This qualitative study examines the experiences of Latinx youth and mainly white staff of the Academic Scholars Program, a college access program that operated in an affluent suburban high school. Guided by Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies, the findings highlight the constraints Latinx youth and staff faced and how they resisted…

This ethnographic case study explores Nicaragua--Costa Rica cross-border dynamics, one of the most important South-South migration flows in the Central American region. I identify practices that prevent Nicaraguan children in a Costa Rican classroom from consolidating transnational identities and networks during the school day. Specifically, I…

This paper is based on the ethnographic multiple case study of four refugee background youths from Burma at four different schools in a midwestern urban school district in the US. My research finds that the normalization of English constructed the focal youths' language-related identities. I also argue that through this normalization, language…

A Hawaiian adaptation of Tobin et al.'s (2009; 1989) video-cued ethnography (VCE) illuminates the possibilities and challenges of implementing culturally sustaining and revitalizing Indigenous education in contemporary Hawaiian schools. Findings highlight (1) the successful classroom integration and transmission of Indigenous interactional styles…

This essay utilizes autoethnography to explore myriad cultural and institutional practices that impacted the author's education while she was growing up in Jamaica, West Indies. Informed by and through the use of some postcolonial theory, the information in this text is presented in the form of the creative nonfiction essay and chronicles the ways…

This study examines how students of majority and minority ethnic backgrounds in Botswana understand national identity as inclusive of their ethnic groups. Within assimilationist policies and curriculum, we find that the value of national identity rests on its positioning as a path toward higher levels of education and employment. However, for…

Through art and storytelling, Indigenous youth highlight continuity between recent experiences in child welfare systems and Canada's residential schools of the twentieth century. Between mid-2014 and mid-2015, twenty Indigenous youth collaborators (eighteen to twenty-nine years) in Calgary, Canada critiqued how child welfare systems become…

This article examines a rural public school with an increasingly racially diverse and working-class student body as a site where inclusion and exclusion were negotiated based on popular beliefs about culture. I look at how the interpretation of particular behaviors as indicative of a cultural regard for the value of formal education created…

This article presents the experiences of three women who have chosen to move from secular, assimilated lives to lives characterized by the distinctive dress and practice associated with observant Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Christianity, respectively. All three relied upon informal, peer, and distance learning strategies for their…

This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from…

In this article, I explore the complicated relationship between ideologies of language and language learning, discourses of immigration and belonging, and the actual lived experiences of individual language learners. The analysis demonstrates how questions of educational access, economic stability, and social membership are all influenced by a…

Examined Japanese children's experiences at a U.S. elementary school, noting their teachers' pedagogical responses. Two discourses of difference (individual and social/cultural difference) were used in the school in somewhat dichotomous ways, and the combination worked against children who had difficulty adjusting. Recommends a nonessentialist…

Utilizes ethnographic research, the history of anthropology, and literature on multiculturalism, biculturalism, and bilingualism to assert that neither multiculturalism nor multicultural education can mitigate the assimilationist and racializing costs. Eurocentrism poses for immigrants and minoritized groups. Proposes a policy of bilingual and…

Examined how immigrants from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) assimilated into Israeli society and schools. Data from observations, interviews, and surveys indicated that educational policies and school arrangements, and CIS immigrants' high self-esteem, produced a semipermeable enclave. CIS students acquired the Hebrew language and…

Investigates how classroom communicative competence was defined in a multilingual preschool classroom. Sociolinguistic analysis of a conflict event, and the larger classroom context, reveals norms and values influencing the behaviors of the English-speaking teacher, bilingual teaching assistant, and Chinese-speaking preschoolers. Identifies…