Edmund T. Hamann

Sojourners in Mexico with U.S. School Experience: A New Taxonomy for Transnational Students

Millions of students attending U.S. schools were born in Mexico, as is well known, and many millions more are the American-born children of Mexican parents. What is less widely known—and less considered in educational research, policy, and practice—is that there are likely hundreds of thousands of students in Mexican schools who have previous experience in U.S. schools. 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 international, mobile population. One purpose of this article is to build an understanding of transnational students from

The Roles of State Departments of Education As Policy Intermediaries: Two Cases

As the variety of state education agency (SEA) responses to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 demonstrates, different SEAs interpret the same federal educational policy differently. Nonetheless, little research has depicted how federal policies are changed by SEA-based policy intermediaries. Using an “ethnography of educational policy” approach, this article offers two illustrations of mediation processes at the SEA level: Maine’s and Puerto Rico’s initial attempts to implement the federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program. Both attempts show that the mediation process is inevitable and that its general direction can be predicted: Policies will be adapted in ways that better correspond with local problem diagnoses, understandings, and habits of action. The study leaves intact McLaughlin’s assertion that local negotiation and reframing of policy can be a source of improvement or added value. Such improvement is more likely if an expectation of mediation is explicitly accounted for and if what counts as improvement reflects local mores.

Going to a home you have never been to: the return migration of Mexican and American-Mexican children

Focusing on childrens experience-driven cosmologies revealed through interviews and survey responses, this article seeks to analyse and interpret the way children explain their migration from the USA to Mexico within the context of increases in both voluntary and forced return migration of Mexicans since 2005. It draws from representative samples of students (aged 9–16) enrolled in both public and private schools in several Mexican states, which are complemented by data drawn from in-depth interviews that complicate the sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. The goals of this article are as follows: (a) to illuminate and value childrens own narratives about their migration experiences and (b) to discuss the contribution of diverse and apparently contradictory micro-, meso-, and macro-level approaches in studying migrant children.

What the Youngest Transnational Students Have to Say About Their Transition From U.S. Schools to Mexican Ones

For 5 years, this research team has sought to learn from more than 700 students encountered in Mexican schools, who had previous experience attending schools in the United States. Although this study has used mixed methods, 1 tool—the written survey—has proven particularly valuable as a means to build profiles of such transnational students. Now, however, from new interview research carried out in Puebla in 2010, there are lengthy interviews from a few beginning primary school students who, nonetheless, have U.S. school experience. Four cases were selected that allow the consideration of how the experiences of younger transnational students in Mexico might differ from that of older students with similar geographic histories. Ultimately then, this article offers both empirical, child-originating takes on negotiating 2 school systems and a more theoretical analysis of how childrens perspectives on the same macro-phenomenon seems to be affected by the age of the student respondent.

From Nuevo León to the USA and Back Again: Transnational Students in Mexico

ABSTRACT 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. Based on visits to 173 randomly selected classrooms in the state of Nuevo León Mexico, this study shares survey and interview data from 208 of the 242 students encountered who had previous experience attending school in the United States.

Multilingual pedagogies and pre-service teachers: Implementing “language as a resource” orientations in teacher education programs

ABSTRACT While Ruiz’s (1984) influential work on language orientations has substantively influenced how we study and talk about language planning, few teacher education programs today actually embed his framework in the praxis of preparing pre-service and practicing teachers. Hence, the primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate new understandings and expansions of Ruiz’s language-as-resource (LAR) approach and ways in which teacher education programs can model this orientation in their own classes, including those programs, like ours, that prepare mostly monolingual pre-service and in-service teachers to work with bi/multilingual students. The authors pursue this by laying out the theoretical framework for multilingual pedagogies that approach teacher education through the LAR orientation and then illustrate these pedagogies as they are realized in their own teacher education programs with the aim of moving closer to and expanding on Ruiz’s original proposal.

Using a Cohort Approach to Convert EdD Students into Critical Friends

A steadfast but not previously examined feature of our department’s six-year (and counting) experience with a Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED)-influenced Doctor of Education (EdD) program is the successful implementation of a cohort model and, in turn, the utilization of practitioners’ sense of belonging and familiarity to become each other’s Critical Friends. Looking across the experiences of three cohorts of University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) CPED students—a first cohort that graduated eight EdDs, a second cohort with twelve students who attained candidacy just three months before this writing, and a new cohort of ten students also composed largely of educators who have not known each other prior to enrolling in CPED—this chapter considers the action steps pursued and the formative evaluative processes that compel minor redirections of course that have helped convert a collection of advanced graduate students into enduring Critical Friends Groups (CFGs). Data include program design elements, including syllabi, but the main sources of information are the accounts of the practicing professionals who have completed their EdD journey as members of our first cohort.

Identifying the Anthropological in a Mixed-Methods Study of Transnational Students in Mexican Schools

Identifying surveying as more commonly sociological and semistructured interviewing as more commonly anthropological, which describes disciplinary histories more than any fixed formulas, we juxtapose transnational students’ survey answers collected in Mexican schools with their answers to interviewers several months later. From this, we consider what can be learned about research methodology and transnational student cosmology when different methods yield discrepant answers. Without claiming superiority for either mechanism, we find their combination illuminating, and it substantiates the claim that anthropological inquiry can add crucial value to mixed-methods, interdisciplinary inquiry.

BOOK REVIEW: "Practitioner Sensibility and the Negotiation of Contradictory School Reforms"

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