Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

A Longitudinal Analysis Of The Development Of Mandarin Chinese In Fourth Grade Chinese Immersion, Robin E. Harvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many studies have confirmed the benefits of dual language immersion programs. Research into reading and writing development in these programs, and particularly in Chinese immersion, is less common. In this dissertation, an attempt is made to address this gap in research by exploring the literacy development of fourth grade Chinese immersion students. Participants were 70 students, the entire fourth grade of an urban Chinese immersion school in the northeastern U.S. The school had recently made several curricular changes. They were adopting a practice of freewriting, or independent writing. In freewriting, students are encouraged to write as much as they can …

Cùng Với Nhau Chung Tay: A Collaborative Project With Vietnamese American Youth, Khanh Le

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my research is to document, remember and reflect on the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. To create a space in which Vietnamese American youth can co-labor (García, 2020) and co-produce knowledge to disrupt the silence surrounding their lived experience in the U.S., I drew across methodological traditions for this collaborative project. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do Vietnamese American youth view/narrate their lives and relationships to the past and the present in the U.S. and Vietnam?
2. What do youths’ narratives communicate about their transtrauma?

This collaborative project drew from translanguaging and …

Coalition And Creativity On The Bridges And Fringes With Immigrant Student-Contributors In Nonprofit Adult Education, Katherine E. Entigar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The nonprofit education of adult immigrants is an under-researched aspect of U.S. education. Adult immigrants, often perceived as passive and quiescent, bring voices and contributions to learning in powerful yet unheard ways. This research agenda invokes a new critical lens in education scholarship to uplift and center these contributions as a coalitional, dialogical project. Drawing upon critical sociocultural, women of color feminist, and poststructual theories, critical intersectional epistemology, and Bakhtinian dialogical thinking, this research project pursues inductive, recursive meaning making as an innovative exploration. A multiphase, sequential study including surveys and two focus groups foregrounds the complex, fluid ways adult …

Afro-Americano: The Transracialization Of The African-American Spanish Speaker, John M. Flanagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transracialization is not a biological term connoting the change of one’s skin tone to become a member of a different race. Its definition has its roots in racialization—the ideological process that describes how one assembles ideas about groups based on their race and decides, for example, what a ‘Black’ person is and how ‘Black’ people speak. Thus, transracialization is a linguistic term that describes the political and sociocultural act of recontextualizing one’s phenotype with the use of language, and in so doing, upending the observers’ stereotypical expectations of who one is (Alim 2016). This dissertation deals with how Spanish influences …

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

P.S. 25, South Bronx: Bilingual Education And Community Control, Laura J. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a methodology of oral history interviews with primary subjects and archival research, this dissertation explores the creation and evolution of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, the first Spanish-English bilingual elementary school in New York City, as well as the entire Northeast. The Bilingual School, founded in 1968, was a product of the civil rights movement in the United States and one key manifestation of that movement in New York City, the struggle for community control of schools.

Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular have been written out of the official narrative of the educational civil rights movement …

Musicking And Literacy Connections In The Third Space: Leveraging The Strengths Of A Latinx Immigrant Community, Angelica Ortega

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music-making classroom is a space were students enact their multi-literacies. This space is especially important for Latinx bilingual students who are often labeled as struggling in school. In the music-making classroom, students reinvent their identities as integral members of a learning community, are accepted as leaders by their peers and are seen as literate in their music making practices. This habitus of success can have a durable, generative and transposable impact on the identity formation for the bilingual student that goes beyond the music classroom. This occurs because the music–making classroom acts as a third space both cognitively and …

Translanguaging Practices For Educational Equity: Moments In A Bilingual Middle School Classroom, Luz Y. Herrera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in New York City largely follow a 50-50 model: half of the instruction is in English while the other half is in another target language. In NYC, as well as the rest of the country, these programs are typically English-Spanish due to the large Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. Bilingual programs also tend to strictly separate languages and often insist that teachers and students only use the designated language according to the school or district’s particular language allocation policy.

This qualitative case study challenges the strict separatist language model of some dual language bilingual …

"Resisting From Within": (Re)Imagining A Critical Translingual English Classroom, Kate Anna Seltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study of an urban, linguistically diverse English classroom explores what happened when space was made for students both to voice their experiences living amidst ideologies that marginalize their language practices and identities and to resist such ideologies through writing that pushed monoglossic boundaries. Intensive one-on-one work with a high school English teacher led to the creation of a year-long curriculum that emphasized metalinguistic inquiry and discussion, linked language, power, and identity, and modeled the ways that writers and other artists take linguistic risks in order to critique monoglossic language ideologies.

Over the course of the year, students …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Escribiendo Para Desahogarme: Release And Resistance In A Middle School Bilingual Writing Workshop, Carla Espana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a teacher’s language ideologies, their impact on curriculum modifications and bilingual Latinx middle schoolers’ storytelling, to understand how a bilingual pedagogy builds on their cultural and linguistic resources. This qualitative study was conducted in a sixth grade writing workshop class in New York City as the focus teacher taught the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Personal Narrative Unit of Study. The first two findings center on the factors that influence a teacher’s stance on language practices and bilingual pedagogy, and how these contributed to curriculum modifications that included using students’ full linguistic and cultural repertoires, integrating …