The Gendered and Racialized Pathways of Latina and Latino Youth: Different Struggles, Different Resistances in the Urban Context

This article explores the student resistances that shape orientations to schooling. Drawing on a study of Latina/o youth, I examine how race and gender influence whether they perceive education as oppressive or useful in resisting oppression. The key lever that may alter their perceptions is how school and society treat Latinos differently from Latinas. This study shows how ethnography can inspire pedagogical practices that bolster urban students' resistances to the oppressive forces negatively impacting their education. [Latina/o youth, race, gender, resistance, urban education]     

The Power of Black and Latina/o Counterstories: Urban Families and College-Going Processes

This article examines the diversity of practices utilized by working-class and poor black and Latina/o families to support their children's college-going processes. We employ the work of feminists, scholars of color, and critical ethnographers to critique the power undergirding the monolithic model establishing one entry point of parental involvement in urban schools. Then, drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography of 27 black and Latina/o youth, we illustrate the ways counterstories expanded entry points of family involvement within the lives of black and Latina/o college-bound youth . [minorities, youth, college-going, family, counterstories]     

The Political Coherence of Educational Incoherence: The Consequences of Educational Specialization in a Southern Moroccan Community

This article is based on an ethnographic study I conducted in southern Morocco during 2004. I explore the historical, ideological, and cultural background behind educational specialization among Moroccan university students. I describe how French colonial educational policies and postindependence Moroccan national schooling ideologies have created a national system of double standards that: (1) privileges French-educated urban middle- and upper-class students, (2) emphasizes the Arabization of the national education system, and (3) discriminates against Arabized, largely rural students, which have exacerbated regional educational and socioeconomic inequalities. I finally contend that educational specialization in noncompetitive degrees such as Arabic language and literature, Islamic studies, geography, and general law is the result of an ideological matrix I have termed political coherence of educational incoherence. Political coherence of educational incoherence naturalizes the reliance of certain disfranchised regional groups on a traditional preschool Islamic education that is largely based on memorization and inefficient pedagogy and is unsuitable for the modern educational requirements.  [Islamic education, school ethnography, Arabization, school failure, minority education]     

Awareness of Arizona's immigration law SB1070 predicts classroom behavioural problems among Latino youths during early adolescence

Bridging diverse areas of inquiry (i.e. legal studies and developmental psychology), this study explored the longitudinal association between Latina/o youths’ burgeoning legal consciousness, measured as awareness of Senate Bill 1070 (SB1070) in Arizona, and their adjustment in school, measured as classroom regulatory behaviours, and examined whether this association varied across immigrant generational status and gender. Participants were 689 Latina/o middle school students in Arizona (M_age?=?12.06 years, SD?=?.98). Multiple regression analysis revealed a significant interaction between Latina/o youths’ awareness of SB1070 at Time 1 and gender in predicting classroom regulatory behaviours at Time 2 (controlling for levels of it at Time 1). Males who were higher on awareness of SB1070 at Time 1 reported lower levels of classroom regulatory behaviours at Time 2. This study underscores the importance of measuring youths’ awareness of laws and how this awareness may impact their academic adjustment.     

Risky subjects: narrative,literary <Emphasis Type="Italic">testimonio</Emphasis> and legal testimony

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

Research for Change versus Research as Change: Lessons from a Mujerista Participatory Research Team

In this article, I aim to further the discussion of engaged research in anthropology and education by examining the unique changes promoted by participatory research in contrast to policy-oriented activist research models. Drawing on my work with Latina immigrant mothers in a school reform movement, I argue for a Latina feminist view of participatory research that illuminates and builds on Latina women's capacities for social critique and transformative resistance.  [participatory research, activist anthropology, Latino parents, school reform]     

Labrador Inuit Subsistence in the Context of Environmental Change: An Initial Landscape History Perspective

In this article, I examine the subsistence economy of the contact-period Labrador Inuit (17th to 19th century) to investigate the relationships of elements of specific cultural changes to environmental change, the effects of cultural interactions, and internal social processes. I apply paleoclimate and sea-ice records and zooarchaeological studies of life history and seasonality of ecologically sensitive species to reconstruct histories of change in particular elements of the physical landscape and of their use. I associate the use of communal houses by the Labrador Inuit and their modification of settlement patterns during the 18th century to a limited phase of environmental moderation and stability during the Little Ice Age and suggest that these changes reflect, in part, economic strategies oriented toward surplus production.     

《食用菌栽培技术》课程“理实一体化”教学实践与探索

"理实一体化"教学是将理论教学与实践教学有机的融合为一体的教学模式,从《食用菌栽培技术》"理实一体化"教材与教案的编写,"理实一体化"实践教学完整性的实施保证,"理实一体化"教学场地的创建,前沿性知识教学的充实,促进学生"零距离"上岗的措施等方面,对进一步完善高职《食用菌栽培技术》课程"理实一体化"教学进行了探索。     

Teaching reading,writing, speaking and risk: dialoguing with Eades,French and Lecuna

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

Learning how scientists work: experiential research projects to promote cell biology learning and scientific process skills

Facilitating not only the mastery of sophisticated subject matter, but also the development of process skills is an ongoing challenge in teaching any introductory undergraduate course. To accomplish this goal in a sophomore-level introductory cell biology course, I require students to work in groups and complete several mock experiential research projects that imitate the professional activities of the scientific community. I designed these projects as a way to promote process skill development within content-rich pedagogy and to connect text-based and laboratory-based learning with the world of contemporary research. First, students become familiar with one primary article from a leading peer-reviewed journal, which they discuss by means of PowerPoint-based journal clubs and journalism reports highlighting public relevance. Second, relying mostly on primary articles, they investigate the molecular basis of a disease, compose reviews for an in-house journal, and present seminars in a public symposium. Last, students author primary articles detailing investigative experiments conducted in the lab. This curriculum has been successful in both quarter-based and semester-based institutions. Student attitudes toward their learning were assessed quantitatively with course surveys. Students consistently reported that these projects significantly lowered barriers to primary literature, improved research-associated skills, strengthened traditional pedagogy, and helped accomplish course objectives. Such approaches are widely suited for instructors seeking to integrate process with content in their courses.     

Nikolai N. Konstantinov’s Authorial Math Pedagogy for People with Wings

This special issue is dedicated to an innovative pedagogy by Soviet-Russian math educator Nikalai Nikolaevich Konstantinov. Diverse and at times contradictory interviews with Konstantinov, math teachers involved in his pedagogy, and former students, available sources in Russian and English, and my own memoirs as a former student of Konstantinov, I tried to reconstruct, define, analyze, evaluate, and problematize his innovative pedagogy. Konstantinov himself defined his innovative pedagogy as promoting “people with wings” – promoting initiative, creativity, ownership, critical thinking, and self-realization among students in math and other areas. In math instruction, Konstantinov focuses on providing students with choices of math problems, interrogating students’ math solutions, and offering guidance in a direct response to the questions and difficulties that the students experience in their particular math problems. I demonstrate his pedagogical approach is integrative aiming not only at math. Emerging tensions between students’ curricular choice and teacher’s imposition, educational elitism and social equality, and teacher’s authorial freedom and Konstantinov’s support are discussed.     

From whiteness to diversity: crossing the racial threshold in bicentennial Argentina

This article examines recent transformations on the discourses of race and nation in bicentennial Argentina, which have shifted from the notion of a fundamentally white nation to an assertion of its racial and cultural diversity. I examine the production of race in contemporary institutional and non-institutional practices that challenge the discourses of modernity according to which Argentina is a white, homogenous and Europeanized nation. The article focuses on a set of cultural manifestations involving Japanese Argentines that – as non-traditional actors in the racial and national stages and as ‘desirable’ immigrants – reveal some inherent fissures in the current official narrative that ostensibly progresses from homogeneity to diversity, and from exclusion to inclusion. By observing the performativity of race and a non-constructivist understanding of race embedded within these cultural manifestations, I argue that the newly multicultural nation continues to inherit its mechanisms of racial production from the modern nation.     

Globalisation and bridewealth rhetoric

This article offers a close analysis of a ‘classic’ body of ethnographic material on the rhetoric and ritual accompanying bridewealth exchange and argues both for the perspective it provides on the dynamics of cultural continuity, and for the contemporary significance of such continuity for theorising the politics of globalisation. Munn’s study on ‘spacetime’ provides a perspective on bridewealth, both as praxis of continuity and of articulation with global processes. I conclude this article by posing the question of whether subjects such as the Maring of Papua New Guinea can be said to have agency at the global level. I argue that the condition of such agency is the alienation of that agency from their specificity as subjects.     

Community Writing, Participatory Research, and an Anthropological Sensibility

Participatory research is a radical praxis through which marginalized people acquire research capabilities that they use to transform their own lives. In this article, I examine how parent writers incorporated facets of community writing into their research practice as they developed their practices and identities as researchers. I also consider how anthropology, as both research practice and sensibility, contributed to the ways I engaged as an outside collaborator with these parent researchers.  [community writing, participatory research, praxis, anthropological sensibility]     

Displayed Objects, Indigenous Identities, and Public Pedagogy

In this article, I describe how one group of student examines indigenous identity formation as dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Drawing on field observations and interviews with students in a 16-month ethnographic study, I examine how one group of students worked toward understanding how indigenous identity was determined by curatorial authority and historically defined museum practices. I argue that students can question the traditional pedagogical conceptions of indigenous culture that ought to be reconsidered within the public museum, and that working to historicize such conceptions makes more explicit student knowledge production of identity.     

Ideological Whitening: does skintone shape colour-blind ideology adherence for Latina/os?

Prominent theories of the US racial order contend that phenotypically light Latina/os will elevate to an honorary White category as a result of their socio-economic advantages over darker Latina/os. Accordingly, light Latina/os are presumed to adopt colour-blind racial ideology to cement their elevated racial status. This study is among the first to examine the relationship between skintone and Latina/os’ colour-blind ideology adherence with nationally representative data. I examine these relationships with data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, and test the robustness of findings across two alternative national data sets: the 2014 General Social Survey, and the 2006 Latino National Survey. Across data sets, different measurement approaches, and time periods, this study finds no evidence that skintone shapes Latina/os’ levels of colour-blind ideology adherence. The study concludes by considering why the racial ideology of light Latina/os is non-concordant with their elevated socio-economic status in relation to darker Latina/os.     

Evolution and nature of science instruction

In this article, I provide an analysis of my work (1985–present) with non-major biology students and science teacher candidates in developing strategies for teaching and enhancing learning with respect to evolutionary science. This first-person account describes changes in evolution instruction over the course of a career based on personal experiences, research-informed practices, and a critical collaboration with colleague Mike U. Smith. I assert four insights concerning the influence and efficacy of teaching nature of science (NOS) prior to the introduction of evolution within college courses for science non-majors and science teacher candidates. These insights are: (a) teach explicit NOS principles first; (b) integrate evolution as a theme throughout a course in introductory biology (but after NOS principles have been introduced); (c) use active learning pedagogies; and (d) use non-threatening alternative assessments to enhance student learning and acceptance of evolutionary science. Together, these insights establish a pedagogy that I (and my colleagues) have found to be efficacious for supporting novice students as they engage in the study of evolutionary science.     

"Our Hands Will Know": The Development of Tactile Diagnostic Skill—Teaching, Learning, and Situated Cognition in a Physical Therapy Program

Relying on observational and interview data from a clinical practice class in a graduate physical therapy program, I examine, within a situated cognition framework, the teaching and learning of a concept in biomechanics, the manual techniques and tactile discrimination skills that accompany it, and the diagnostic frame of mind that informs concept, technique, and skill. In examining this complex set of practices, I hope to add to and qualify the literature on working knowledge, participation and competence, and situated learning and pedagogy.     

Signifying the Pandemics: Metaphors of AIDS, Cancer, and Heart Disease

This article offers a symbolic analysis of the cultural construction and signification of three of the major "pandemics" of the late 20th century: AIDS, cancer, and heart disease. It is based on unstructured interviews conducted in Israel between 1993–94 with 75 nurses and 40 physicians and between 1993–95 with 60 university students. Two key symbols, "pollution" and "transformation" are shown to constitute AIDS and cancer within a symbolic space that I suggest is "beyond culture" where body boundaries are dissolved and cultural categories are dismantled. Heart disease, in contrast, is metaphorized as a defect in the "body machinery." The article concludes by arguing that heart attack is depicted as the pathology of the Fordist, modernist body, while AIDS/cancer are pathologies of the postmodern body in late capitalism. [AIDS, cancer, heart disease, semiotics, metaphorization]     

Parental Strategies in Contrasting Cultural Settings: Families in México and "El Norte"

A "culturally relevant pedagogy" has been recommended to enhance the achievement of Latino students in American schools. In practice, this pedagogy is often based on a view of the home culture as static and in conflict with mainstream culture. The present study compares the child-rearing practices and values of Mexican immigrants raising their children in the United States with those of their siblings who are raising children in Mexico. The study contributes to the theories of culture, documenting the dynamic nature of cultural practices on both sides of the border and examining the implications of cultural change of different types for practice in language minority education.