential of critical arts pedagogies in the ongoing work of decolonization by engaging art, activism, and transnational feminisms. Offering contributions from scholars, educators, artists, and activists from varied disciplines, the volume highlights how arts can reveal intersectional forms of oppression, inform critical understandings, and rebuild transnational solidarities across geopolitical borders. The contributors present forms of enquiry, creative writing, art, and reflection which grapple with issues of colonialism, racism, and epistemological violence to illustrate the power of decolonial arts pedagogies in formal and informal education. Using a range of multiple and intersectional critical lenses, through which readers can examine ways in which transnational feminist theorizing and art pedagogy inform, shape, and help strategize activism in various spaces, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students, and practitioners with interests in arts education, the sociology of education, postcolonialism, and multicultural education.

This book foregrounds postcolonial theory as a lens through which to explore the concept of ‘global heritage’ and argues that the meso-level spaces of institutional ethos and cultural pedagogy must take an active role in the pursuit of cultural equality. Through interviews and accounts of observational, empirical data, chapters draw attention to how the cultural capital of Global Majority students is institutionally positioned as a racialised and inferior cultural capital that is constantly required to ‘prove itself’ in the Western school. Ultimately, the book contributes to international discussion on decolonising education and the spaces within in order to enact change, further the field, and more precisely to recognise the importance of global heritage as vital to a transformative understanding of the West’s cultural identity within a globalised world. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers and post-graduate researchers in the fields of multicultural education, school leadership, management and administration, and education policy and politics more broadly. Those interested in social justice, ideas of cultural and racial equality, and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from the volume.

This book explores the discourse of traditional values and local practices within the formal educational system in Senegal, investigating how these cultural elements are present in the daily life of the community and integrated into formal schools and teaching. Studying the integration of concepts such as Jom (hard work, pride, dignity), Kersa (decency), Fule (self-respect), Mun (endurance), Teranga (hospitality), Kal (kinship), and Suture (Protection), it looks at how values are used, perceived and understood within communities, as well as their positive and negative connotations in the postcolonial context. Based on long-term participant education and utilizing a critical auto-ethnography lens, it ultimately proposes that such concepts can be used to counterbalance the Western knowledge to which schoolchildren are mostly exposed, connecting this to Bhaba’s system of the ‘Third Space”; a hybrid system to accommodate both educational systems for more relevant education. An informed study of the positive impacts of traditional cultural values on education in Senegal, it will appeal to scholars, researchers and practitioners of education in post-colonial Francophone countries with interests in culturally relevant education, African education, post-colonial education, and international education.

This edited book examines how teacher education utilises international immersion and field teaching (or service-learning) experience to develop teachers’ global, multilingual and intercultural competencies, in preparation for entering today’s culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Through a series of theory-based case studies, the authors demonstrate how teachers’ awareness of social inequities and responsive actions, the ability to bridge one’s own and others’ perspectives, and understanding of key principles of second language learning are pedagogical concepts and skills that become ever more essential across all mainstream K-12 educational contexts. The chapters bring together the voices of teacher educators, intercultural learning theorists and pre- and in-service teachers to identify threads of practice and theory that can be applied within teacher education more broadly. This book will be of interest to academics, instructors and graduate students in the fields of teacher education, language learning, intercultural communication and social justice education.

This book reflects the diversity and possibility of critical research in education, with an emphasis on the examination of the intersections of social identities for men teachers of color, and the relationship between social identity and struggles for political and professional agency. The authors address race and race inequality in education and provide a strong theoretical foundation for filling the empirical gap on men teachers of color by engaging in questions such as: How do critical considerations of the intersection of race, gender, and profession inform the future of teacher education? What does it mean to be ‘men’ or ‘of color’ in the context of the teaching profession in the U.S. and abroad? What are the aims of ethnoracial diversity in the field of education? The research included in this edited volume explores topics including, but not limited to, men teachers of color and their perceived pathways to the profession; their perceptions of and partnerships with colleagues of other genders; their sexual and gendered identities and performances; and how they embrace, reject, or negotiate the expectations of performing as a role model in classrooms. Moreover, the chapters provide explicit implications for teachers, teacher educators, university, and PK-12 administrators, education activists, and/or education policymakers. In sum, this volume charts a new landscape in education research for all men teachers of color. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Race Ethnicity and Education.

Rich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth. Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another. Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging.