Multilingual education and acculturation research share a parallel history of problematic research paradigms that center the majority viewpoint and view minorities through a lens of deficit. This continual pathology of cultural difference has led to the pathologization of minority individuals, and has hampered our efforts to effectively understand…

Cultural discontinuity is recognized as a culturally motivated academic process where sociocultural behaviors and communicative skills valued in the home culture of students are discontinued at school thus resulting in their low academic performance. This process may be reinforced by structural inequality in the mainstream society and education…

In a period of educational reform that gives much attention to children's family experiences, gaining an understanding of diverse cultural views of parenting is important. This is especially so for Australia, a multicultural society where the values of diversity, culture, family, and community are all shared in early childhood education. This…

Education and assimilation seem intimately connected; education either supports assimilation or thwarts it. But these paradigms assume a model of cultural vitality that depends on what one scholar aptly terms "tenacious adherence," over time, to an unchanging cultural or religious tradition. Taking the example of the Jewish community and Jewish…

We examine school choices made by western expatriate parents in post-colonial Hong Kong in order to understand the essence of imagined global citizenship and its implications for existing ethnic and class inequalities in the education system. Responding to changes in the global job market, a small but increasingly visible group of parents are…

In recent decades, the Bedouin population in Galilee, in Northern Israel, experienced significant multifaceted changes. Exposure to other cultures and other social components, with which this population had very limited interaction in the past, had affected its norms and behavior patterns and caused adaption of manners and values that had not been…

Most societies today are culturally diverse. Increasingly, minority groups are demanding recognition and self-governing rights to protect their ways of life against that of the majority. These demands represent a serious challenge for the state: how is it to balance between the equally legitimate claims of the many cultures inhabiting its…

The prevalence of learning disabilities amongst South Asian communities in the United Kingdom is thought to be almost three times higher than in any other community. Despite this, service utilisation amongst this group remains low and working cross-culturally can pose unique challenges for service providers. The experiences of South Asian families…

Some members of ethnic minority groups respond to identity threat in ways that are detrimental to their school career, while others persist despite an unwelcoming school environment. It was hypothesized that ethnic and national identities, as combined in "separated," "assimilated," or "dual identity" strategies,…

During the last few years, East-Europeans, predominantly Romanians, have become the second largest cultural minority in Catalonia (Spain). Spanish educational institutions now have students from more than twenty different cultures. This paper focuses on the educational background and the factors which characterize the educational experience of…

There may be an implicit assumption amongst some New Zealand educators that minority cultures should assimilate wholly into the New Zealand way of life, shedding aspects of their own culture that conflict with the mainstream. Some others assert that encouraging minority students to maintain their culture, including language and traditions, results…

In this article we assess the literature on cultural explanations for ethno-racial differences in K-12 schooling and academic performance. Some cultural arguments problematically define certain ethno-racial identities and cultures as subtractive from the goal of academic mobility while defining the ethnic cultures and identities of others as…

Considers how the experiences of middle class minorities might alter current models of second-generation incorporation, proposing that minority middle classes share a minority culture of mobility (cultural elements responsive to distinctive problems of interracial encounters in public settings and interclass relations within minority communities).…

In this article, the author discusses several things that young immigrants lose when they settle in a new land. These losses might entail the following: the ability to forget about race; language; the advantage of parents who can interpret the secrets of society; the stabilizing power of traditions; and the chance to disappear into the majority…

Six factors may account for lack of minority participation in adult education: unequal access to workplace training, stigma transference, ethnic typecasting, cultural assimilation, hopeless attitudes toward innercity problems, and negative effects of instrumental individualism. (SK)