Rhetorical Functions of Letter Writing: Dialogic Collaboration,Affirmation, and Catharsis in Dolores Huerta's Letters

This essay focuses on the letters that Dolores Huerta wrote to César Chávez in the 1960s and 1970s to better understand her role in the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and the functions of letter writing for individuals such as Huerta, who faced constraining ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Huerta used these letters to establish dialogic collaboration with Chávez. These letters also had a more personal function through affirmation and catharsis, enabling Huerta to affirm her role within the UFW by noting her accomplishments and sacrifices for the union and by expressing both her personal and professional problems. These rhetorical functions of her letter writing contributed to Huerta's identity consciousness, enabling her to build an identity that emphasized social justice issues related to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender.     

Forgotten History: Mexican American School Segregation in Arizona from 1900–1951 1

This article documents the efforts by Mexican Americans to challenge school segregation in Arizona in the first half of the twentieth century. As in Texas and California, although state law never formally mandated the segregation of Mexican American students, school districts in Arizona often established separate “Mexican Schools” for Mexican American students. While districts argued that segregation was necessary because of students' poor English skills, the segregation of Mexican American students in Arizona's public schools was not an isolated practice but occurred in tandem with other discriminatory practices that restricted the social rights of Mexican Americans, many of whom were American citizens. However, Mexican Americans challenged segregation in the courts. Notably, in Gonzales v. Sheely, a case heard in the United States District Court of Arizona in 1950, Judge Dave Ling declared segregation unconstitutional over three years before the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board (1954).     

The “Other White”: Mexican Americans and the Impotency of Whiteness in the Segregation and Desegregation of Texan Public Schools

This article analyzes the legal classification of Mexican Americans as “other white” as argued in a number of critical court cases that beginning in the 1930s up to the 1970s attempted to desegregate public schools in Texas. Since the Texas constitution declared school segregation as being only for “colored children,” Mexican Americans in their fight against de facto segregation sought to claim their legal classification as white. My objective is to further analyze these cases as presented in the literature in order to examine what the relationship between Mexican American whiteness as a legal category versus their “otherness” as a social category says about the vital role of public schools in reproducing, as well as creating, social, political, and economic marginalization.     

Social Justice,Sport and Judaism: A Position Statement

ABSTRACT

Jewish teachings on social justice include the maxim attributed to Hillel the Elder in the Mishnah: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” This maxim indicates Jewish responses to experiencing anti-Semitism in the context of sports, as Jews have stood up for themselves through protest, cultural adaptation, and boycott, as illustrated in phenomena such as the creation of the HaKoach sports teams in Europe, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association basketball team in the United States, and international responses to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It illuminates how others have “been for them,” including Football 4 Peace, responses in Europe to Jewish-identified football teams and anti-Semitism. And it illustrates how the Jewish state, Jewish athletes and teams have responded to the call to stand up for others in American baseball and Israeli football.     

Challenger and the social contingency of meaning: Two lessons for the technical communication classroom

In my technical writing class, I examine two “meanings” from the Challenger disaster to illustrate the social contingency of meaning even in science and technology. These instances are the “anomalous” charring of the O‐rings and the reconceptualized assumption of flightworthiness the night before the launch. The social contingency of these meanings shows that the “object” of technical communication is not the material object as a pre‐existent isolate but in its social interpretation, significance, and meaning. Ultimately, technical communication is about people communicating about and to the interests of other people.     

“American = English Speaker” Before “American = White”: The Development of Children's Reasoning About Nationality

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more “American” than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of individuals varying in race and language. Across cultures, 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 100) categorized English speakers as “American” and Korean speakers as “Korean” regardless of race, suggesting that young children prioritize language over race when thinking about nationality. Nine‐ and 10‐year‐olds (N = 181) attended to language and race and their nationality judgments varied across cultures. These results suggest that associations between nationality and social category membership emerge early in life and are shaped by cultural context.     

The pain and lessons of constructing and becoming the “other”

Abstract

The United States and its public schools are becoming increasingly diverse, yet teachers, prospective teachers, and teacher educators remain predominantly European American. This situation raises a number of questions for teacher educators and teacher education students committed to multicultural education. One challenge to avoid when discussing issues of diversity within largely monocultural learning environments is the unintentional construction of the “Other.” This article describes the painful experiences and interactive reflections of a student of color and a White teacher educator when the student became the “Other” in a preservice teacher education course. The student, her peers, and the instructor describe how the unfortunate incident was turned into a teachable moment and a transformative learning experience that gave deeper, personal meaning to the theories they discussed in the course.     

Seeking a Mexicana/Mestiza Critical Feminist Ethic of Care: Diana’s Revolución of Body and Being

This Chicana Critical Feminist Testimonio reveals a Mexican/Mexican-American Ethic of Care and Testimonios of struggle and survival informing curriculum and pedagogy of one Mexican/Mexican-American female educator of predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American students. This work is part of a larger ethnographic study conducted through multiple methods. Findings here reveal Diana’s Ethic of Care, a (re)framing of social justice revolution/Revolución at the intersection of race, class, gender, language, and immigration status. As Diana (re)constructs and (re)claims her Mexican/Mexican-American identity, she likewise endeavors toward her students’ dignity and academic access. Findings have curricular, pedagogical implications for all educators serving marginalized youth and youth of color.     

War,education and state formation: problems of territorial and political integration in the United States, 1848–1912

Abstract

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power.     

Preparing principals on the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond: A call to confront fear,uncertainty, and the marginalization of Mexican American Students

The recent presidential election and an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric and deportations foster greater uncertainty and fear in Mexican American immigrant communities. In the border city of El Paso, Texas, teachers and principals report how fear and uncertainty negatively impact their campuses, students, and school-family relationships. The purpose of this article is to prompt a regional and national discussion about the preparation of principals who work in Mexican American and immigrant communities, because current professional standards and so-called “best-practices” in school leadership do not sufficiently address the critical social justice issues central to supporting students and families in the present and immediate future. To catalyze this dialogue, I offer five school leadership recommendations developed in collaboration with El Paso teachers and school leaders working in Mexican American immigrant communities. I hope scholars, educators, policymakers, parents, and activists will collectively consider these recommendations as well offer other viable solutions, strategies, practices, and approaches to preparing school leaders in these uncertain and unjust times.     

An Epistemic Frame Analysis of Neoliberal Culture and Politics in the US, UK, and the UAE

Neoliberalism is a loosely knit bricolage from economics, politics, and various forms of reactionary populism that can be envisioned as a kind of epistemic frame in which largely counterrevolutionary forces engage in the creative destruction of institutional frameworks and powers, forging divisions across society that include labor and social relations (Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism, 2009). Such “creative destruction” implies that neoliberalism is actually a reactionary “catalog of mind” (Robin, The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, 2011, p. 17); that when believers engage in reactions to programs and ideas which represent what Bourdieu (Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market, 1998) called “the left hand of the state” (typically represented by teachers, judges, social workers), one result has been the “involution of the state” (p. 34) and the “destruction of the idea of public service” (Bourdieu, The abdication of the state. In P. Bourdieu (Ed.), The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society, 1999, p. 182). We examine neoliberalism using Shaffer’s (Int J Learn Media 1(2):1–21, 2009) concept of an “epistemic frame” based on the epistemic frame hypothesis that suggests that a community of practice has a culture, and that the collection of values, skills, knowledge, and identity form the “epistemic frame” (p. 4). An epistemic frame has a kind of grammar and structure comprised of people’s thoughts and actions, reinforced by the ways that people see themselves, the values to which they hold, and the epistemology that binds together their agenda. The purpose of our analysis is to create a praxis for what has been termed Regressionsverbot, which is defined as “a ban on backward movement with respect to social gains at the European level” (Bourdieu, Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market, 1998, p. 41). In the form of cases from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates, neoliberal initiatives are examined, unpacked, and interrogated.     

Estimation performance and strategy use of Mexican 5th and 8th grade student sample

What computational estimation skills and strategies do Mexican students possess? Does the theoretical model based on interviews with a select United States sample accurately describe the Mexican sample? These were questions studied based on interviews with 8 eighth graders (those scoring in the top 5%) out of a sample of 177 eighth graders from twelve different Mexican schools representing a range of social and economic backgrounds. Preliminary screening data collected by administering a computational estimation test revealed that estimation was very difficult for the Mexican students (mean 4.0, range of 0 to 18 on the 38-item open-ended test). The interviews revealed that the Mexican students as a whole did employ the three general cognitive processes outlined in the theoretical model, namely reformulation, translation, and compensation. The most common strategy employed was the front-end technique. Similarly, a frequent strategy used to “estimate” was mentally applying a paper/pencil algorithm. In contrast to data collected under similar conditions in Japan and the United States, rounding was a strategy only occasionally used in the interviews. The use of benchmarks (key reference points used as bounds in forming an estimate) as a strategy for estimating problems involving percent was common and may reflect students' “out-of-school” experience with mathematical applications. Consistent with parallel investigations with Japanese and United States students, these Mexican strudents rarely reflected on their estimates through their own initiative and rarely recognized unreasonable estimates.     

Boundlessly entangled: non-/human performances of education for health through open-air schools

ABSTRACT

This article starts from histoire croisée to develop a genuinely relational analysis of performances of health education in the context of open-air schools. It interrogates, through places, people, and things conceived of as being performatively entangled, the notion of an internationalisation of school hygiene. These places, people, and things – “international” conferences and exhibitions, “figureheads” of the aspiring New Schools and open-air schools movements, and printed, photographed, and designed materials – reveal open-air schools as “practice[s] and movement[s]” unbound by national or otherwise (real-)imagined borders. Fragmentation accompanied their circulation and ensued from their co-constitutive role in the mediation of knowledge and praxis around hygiene. While still underexplored, economic factors were key to this process. Their analysis from within the “meshwork” in which non-/humans were (are) entangled opens up new lines of enquiry.     

ACT UP 25: HIV/AIDS,Archival Queers,and Mnemonic World Making

Audre Lorde's speech, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “sheds light on the margins of rhetoric in the sense of the public speech because she examines factors that may cause some people to remain silent while enabling others to speak and act. “Margins” refers both to the parameters employed for defining a practice and the relative place or value of varied activities exemplifying the practice. Lorde interweaves her commentary on the silence surrounding breast cancer with insights about silence drawn from her experiences as a member of several subordinated communities, especially as they relate to the misuse of power to silence those who are different. Her speech comments on silencing and power, sexism, verbal abuse, violence and sexualized aggression, shame, the taboo, and hostile social environments. Paradoxically, Lorde's speech is as much about the possibilities of rhetoric as its limits.     

Tenets of Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy: teaching for critical consciousness,nourished resistance,and healing

ABSTRACT

For marginalized communities, schooling is mired in social/bodily control, tracking, and cultural erasure circumscribing difference/culture as obstacles, as opposed to sites of wisdom, connectedness, and critical consciousness. Authors shape a transformative pedagogical framework across teacher education and partnering schools by utilizing spiritually embodied, land-based Chicana Feminist and Indigenous Epistemologies. We outline six tenets of Body-Soul Rooted Pedagogy which: 1) construct education politically, 2) enact schooling as decolonization/empowerment, 3) center epistemologies, multiliteracies of marginalized groups, 4) foster critical frameworks navigating oppression, 5) engage social action pedagogy, and 6) engender hope, well-being. Scholarship has implications for educational theory and practice at all levels.     

About Creativity,Giftedness, and Teaching the Creatively Gifted in the Classroom

In this case study the author explored a teacher's beliefs about creativity and gifted‐ness and investigated the classroom practices of this teacher of gifted students for 20 years. Seven semi‐structured and 2 open observations were carried out in her classroom, and 2 prefigured interviews were conducted with her. She believed that creative children are those who are “free thinkers” and have “imaginative intelligence.” The thin line between an academically gifted child and a creatively gifted child is built by “imagination,” “emotional intensity,” and “curiosity.” In creative writing, she tried to implement activities such as learning to write poetry, personal narratives, research reports and essays posing solutions to real world problems, and mystery stories decorated with similes, metaphors and imaginative expressions. In reading, students analyzed characters, problems, places and times in stories and novels, and then rewrote stories.     

Francisco Maestas et al. v. George H. Shone et al.: Mexican American Resistance to School Segregation in the Hispano Homeland, 1912–1914

The authors in this article argue that the Francisco Maestas et al vs. George H. Shone et al (1914) case is one of the earliest Mexican American challenges to school segregation in the United States. Unidentified for over a century, the lawsuit took place in southern Colorado, a region of the nation where Mexican Americans have deep historical roots. This case was unique because the racial background and linguistic needs of Mexican American children were contested. First, plaintiffs (Mexican Americans) argued their children were racially distinct as Mexicans and used the Colorado Constitution to challenge segregation because the state prohibited public schools from classifying and distinguishing children based on color and race. Defendants (school board members and the superintendent) countered that Mexican American children were Caucasian and claimed they were no different from other White children in the school district. Second, school district officials maintained that non-English speaking Mexican American children were placed in a separate school in order to serve their linguistic needs. The district court judge discovered that school officials had created a policy that sent all Mexican American children to the separate school. To the extent that many Mexican American children were English speaking, the district court judge ruled in favor of Francisco Maestas on the grounds that school officials could not prevent English-speaking Mexican American children from attending schools of their choice in general and schools that were closer to their homes in particular.     

“The Subjective Necessity”

Abstract

Several recent articles on social work education have advocated for the inclusion of literature in the curriculum. The authors argue that the value of including works of literature in the social work curriculum extends beyond specific content to the reading process itself. They assert that the subjective values inherent in works of literature or film, as opposed to textbooks, can pose a necessary challenge to empirical thinking by exposing students to a diversity of narratives and narrative forms and by introducing ambiguity, critical thinking, and interpretive freedom into the classroom. An argument is made for including literature in a process of learning that is “dialogic” rather than “monologic” and that, by its practice and methodology more than its content, embodies and transmits the professional values of social work.     

European Perceptions of American Coeducation, 1865–1914: Ethnicity,religion and culture

In the era between the American Civil War and World War I, European observers considered coeducation, especially at the secondary level, to be one of the most remarkable features of American education and society. This article explores how Europeans tried to explain why mixing the sexes could work in the New World but, in the eyes of most, was impossible or unacceptable in their own countries. Although some commentators referred to “race” or ethnicity as the crucial factor that allowed American boys and girls to mingle in school without producing significant immorality, most visitors ultimately saw cultural differences as more important. An intriguing paradox in their perceptions was that many saw the United States as the progressive “land of the future,” but considered coeducation a holdover from primitive frontier conditions.     

Mexican American Mothers’ Conceptualization of Autonomy Support and Psychological Control in the Context of Cultural Values

This qualitative study explored the intertwining relationships among the concepts of parental autonomy support, parental control, and cultural values for Mexican American families. The study was guided by the following questions: (1) What elements of parental autonomy support are identified in Mexican American parents’ involvement in their children’s academic performance? (2) How do Mexican American parents conceptualize “autonomy support” and “parental control”? Sixteen Mexican American mothers expressed their own goals and strategies for home-based parental involvement to support their adolescents’ academic performance, and responded to the prototypes of autonomy support parenting and use of psychological control. Four themes emerged from the data to explain the participants’ practice: (1) Explain the expectations for behavioral and academic pursuit through persistent “telling” and “reminding”; (2) Respond to children’s feelings from parents’ perspectives; (3) Encourage with provisions, praises, and criticisms; and (4) Allow choices upon trust in child’s sense of responsibility. Discussion is focused on how Mexican-American mothers’ conceptualization of “autonomy support” and “parental control” is influenced by the cultural values of educación and respeto. Culturally appropriate autonomy support training is suggested for effective intervention programs for Mexican-American parents.