Silvia Cristina Bettez

Teaching Globalization Issues to Education Students: What's the Point?.

We argue that teaching the dynamics of globalization to education students is an important aspect of teaching for social justice and for the development of critical awareness, thinking, and sensitivity. We begin this position paper by briefly characterizing globalization and exploring a range of approaches to teaching this topic. We then describe some of the challenges and risks of teaching globalization issues. We reflect on the responses of our students, looking at such issues as guilt, paralysis, disconnection, fear, pity, and anger. We end by describing how teaching about globalization can support our broader goals as critical educators, which include helping students to disrupt commonsense understandings, to unlearn dominant ideologies, to think systemically, and to create new habits of learning.

Navigating the complexity of qualitative research in postmodern contexts: assemblage, critical reflexivity, and communion as guides

For graduate students and other emerging qualitative researchers, the ever-evolving and sometimes conflicting perspectives, methodologies, and practices within various post-positivist frameworks (e.g. feminist, critical, Indigenous, participatory) can be overwhelming. Qualitative researchers working within postmodern contexts of multiplicity and ambiguity are tasked with working through challenges – related to methods, interpretation, and representation – throughout the research process. Through examining related literature and incorporating my own experiences, I explore ethical dilemmas that social justice-oriented qualitative researchers may encounter as a result of conflicting multiplicities of difference among researcher(s), participants, and readers. Such dilemmas include incongruent interpretations between participants and researchers, and participants’ and researchers’ conflicting desires about what should be shared, intercultural (mis)interpretations, rapport issues, and conflicts between research life and home life. I consider how combining the practices of attending to assemblages, engaging in critical reflexivity, and centralizing communion may be useful in navigating relationships and ethical dilemmas in qualitative research.

Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

How is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identifi cation with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six “hybrid” mixedrace women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging. I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identifi cation and identifi cation with others. Stuart Hall argues that identities are constituted discursively. He states:

Imagined Community of Education: Voices From Refugees and Immigrants:

To challenge deficit thinking concerning immigrants and refugees in urban schools, we engaged members of local immigrant and refugee communities from China, Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan in focus group discussions about their prior educational experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they encountered in their perceived reality of PK-12 education in the United States. In an effort to promote asset-based approaches, we employed Yosso’s framework in our analysis to highlight the community cultural wealth and to describe the process of creating an “imagined community” of education shared among our participants.

Community Building in Social Justice Work: A Critical Approach

In this article we argue for the importance of building critical communities as an integral, yet neglected, aspect of education for social justice. We begin by defining critical communities and by describing goals and vision for social justice education. We then explore how community is discussed in the education literature, limitations and challenges of calling for community, and images of critical communities in social justice work. We end by exploring the role that individuals can play in nurturing and enabling social justice efforts, offering some strategies to promote community building within and beyond higher education.

Fostering community life and human civility in academic departments through covenant practice

Creating desirable academic departments for individuals’ well-being and quality scholarship is an important effort as well as a novel idea. The focus of this reflective article is twofold: (a) We present a social capital theory of social justice covenants as a product and process of community building, and (b) we share the multiple lived experiences of three scholars within the context of our departments covenant ideology and practice. We explore how faculty can promote community and civility by not only developing but also enacting an internally generated covenant while operating within a larger institutional context that produces tension. As related to our purposes, we examined the relevant literature on social capital, capacity building, workplace environments, and organizational covenants to frame our discussion of community-driven action in education. We include an extended application of a covenant that guides our departmental facultys social outlook, interpersonal behavior, scholarly work, and communal activism. Although our focus is on change-oriented, grassroots activity within higher education, the public schooling context is considered.

Textured Dialogues: A Community Project about Immigrants' Multimodal Perspectives on the Meaning of Education

With greater diversification of American society comes a need to forge intercultural connections that will promote and support effective education services for immigrant families. The intercultural approach taken in this community project goes beyond a paradigm of coexistence. Rather, the term “intercultural” implies an integrated society of diverse members who participate in skilled dialogues that promote shared goals and understandings (Barrera, Corso, & Macpherson, 2003; Kimmel & Volet, 2012) and build on the “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) of all involved. Exploring intersections of this dynamic was central to understanding immigrant perspectives on the meaning of education. The result was the creation and display of a tapestry and book created by immigrant community members. This article provides a brief description of how this community project came about and, then, describes community members’ (hereafter referred to as “artists”) tapestry squares and narratives. The perspectives gleaned from this project can be used to inform educators, students, and others about the beliefs, practices, experiences, and aspirations of immigrant families around the meaning of education. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how an arts-based project can encourage dialogue on an educational topic, and second, to illuminate the immigrant artists’ beliefs, practices, experiences, and aspirations related to education.

Flipping the Script from Talking to Teens about "Celebrating Diversity" to Promoting Equity through Embracing Vulnerability and Enacting Courage.

Diversity and inclusion are popular, yet often challenging, topics for youth in schools. A common approach to address the issues is to invite outside speakers to discuss ways to “celebrate diversity.” After being invited to give such a talk, I created and enacted a presentation at an affluent high school on this topic that is grounded in social justice education. The presentation flips the script from celebrating diversity to promoting equity by using a framework that connects embracing vulnerability with enacting courage. This article provides the theoretical underpinnings of this embodied approach. The presentation maneuvers include definitions of courage as connecting with others while embracing vulnerability; modeling the approach through shared personal counternarratives; defining related social justice terms and concepts; sharing counternarratives of young people; and providing an example of ways (in this case, promoting alliances) to create connections to promote equity. This approach can be a starting point to deeper understandings of inequity. The approach has the potential to encourage young people to embrace the marginalized parts of their identities and take actions against discrimination and oppression.

Feeling Brown in the Academy: Decolonizing Mentoring through a Disidentification "Muxerista" Approach.

ABSTRACT According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Hispanics” comprise only 4% of the full-time faculty in U.S. universities, although Latin@s comprise 16.4% of the U.S. population. Given the under-representation of Latin@ faculty, efforts to support and retain them are paramount. Recently a small body of literature has surfaced explicitly centering the practices of peer mentoring among Latin@s. Through collaborative auto-ethnography and counter-storytelling, using a framework of disidentification, muxerista mentoring, and community cultural wealth, we add to this literature by discussing our experience of engaging in non-hierarchical Latina peer mentoring at a predominantly White university. The main themes include: merging emotional needs with professional growth, forging learning and research partnerships, Browning teaching spaces and transforming institutional practices.