This article draws on ethnographic research to explore the re-membering pedagogy of Hmong immigrant educators. It explicates the ways in which the work of Hmong immigrant educators within a theater project recenters Hmong ethnicity, reveals marginalization, and re-affirms family. Our study significantly advances an understanding of re-membering…

While research on Asian American students has overwhelmingly emphasized family ties as an important contributor to student success in high school, what it neglects is how family ties can constrain students in their educational endeavors. Based on a study of 30 low-income Hmong American high school students, I argue that poverty can create…

Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student's academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary…

In the United States, English is not the official language but the dominant one. But for many students, the dominance of English instruction has come at the expense of losing their first language. For much of our history of schooling in the United States, students have been forced to leave their heritage or home languages at the door when they…

There is a need for a critical race analysis of Hmong American education that places race and racism at the center of analysis, highlights Whiteness as property and recognizes the fluid and situated racialization of Hmong American students. Majoritarian explanations of inequities in Hmong American education often describe Hmong American student…

This article presents the language policy and sociolinguistic realities of Hmong people in Lao Cai province, Vietnam. Minority children, who have their own mother tongue, are educated in Vietnamese, a language that few understand. In response to this situation, the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam in collaboration with UNICEF,…

This ethnographic case study of a male Hmong refugee, Vue Lang, is situated against a backdrop that is characterized by a burgeoning immigrant population in the United States and a growing need to provide them with English language instruction. The Bourdieusian concepts of "capital", "habitus", and "field" (Bourdieu, 1991) are used to explicate…

Charter schools are opening, and religious associations are also sponsoring these schools since religious groups find private school tuitions to be high and prohibitive. This study includes studies of Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota Arabic charter school (Blaine and Inver Grove Heights, MN); Ben Gamla Charter School, a Florida English-Hebrew…

The contact hypothesis (Allport 1954) predicts that cross-racial interaction can produce social bonding under certain status, relational, and institutional conditions. We extend this classic theory on ingroups and outgroups using qualitative data on Cambodian and Hmong refugees' recollections of casual conversations about ancestry with black and…

In this article I offer a framework for thinking about how public schools in liberal societies ought to respond to instances of arranged marriages for girls from deeply communitarian cultural groups. Focusing on three cases of culturally and religiously arranged marriages from the Hmong, Islamic fundamentalist and Mormon fundamentalist…

Hmong American adolescents' perceptions of their parents were examined using the parenting styles and family ecologies models. Individual interviews of forty 11- to 18-year-old Hmong American teenagers resulted in open-ended and fixed-choice responses. In the open-ended responses, adolescents emphasized themes of parental involvement and depending…

Previous studies show that young monolingual children's ability to "fast map" new word forms is closely associated with both their age and existing vocabulary knowledge. In this study we investigate potential relationships between age, fast mapping skills and existing vocabulary knowledge in both languages of developing bilingual preschool…

Cancer is the number one cause of death for Asian American women, yet they have the lowest rates of cancer screening. Contributing factors, particularly for Hmong women, include the lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate educational interventions. This study aimed to develop a culturally and linguistically appropriate intervention to…

This article suggests that literacy development in immigrant, refugee, and other historically marginalized communities can be understood as a response to rhetorical struggles in contexts of civic life. To illustrate this "rhetorical conception of literacy," the article examines a collection of anti-immigrant letters published in a Midwestern…

Argues that the rhetoric of preliteracy is a 19th-century narrative that offers a subordinate identity and obscures the conditions through which literacy development is promoted. Examines the literacy experience of the Hmong of Laos to demonstrate how their supposed preliteracy is an outcome of a dense and interconnecting network of historical…