Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

"The Lady From North Carolina": The Perils And Limitations Of External Expertise, Aprille J. Phillips, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This paper examines a state department of education’s (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to “turnaround” schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to rent competencies, under a neoliberal guise of efficiency, but at the expense of system capacity or learning.

Islamophobia In U.S. Education, Shabana Mir, Loukia K. Sarroub

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Anti-Muslim sentiment has grown in scale and visibility far beyond its association with the horrific attacks of 2001. The US government’s “War on Terror,” which began after the attacks, often pervades the domestic landscape as a war on Islamic religious “extremism.” The definitions and content of such religious extremism are so extensive that they encompass large numbers of Muslims, and they highlight Muslims as being inherently problematic. For example, the success of the 2016 presidential campaign can be said to have relied significantly on a right-wing Islamophobic fear-mongering that shariah was set to take over the US. As we grappled …

European Spaces And The Roma: Denaturalizing The Naturalized In Online Reader Comments, Theresa Catalano, Grace E. Fielder

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

With the entry of several Eastern European nations into the European Union (EU), a “third” space has developed in the discourse for nations perceived as not fully integrated “inside” the EU system. This article investigates the construction of this “third space” in the resultant “moral panic” about undesired immigration from other EU countries and its potential drain on the social services of the United Kingdom and links it to Euroskeptic discourse in British media. The article uses construal operations from cognitive linguistics combined with critical discourse studies as a way of denaturalizing the discourse in online comments that focus on …

Where Should My Child Go To School? Parent And Child Considerations In Binational Families, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga, Juan Sánchez García

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Using examples encountered from our multi-year study of students encountered in Mexican schools with prior experience in US schools, we look at transnationally-tied families’ decision-making regarding where to send their children to school and ask whether parents should ‘parent from afar’. We don’t pose that as a question about ideals— what would be best if parents had economic security and unambiguous legal residential status— but rather as a more pragmatic one. Given some parents’ and children’s limited agency in real- world circumstances, what is their best path forward?

Dispatches From Flyover Country: Four Appraisals Of Impacts Of Trump’S Immigration Policy On Families, Schools, And Communities, Edmund T. Hamann, Cara Morgenson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

A university professor and high school ESL teacher, both based in Lincoln Nebraska, each write two short essays that detail implications of the Trump administration immigration policies for students, teachers, schools, and communities. The first two dispatches come from the transition period (after Trump won but while Obama still presided) while the latter two come from the 50-day mark of the Trump presidency. Juxtaposing voices contrasts overarching impact with the local; juxtaposing chronologies allows comparison of political promises and threats to early actions and reactions.

Trump, Immigration, And Children: Disrupted Schooling, Disrupted Lives, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Many of us work with immigrant communities and are witnessing firsthand the fear, frustration, and heartache caused by Trump’s immigration policies. Yet despite our years of work with, and study of, immigrant communities, there are times when our academic expertise is not enough. What follows is a reflection by CAE member Ted Hamann on just such a situation he faced this spring when asked for help in assisting two US-born students that were about to accompany their soon-to-be deported parents to Mexico.

Educator Responses To Migrant Children In Mexican Schools, Juan Sánchez Garcia, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

A decade-long, five-state, mixed-method study of students encountered in Mexican schools with previous experience in the United States suggests there may be 400,000 such students in educación básica alone (elementary and middle school). The focus here, however, are data from 68 educators asked how they have responded to such students and their families. We offer an emergent taxonomy of teacher sensemaking about these students and teachers’ responsibilities to respond. We then assert that because they are at the interface between a national institution (school) and transnational phenomena (migration), educators can provide key insight into how migration is shaped and negotiated. …

Moisés Sáenz: Vigencia De Su Legado (English Translation), Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This book mainly offers the biography of Moisés Sáenz (1888-1941), founding architect of Mexico's system of public schooling and former student of John Dewey, describing in particular his roles in creating rural schools, initiating bilingual education (for Mexico's indigenous populations), and experimenting with linkages between schooling and community development. The volume also includes the author's reflection on the relevance of learning about Profr. Sáenz for his own intellectual trajectory (which includes studying the movement of students between Mexico and the US) and reflections by Mexican educators Humberto Leal Martinez and Juan Sánchez García.

The Roma And Wall Street/Ceos: Linguistic Construction Of Identity In U.S. And Canadian Crime Reports, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Discriminatory practices against Roma (also known as Romanies) occur on a daily basis in many countries around the world through media discourse. This paper investigates the representation of Romanies in U.S. and Canadian online newspaper crime reports and compares this representation to Wall Street/CEOs in crime reports demonstrating how identity of both groups is constructed through a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strategies. Drawing on Mayr and Machin’s (2012) critical linguistic analysis of the language of crime, this multimodal study incorporates a variety of tools such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics in order to dig below the surface …

Hyphenated Identities As A Challenge To Nation-State School Practice?, Edmund T. Hamann, William England

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This chapter concludes the edited volume Hyphenated Identities and affords a chance to juxtapose how transnational students negotiate school and identity with how school systems in turn view such students, and then it allows the examination of two different strategies -- situational ethnicity versus the assertion of hyphenated identity -- as a glimpse into the cosmology of transnationally mobile students as they come into adulthood.

Schooling, National Affinity(Ies), And Transnational Students In Mexico, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

An examination of responses by 346 students from Nuevo León and Zacatecas, Mexico, who had previously attended schools in the United States, found that 37% asserted a hyphenated identity as "Mexican-American," while an additional 5% identified as "American." Put another way, 42% did not identify singularly as "Mexican." Those who insisted on a hyphenated identity were not a random segment of the larger sample, but rather had distinct profiles in terms of gender, time in the United States, and more. This chapter describes these students, broaches implications of their hyphenated identities for their schooling, and considers how this example may …

The Anglo Politics Of Latino Education: The Role Of Immigration Scripts, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In the 41 states without a substantial historic Latino population, large-scale schooling of Latinos is a comparatively new issue and the nature of that schooling is fundamentally shaped by how the more established (usually Anglo) populations understand this task. This chapter describes the understandings that led to, but also limited, one particularly comprehensive attempt in Georgia to respond to Latino newcomers. In that sense, this is a study of the cosmologies that can undergird the politics of schooling of Latinos. This chapter utilizes the concept of the script, or broadly shared storylines about how things are or should be, to …

Schooling And The Everyday Ruptures Transnational Children Encounter In The United States And Mexico, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Using examples of students in Mexico who used to attend US schools and examples from Georgia of students who used to and might again attend Mexican schools, this chapter considers how an unremarkable, quotidian activity—the act of attending school—can become means for transnationally mobile children to experience shock, disconnection, and a reiterated sense of dislocation if schools are incompletely responsive to learners' biographies.

Education In The New Latino Diaspora, Edmund T. Hamann, Linda Harklau

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In 2002 Hamann, Wortham, and Murillo noted that many U.S. states were hosting significant and often rapidly growing Latino populations for the first time and that these changes had multiple implications for formal schooling as well as out-of-school learning processes. They speculated about whether Latinos were encountering the same, often disappointing, educational fates in communities where their presence was unprecedented as in areas with a longstanding Latino presence. Only tentative conclusions could be provided at that time since the dynamics referenced were frequently novel and in flux.

In this chapter we revisit their inquiry in light of six subsequent years …

Transnational Students' Perspectives On Schooling In The United States And Mexico: The Salience Of School Experience And Country Of Birth, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga, Juan Sánchez García

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Students in Mexican schools with previous experience in US schools are transnational students. To the extent their Mexican schooling does not recognize or build on their US life and school experience and their American school experience did not anticipate their later relocation to Mexico, these students are incompletely attended to by school. Yet these students, like all students, are agentive and have some control over how they make sense of their schooling.

As schooling becomes an increasingly common institutional presence across the world and as decided majorities of children now attend at least some version of primary school, it is …

Sojourners In Mexico With U.S. School Experience: A New Taxonomy For Transnational Students, Víctor Zúñiga, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

There are many school-age children involved in the transnational movement of peoples between the United States and Mexico. Among those currently in Mexico (typically regarded as a sending country rather than a receiving country), most expect to return to the United States someday, although not necessarily permanently, and they variously identify as Mexican, Mexican American, or American. This suggests that the prospect of enduring geographic mobility affects the complicated work of identity formation and affiliation. Central to this negotiation are Mexican schools, which, like U.S. schools, are not deliberately designed to consider the needs, understandings, and wants of an increasingly …

From Nuevo León To The Usa And Back Again: Transnational Students In Mexico, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor A. Zúñiga, Juan Sánchez Garcia

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The movement of Mexicans to the United States is both longstanding and long studied and from that study we know that for many newcomers the attachment to the receiving community is fraught and tentative. The experience of immigrant children in U.S. schools is also relatively well studied and reveals challenges of intercultural communication as well as concurrent and contradictory features of welcome and unwelcome. What is less well known, in the study of migration generally and of transnational students in particular, is how students moving in a less common direction — from the U.S. to Mexico — experience that movement. …

Alumnos Transnacionales: Las Escuelas Mexicanas Frente A La Globalización, Víctor Zúñiga, Edmund T. Hamann, Juan Sánchez García

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Counter to the expectations that Mexico-U.S. migration is one-way, adult, and from Mexico to the United States, this Spanish-language book includes nine chapters describing various facets of the lives and educational circumstances of students encountered in Mexican schools who have previously attended U.S. schools. Data were derived from written questionnaires from a sample of more than 24,000 students in the Mexican states of Zacatecas and Nuevo León, of whom 632 had U.S. school experience and/or a U.S. birthplace and thereby American citizenship, and from more than 125 interviews with transnational students and their teachers. This study variously considers transnational students' …

Creating Bicultural Identities: The Role Of School-Based Bilingual Paraprofessionals In Ontemporary Immigrant Accommodation (Two Kansas Case Studies), Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This study locates the professional and informal practices of school-based bilingual paraprofessionals (paras) in the context of the larger social phenomenon of acculturation, cultural brokerage, and identity construction. It demonstrates how the paras in two Kansas communities transform an assimilationist mandate into something quite different, the promotion of bicultural identities, as part of a process called “additive biculturalism.” Additive biculturalism incorporates Weiss’s characterization of paras as cultural brokers (1994), but expands upon it significantly. As the first part of additive biculturalism, bilingual paras model and promote bicultural identities among the English-Learner students and parents they work with. As the second …