The models and hard cores: selective acculturation and racial stratification in Chinese students’ school experience in Malaysia

Are the academic and social experiences of Chinese Malaysian students as much an outcome of the selective acculturation strategy of their parents as the linguistic assimilation policy of the government? Driven by economic necessity on one hand and pressured by cultural preservation on the other, Chinese parents first send their sons and daughters to Chinese-medium primary schools and then Malay-medium secondary schools. Facing linguistic assimilation and racial stratification, students with opportunistic attitudes accumulate language capital and obey discipline rules. Those with oppositional attitudes and defiant behaviors are labeled as “hard cores” and pressured to quit school. As “model students” (high achievers) become technical professionals and “hard cores” (low achievers) work as unskilled workers for co-ethnic entrepreneurs, social stratification is reproduced within the Chinese community.     

Educational reform and policy dynamics: a case of the Malaysian “Vision School” for racial integration

In the multiracial Malaysian society, a new school redesign model called “Vision School” has been initiated as yet another measure to foster racial harmony. In this model, the ethnicity-based schools with the medium of instruction in the respective native languages are located within a common compound to share common facilities and jointly organize select school events. Conceptually, the Vision School model can be argued as a viable avenue for fostering racial unity. However, on the ground, the strategies and planned activities seem to be inadequate, simplistic, and unproductive. A qualitative investigation of a high-profile Vision School indicated that the goal of racial integration/harmonization is far from happening for the approach taken to implement the Vision School is fallacious with the shortfall in the policy formulation and execution stages. It provided evidence that the policy cycle, policy instruments, and critical action domains need to be coherently and sequentially aligned for success.     

Multiple pathways to whiteness: white teachers’ unsteady racial identities

Abstract

Teacher education programs in the US, recognizing the mismatch that exists in preschool provision between mostly white teachers and a very diverse intake of young children, have begun to explore ways of raising racial awareness among pre-service teachers, with the aim of improving non-white children’s classroom experiences and outcomes. This paper analyzes 60 critical memoirs written by students about their own awareness of their identity to demonstrate the intersectionality of teacher identity, and in particular the impact of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion on the processes whereby white students acquire a successful white teacher identity. In doing so, it highlights the ways white pre-service teachers who hope to work with young children imagine or realize their whiteness as it intersects with other aspects of their identities.     

Student and teacher negotiations of racial identity in an Afro‐Ecuadorian region

In this article, using data collected primarily through interviews and observations the researcher explores how students and teachers of African descent at the Jaime Hurtado Academy understand and interpret race and racism in the city and province of Esmeraldas, which is the only region of the country where Afro‐Ecuadorians comprise the largest proportion of the population. The findings reveal that students often distanced themselves from their Blackness through racial mixture, and that parents played a critical socializing role in their students’ negotiations of racial identity. Additionally, it was found that teachers universally embraced their Blackness, although they simultaneously acknowledged their mixed racial ancestry. These findings contest literate understandings of race and ideological attempts by elites to exclude Afro‐Ecuadorians within the dominant discourse of national identity.     

Household bibis,pious learning and racial cure: changing feminine identities in colonial India, 1780–1925

Abstract

Based on the keynote address the author gave at the ISCHE conference in Turkey in June 2015, this article examines how female identities, in a predominantly non-white colonial setting, were variously constructed over a 145-year time period. The paper also sees some resonance with the power structures that drive female oppression in former non-white colonial domains today and begins with that discussion. The author then turns to develop a largely historical perspective concerning this issue and is interested in the changes in the interaction between females living in India and the colonial state over this extended time period. In so doing, the article illustrates the activism of females who were caught within the imperial ambit as they responded, with varying degrees of intensity, to the broader racial and class agendas, which were internal to British colonial rule. The article uses the paradigm of “femininity” to trace the self-actualisation of these females, as well as the official impositions placed on them; and how, even from this position of powerlessness, coercive agendas could still emerge as a result of their activism that the state, itself, was then forced to accommodate.     

Inhabiting the ‘tragic gap’: pre-service teachers practicing racial literacy

Set in the context of a teacher education program, this study examined how three White pre-service teachers participate in book club discussions of children’s literature. We asked: When White pre-service teachers are in a context that enables talk about race, racism and anti-racism, what do they talk about? What conceptual and discursive tools do they use? We were guided by these questions, along with theoretical perspectives of racial literacy, multicultural discourses and a form of critical discourse analysis referred to as ‘positive discourse analysis’ or ‘reconstructive discourse analysis’. Our analysis illustrates that the participants held two questions, what constitutes racism and what makes a person a White ally, without firm resolution in the form and function of their talk. Their discourses illustrate that racial literacy involves what teachers say and also a willingness to stand in the space of indeterminacy, which may create space for new social positions. We argue for a continued theorization of critical discourse analysis alongside of racial literacy and multicultural discourses.     

“Staying Black”: the demonstration of racial identity and womanhood among a group of young high-achieving Black women

Signithia Fordham’s theory of “racelessness” purports that while interacting with teachers, administrators, and peers in the school setting, academically successful Blacks must suppress the racial identities of their home worlds to secure and maintain the label of high achiever. My objectives were to examine how young Black women navigate between racially homogenous public schools in their neighborhoods to a racially integrated setting, and to highlight their involvement in work groups and social clubs as a way of expressing their racial identity and burgeoning womanhood. This study used interviews and questionnaire data gathered from a cohort of high-achieving young Black women in a highly selective honors high school to dispute Fordham’s theory, and to examine the various strategies that these women use to become and remain academically successful. This study revealed that through social club participation these female students are not raceless, and consciously identify as Black, and develop and demonstrate versions of Black womanhood that allow them to negotiate diversity. Implications for promoting racial integration, the development of Black identity, and the academic success of Black female students are provided.     

Prejudice Reduction in Schools: the value of inter‐racial contact

This paper is centrally concerned with criticism of inter‐racial contact as a means of improving race relations. It aims, amongst other things, to highlight the damaging implications of the criticism on practices hitherto thought useful in combating racial prejudice. The main focus of the paper is the charge that a reduction in prejudice towards individual members of a group does not transfer to the group as a whole. It is argued that whilst there is much evidence to support this charge, the acquisition of positive attitudes towards an entire racial or ethnic group is not an aim that educationalists should seek to realise.

In the light of this objection, an alternative view of the purpose of inter‐racial contact is proposed such that the value of contact be judged in terms of whether it helps diminish the tendency to indulge in unsupported generalisations. To promote this goal it is urged that wherever practicable, inter‐racial contact, under specified conditions, should form part of a programme that emphasises the nature, and particularly the dangers, of generalisation. It is acknowledged, however, that there are some children and some forms of prejudice that will remain impervious to the potential benefits of any form of contact.     

“But I’m oppressed too”: white male college students framing racial emotions as facts and recreating racism

Most analyses of racism focus on what people think about issues of race and how this relates to racial stratification. This research applies Feagin’s white racial frame to analyze how White male college students at two universities feel about racism. Students at the academically non-selective and less diverse university tended to be apathetic while those attending the academically selective and more racially diverse campus tended to be angry. This study highlights the interconnectedness of affective and cognitive responses to race: two areas integral to both the maintenance and dismantling of systemic racism. It also highlights how men frequently frame emotions as facts, which can also support racial stratification.     

Language use and racial redirect in the educational landscape of ‘just good teaching’

At colleges and universities across the United States, teacher preparation programs are increasingly required to prepare teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Teacher education programs have responded by incorporating fieldwork experiences and curricular requirements that include a social justice and multicultural education focus. One key individual is uniquely positioned to reinforce and connect coursework with classroom practice during the teacher candidate’s practicum experience: the university supervisor. Our research team focused on the supervisors and their understandings of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) in order to better support them as they worked with teacher candidates to reinforce CRP in the classroom. Through interviews, field notes, and classroom observations, we examined language (words, phrases) that the supervisors used to talk about race and culture in relation to CRP. Our findings indicate a tendency to redirect conversations about race and culture to topics that they were more versed on such as teaching to the whole child or addressing the needs of the individual student. We termed this linguistic move the racial redirect, which emerged in language that (1) simplified the meaning of CRP and (2) made CRP seem like an unexpected or chance event in teaching.     

Correction to: The effects of client–counselor racial matching on therapeutic outcome

Asia Pacific Education Review - The original version of this article was published with the following error. This has been corrected with this erratum.     

The interaction of attitudes toward racial membership and learning ability in school‐age children

Although prejudice exists during childhood, it is unclear how attitudes toward peers of lower or higher academic ability and from one's own or a different racial group interact. This study qualifies previous research by showing that prejudice varies according to whether children are asked to evaluate peers based on academic ability, racial membership, or both, and whether evaluations are based on cognitive, behavioural, or affective components of attitudes. Younger children, particularly girls, had greater negative biases toward lower‐ability and different‐race target children. Gender differences were specific to attitude component, age, and target child characteristics. Consistency in prejudice was found within components, but components were differentially correlated across target children. Results are discussed from a theoretical and applied perspective.     

Gender by racial/ethnic intersectionality in the patterns of Adolescents’ math motivation and their math achievement and engagement

Individuals' math motivational beliefs are theorized to shape their STEM achievement and engagement in high school and beyond. Combining situated expectancy-value theory and intersectionality framework, the goals of this study were to (a) identify the unique patterns of U.S. high school students' math motivational beliefs, (b) examine differences in the patterns based on the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity, and (c) test the extent to which these patterns predicted differences in students' math achievement and classroom behavioral engagement for each of the gender by racial/ethnic groups. The current study included 16,120 high schoolers (50% female; 63% White, 17% Latina/o, 11% Black, and 9% Asian Americans; Mage = 14.46 at Grade 9) from the High School Longitudinal Study. There were six unique patterns of students' math motivational beliefs: Overall High, Above Average but not Identified, Identified but Average Value, Average, Low Identity, and Overall Low. Pattern membership at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity showed nuances that could not be represented by gender or race/ethnicity alone; for example, male and female Asian American adolescents had similar patterns, but many male and female adolescents of other racial/ethnic groups had different patterns. Adolescents' math motivational belief patterns were associated with their Grade 11 math achievement and behavioral engagement even after controlling for prior math achievement and family socioeconomic status, and the associated varied by the gender and racial/ethnic groups.     

Exploring three White American teachers’ dispositional stances towards learning about racial,cultural, and linguistic diversity

This study, situated in the United States, is set in a context where large and growing numbers of children from non-dominant backgrounds populate American public schools while the vast majority of teachers teaching in US schools are White, monolingual women who may not have the requisite expertise to teach children from non-dominant backgrounds. This work focuses on the learning of three White teachers enrolled in a literacy course designed to foster teachers’ understandings of racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Results revealed that the three focus teachers, all members of a small online Book Club within the focus course, assumed different dispositional stances towards learning about diversity. Moreover, their overall dispositional stances shaped the ways they positioned themselves as learners in the course as well as what they learned in the course.     

Encountering disregard in Australian academe: the subjective perspective of a disaffiliated racial ‘other’

This article proposes that progressive frameworks underpinned by diversity are contradictory to the inclusion of the ‘other’ in Australian higher education. I integrate the critical race theory constructs of disregard and convergence with white privilege and indigenous lacking to claim that objective processes underpinned by merit embed the marginalising of the ‘other’. I draw on storytelling to enunciate my subjective experience of disregard as a Maori woman scholar to shed light on institutional culture in the maintaining of insider privilege.     

Examining pre-service teachers’ color-blind racial ideology,emotion regulation,and inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race

In this study, we examined the relationship between 159 predominately White pre-service teachers’ color-blind racial attitudes, emotion regulation, and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Results indicated strong relationships between color-blind racial ideology and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Specifically, emotion regulation difficulties (suppression strategies) served as a mediator between color-blind racial ideology (unawareness of racial privilege) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. In addition, emotion regulation difficulties (lack of emotional clarity) served as a moderator between color-blind racial ideology (blatant racial issues) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Similarly, emotion regulation difficulties (impulse control difficulties) served as a moderator between color-blind racial ideology (institutional discrimination) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. The study’s overall findings highlight pre-service teachers’ difficulties with regulating their emotions in racial situations as well as how this difficulty in turn influences their ability to change negative thoughts regarding other racial groups. The study has implications for how pre-service teachers regulate racial emotions in the classroom as well as how they may potentially interact with racially diverse students.     

Do sheepskin effects help explain racial earnings differences?

This study examines the role of sheepskin effects in explaining white–black earnings differences. The study finds significant differences in sheepskin effects between white men and black men, with white men receiving higher rewards for lower level signals (degrees of a college education or less) and black men receiving higher rewards for higher level signals (graduate degrees). In performing an Oaxaca decomposition of earnings differences, it is apparent that signaling plays an important role in explaining white–black earnings differences and that a portion of the gap may be explained by statistical discrimination.     

Do I belong in my math class? The importance of perceived racial/ethnic context and math course sequence

As careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) continue to grow, so has attention to Algebra 1 enrollment timing that serves as a critical predictor of STEM success. The present study adds to the literature by examining if Algebra 1 enrollment timing from 8th to 9th grade is related to sense of belonging in math, and whether this association changes as a function of the students’ perceived school and math race/ethnic context. To capture the dynamic nature of these contexts, we examined racial/ethnic incongruence, or the difference in the perceived number of same-race/ethnic peers in math class and the school of Black, White, Latino, and Asian students. Mixed effects linear modeling analyses were conducted on a sample of 2,938 participants (46% males; 54% females) who attended 26 racially/ethnically diverse middle schools and who transitioned to 142 public high schools in California. The results showed that enrolling and successfully passing 8th Algebra was protective for sense of belonging but this association depended on students’ race/ethnicity and the racial/ethnic incongruence between the math class and school context. Findings have important implications for math education, teaching, and policy.