Vichet Chhuon

The Multiple Worlds of Successful Cambodian American Students.

Educational policy usually overlooks Cambodian American students as a unique ethnic group, attending instead to the positive statistics that aggregate Asian American students into a single group of successful students. Through ethnographic interviews, this article examines how successful Cambodian American students interpreted values from their multiple worlds in relation to their paths into the university and provides insight into the academically supportive features of their different worlds. Family obligation emerged as a coherent theme that figured prominently in their school experiences. This study complicates the simplistic view of how traditional cultural values influence immigrant ethnic minority school achievement.

Proximal Processes in Urban Classrooms Engagement and Disaffection in Urban Youth of Color

We examine adolescents’ interpretations of instructional interactions to understand the academic and developmental implications of pedagogy for urban youth of color. In doing so, we seek to advance existing knowledge regarding student engagement in two ways—enhancing the ecological validity of such theories and making the links to teacher practice explicit. Urban youth of color (N= 28) were recruited from two urban high schools in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and two youth development programs in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The following three emergent findings summarize engagement-relevant interpretations of instructional interactions made by the adolescents in our study: (a) feeling heard in class, (b) going all in, and (c) taking students seriously.

Creating Connectedness Through Being Known Fulfilling the Need to Belong in U.S. High Schools

A multidisciplinary body of literature has established that students’ affective relationships with teachers are associated with important academic and developmental outcomes. In this article, we explored late adolescents’ active interpretations of what we call “being known” in high school. Distinct from a generalized perception of the school environment, namely, sense of school belonging, the concept of being known may provide a cohesive and efficient framework for understanding the intersections of developmental tasks, psychosocial perceptions, and effective teaching. Our focus group data with adolescents (M = 16.65 years old, N = 77) yielded three robust findings (a) moving beyond “just teach” teacher relationships; (b) providing instrumental support; and (c) engaging a benefit-of-the-doubt treatment of students. We examined each of these key themes to probe how connectedness is created or undermined through the moment-by-moment experiencing of relational structures characterized by students’ perceptions of being known by adults in an educational context.

“I’m Khmer and I’m not a gangster!”: the problematization of Cambodian male youth in US schools

In response to a literature that has paid limited attention to the complex representations of Cambodian students, this article investigated the ways in which Cambodian male youth were problematized in school through Discourses that presented them as apathetic students and/or gang members at one California high school. In this study, the ways in which race, gender, and class collided in the school experiences of Cambodian boys manifested themselves in troubling representations that deflected attention away from the school’s failure to teach these young men. For these negative representations to work, it was necessary to position Cambodian boys in contrast to more positive depictions of other students’ racial (whites and “East Asians”), class (non-“ghetto”), and gender (good Cambodian girls) categories. Overall, this study contributes an important dimension for understanding the education of Asian American urban male students, particularly Cambodian youth.

Adolescent heritage speakers of less commonly taught languages in the United States

Research has demonstrated that heritage language maintenance can positively contribute to the academic and social lives of immigrant youth in the United States. This review examines the literature regarding adolescent heritage speakers of less commonly taught languages (LCTL). I focus on factors of ethnic identity and family relations and how they interact with language learning opportunities and outcomes for adolescent LCTL heritage learners. Heritage language development can lead to students’ stronger sense of ethnic identity which may serve as an important buffer from discrimination in schools and larger society. Heritage language development can also serve as a supportive mechanism for higher quality adult–child interactions and fewer acculturation-related conflicts, particularly during adolescence. In short, researchers and educators must consider how heritage language learning opportunities matter for adolescent LCTL heritage speakers and all diverse students.

Annotated Bibliography: Academic Publications from 2008 to 2009 Related to Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The purpose of this study was to examine how pre- and postmigration factors affect the psychological distress and adjustment for a community sample of Vietnamese refugees resettled in the United States. The sample included a substantial proportion of ex-political detainees who experienced a particularly large number of traumatic events prior to migration. Additionally, the study assessed postmigration experiences using multidimensional and bidirectional measures of