Susan Roberta Katz

Teaching in Tensions: Latino Immigrant Youth, Their Teachers, and the Structures of Schooling.

This article examines the tensions inherent in the relationship between Latino immigrant youth and their teachers at a desegregated urban middle school in Northern California, exploring these tensions from both the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. It is based upon data from a year-long ethnographic study of the school experiences of eight immigrant students from Central America and Mexico, all of whom had older siblings or close friends involved in neighborhood gangs. It also includes interviews with the students’ teachers regarding their perceptions of the students. Significantly, students named teachers’ discrimination against them as Latinos as the primary cause of their disengagement from school, refusing to invest in learning from these teachers. At the same time, these teachers felt they were trying their best to do a good job, responding to the school administration’s mandate to invest in other students who were considered most likely to keep standardized test scores high. Thus this article explores how teachers’ attitudes and practices perceived by students as racist may be actually linked to structural conditions within the school, such as tracking and high teacher turnover, that preclude caring relationships with students. Janet Copeland is a Jewish, European American woman who has been a veteran teacher for over 25 years. Currently, she teaches English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) courses at Coolidge Middle School in the major Northern California metropolis of Bahia. 1

Investing in Teaching and Learning: Dynamics of the Teacher-Student Relationship from Each Actor's Perspective.

This article integrates findings from three independent studies (one national quantitative and two urban qualitative) to analyze two aspects of the teacher-student relationship: (a) how teachers and students each view their mutual relationship and (b) how this relationship affects students’subsequent academic performance. All three studies corroborate the significant finding that teachers base their educational expectations heavily on students’ test scores, whereas the students shape their own educational expectations largely from their perceptions of their teachers’ expectations as well as their test scores. Teachers’ reliance on test scores masks racial differences in their expectations, which students may perceive as racism.

PEACE PROFILE: Graduate Studies in Human Rights Education

The Department of International and Multicultural Education (IME) within the University of San Francisco’s School of Education is proud to offer the first and only graduate program in Human Rights Education (HRE) in the United States. This program, first launched in fall 2008, has already dramatically changed our student enrollment, both in growth and in attracting more students from other states, as well as around the world. Although in its initial stage, our hope is that it will provide a model that other schools of education nationwide can adapt for their own student populations.

Do "gitano" Students Feel Discriminated against in Their Social and Academic Surroundings? A Survey of Schools in Granada, Spain.

Abstract This paper aims to study the perception of 208 students [37 gitanos (gypsies), 138 payos (non-gypsies), 22 mixed ethnicity (gitano-payo), and 8 other ethnicities] in areas and schools with gitano populations in the City and Province of Granada, Spain, considering nine factors related to the segregation, discrimination and racism towards the gitano community. A questionnaire with a Likert scale of 1–5 points was utilised to understand the perceptions of the respondents on the controlled variables and the reasons for their opinions. This study also gathered students’ ideas on ways to help improve integration and social acceptance of the gitano minority. Perceptions of students (especially those of gitano and mixed gitano-payo ethnicity) show that despite efforts towards social inclusion, discriminatory beliefs and practices still linger and need to be actively reduced.

Partnerships, Worldviews and “Primal Vibration” Lesson Plans

This chapter offers six goals for arts-based service learning (ABSL) based on Indigenous Worldviews, including complementarity, peacefulness, ecological sustainability, happiness, health, trust in the universe and respect for diversity. It offers a number of specific lesson plans that relate to learning partnerships between American university students and the Achuar community of Wchirpas, Ecuador. The lesson plans also honour fundamental values common to many Indigenous cultures. In addition to the goals listed above, priorities for each plan focus on trance state learning, humour, respect, generosity, courage, honesty, humility and the balance between independence and belonging. In all lessons, art is understood as a sacred vibrational phenomenon that embraces place, movement and beauty.

Reimagining Doctoral Education

The School of Education (SOE) of the University of San Francisco (USF), an urban, Jesuit institution, serves nearly 1,100 students across more than 20 programs. Its mission centers around a commitment to “serving those most in need,” bringing in students who are educators and organizers, advocates and policy-makers, and those who aspire to make an impact to fulfill the university’s motto to “Change the World from Here.”

'Recuperando la dignidad humana (Recovering human dignity)': Shuar mothers speak out on intercultural bilingual education

This paper presents findings from interviews conducted in December 2011, with seven Shuar mothers of children in an intercultural bilingual school in the southern Amazon region of Ecuador. This study had two objectives: (1) to foreground the perspectives of Shuar parents towards intercultural bilingual education (IBE) as implemented in the Shuar pedagogical institute, and (2) to collaborate as an intercultural research team (North American-Shuar) to ensure linguistic and cultural authenticity of data collection, and analysis. As a Shuar mother herself, the co-author shares the same language and culture as the participants, which led to a deeper level of trust and openness in the interviews. Current studies claim that IBE is losing ground, partly because parents want their children schooled in Spanish – the language of power – and see the IBE system as inferior. However, these Shuar mothers expressed a different concern: IBE has been too intertwined with Salesian missions and must become decolonized in order to reflect authentic Shuar cultural values and educational practices.

Overtested: how high-stakes accountability fails English language learners

on the ‘politics of intra-group difference’. Drawing upon critical feminism, she asserts that the social significance of differences is constructed, and that the distinction between what is considered to be the norm and deviation from that norm is the result of power relationships that restrict personal autonomy. Thus, ‘paying attention to the relations of power in which differences have been constructed is valuable when trying to determine which differences and whose differences should be affirmed and which should be challenged’ (172). In order to do this, courts are invited to listen to the voices of ‘concrete others’, such as the women whom Sawridge sought to exclude, and to assess their claims in light of universal norms. Accordingly, ‘the focus of the analysis must shift from the effort to specify the content of a group’s common identity or the authentic practices that are integral to a group’s culture to the control of identity and cultural reproduction’ (195). This methodology is easier explained than applied, however, and the Sawridge case is perhaps not the most revealing test. Most observers would agree that the excluded women were in a vulnerable position and that the band’s actions were objectionable. The judges, who did in fact pronounce on the merits of certain aspects of the case, had no difficulty in ruling in favour of the excluded women. Thus, it was easy to discern the relations of power at play here. Other cases would likely be less clear-cut, and one could argue that courts are less well equipped to ascertain relations of power especially those with a historical component than they are to assess and balance competing identity and cultural claims. It is not obvious that courts trying to follow Dick’s methodology would do anything other than the kind of contextual analysis they are already performing, albeit taking into account a wider range of factors. Moreover, Dick’s proposal leaves little scope for collective action aimed at strengthening the culture and identity of a minority group. Such measures will inevitably be opposed by some group members, who could then be seen as victims of some form of oppression. But Dick’s framework is inherently distrustful of the minority’s collective voice, which remains caught between the ‘generalized other’ and the ‘concrete other’. Yet, closer attention to other case studies such as, I would argue, the measures for the protection of the French language in Quebec could have revealed instances where there appears to be an adequate balance between the collective interests of a minority and those of its members. All in all, however, Dick’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the tension between minority and individual rights. Although her proposal does not resolve the tension, it provides useful tools to shift the attention away from essentialist conceptions of identity and culture, and it invites courts and other decision-makers to consider a broader range of factors that include the power relations inherent in the way that human difference is given social significance.