This study describes narrative activity in a doctrina class (children's religious education class in Spanish) composed of Mexican immigrants at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. During the telling of the narrative of the apparition of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) doctrina students and their teacher collaboratively construct a multiplicity of identities in an ongoing narrative version. These past and present identities are represented as Mexican, de aquí (from here), and dark-skinned against the backdrop of the description of an oppressive colonial past in Mexico. The paper compares a doctrina class with a racially mixed religious education class conducted in English (catechism) at the same parish to illustrate differences in the way social identities are created in both classes.

By utilizing Indigenous, decolonial and most importantly Na:tinixwe methodologies, this dissertation documents the ongoing settler colonial history of schooling in Na:tinixwe, charts a community vision for the education of Na:tinixwe youth, and lastly documents ongoing praxis of these community visions. The Hoopa Valley Tribe, or Na:tinixwe (Hupa people), reside in the far reaches of Northern California. Na:tinixw (Hoopa Valley) has been our homeland since time immemorial. Before the time of major European contact, around the 1850s, the Na:tinixwe lived along the Trinity River in 12 different villages. Each village was composed of different family groups. They lived their lives in the traditional Na:tinixw way, which included distinct political, social and economic systems. Education was a life-long process guided by teaching from ninisa:n, the land, kisdiya:n, elders and kixuna:y, the spirit ancestors (Nelson, 1978). In 1893 the Hoopa Valley Indian School was established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the mission of teaching Na:tinixwe children how to be civilized, in the hopes of killing off all that made them Hupa through military bootcamp tactics (Nelson, 1978). One major part of this was to force them to speak English only and punish any use of Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe (Bushnell, 1968). This technique of Indigenous linguistic elimination was widely employed by government funded Indian schools and reflects an incredibly important piece of the settler colonial drive to eliminate its Indigenous population (Iyengar, 2014). Following the conversion of the boarding school to a public school, in the same location, Hupa language and knowledge continued to be suppressed and marginalized while settler curriculum remained at the center. Today like many other publicly funded schools serving Native American children across the nation, Hoopa Valley Elementary School and Hoopa Valley High School are “underperforming”, underfunded and understaffed. The majority of the teachers are non-Native and Na:tinixwe traditional knowledge is highly marginalized, if present at all within the curriculum. This dissertation brings together the voice and visions of the Na:tinixwe to chart (re)envisioned pathways and praxis for education in our community.

Many Latino students continue to experience low academic achievement across educational contexts. Despite programmatic efforts, few academic or school-based interventions in the recent past have demonstrated a reliable way to increase their student outcomes. While parent involvement has been considered as an intervention to improve Latino student behavioral and academic outcomes, there are still significant gaps in the ways schools relate to these parents. In the last fifty years we have learned that the most impactful form of parent involvement is not when they come to the school site for meetings or workshops to ameliorate perceived deficits, deficiencies in their parenting or home environment. But rather, when they establish home behaviors that set academic supports and expectations for their children and which match the expectations of the school.

To introduce or strengthen such academic home behaviors and support some studies have suggested that the targeted use of school liaisons at home has led parents to become aware of the skills, assets and resources they possess and whose utilization have led to measurable positive results in schools. In these cases, school liaisons were used as an extension of the school or district academic program. They visited targeted students’ homes and utilized a strength-based approach which involved them guiding parents to identify available strengths and assets inherent in their family. The strengths and assets that the family possessed were then combined with the resources that the liaisons provided or identified. They were then combined to improve student outcomes.

However, in Migrant Region X, the current training that migrant liaisons receive do not prepare them for the specific purpose of working with parents. This lack of training does not allow them to develop and empower the family’s capacity to activate and use their existing social and human capital (inherent family strengths and assets) to address their children’s’ academic needs. Even if migrant liaisons were aware of the valuable assets and strengths that families possess they have no established formal protocol in which to consistently approach their interaction with migrant families. A tool is needed to guide them upon engaging parents in a strength-based process. Without proper training and access to a strength-based protocol these strengths and assets remained untapped.

My intent in this design study was to format a sequence of workshops and development activities to guide a team of migrant liaisons in their problem resolution interactions with parents to a higher degree of sophistication. Migrant liaisons would be led to expand their level of knowledge about factors that affect parent involvement. In particular, they would come to understand the need for employing a strength-based approach with families. Another change expected was that interaction with parents would be standardized and accorded by co-developing a Migrant Strength-Based Protocol (MSBP). A final expected study outcome would be that having benefitted from the study’s content and protocol, migrant liaisons would report an increase in their perceived sense of efficacy in regards to working with parents. I found that the study produced data that showed liaisons moved decidedly towards favoring a strength-based approach with parents. However, the afforded study timeframe was not sufficient to fully develop the intended protocol. Liaisons also showed an increase in their perceived efficacy in working with parents.

Research in both the anthropology and sociology of education has increasingly come to consider the institutional effects of migration, globalization, and transnationalism on learning environments. Yet, most studies examining transmigration and education have only looked at migrant children in schools rather than at the transitions they undergo as transnationals across settings. We know little of the linguistic and socializing practices that occur during migrants’ transitions from place to place and how they come to define the migratory and educational experience for transnational children.

This multi-sited, global ethnography examines language socialization practices and linguistic ideologies among families of Israeli emissaries (shlichim) employed by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI). The study documented the transitions undergone by families with school-age children in the months of their preparation for their move from Israel to the United States and during the first year and-a-half in the U.S.. Data collection for this project took place in both Israel and New York at the homes of the families, the children’s schools, peer group activities, extracurricular programs, play, and summer camp.

The focus of this dissertation project is on routine home and school practices which orient children to attitudes towards their identities as Israelis, as Zionists, as transnationals, and as temporary residents of the United States. The study approaches this question through the lens of the language socialization paradigm, a subfield of linguistic anthropology which understands socialization to occur both through the use of language and to the use of language. I argue that through attention to language use and form children are taught to attend to symbolic boundaries between Israeli, Jewish Diasporan, and U.S. American identities. The simultaneous reinforcement and transcendence of these symbolic boundaries is a defining characteristic of living transnationally.

I find that transnational identities: (1) Are constructed through an explicit recognition of the boundaries between the linguistic and cultural practices of the homeland and the host country; (2) are negotiated through attention to the authenticity of members of the homeland, the host country, and the transnational community; that is, through attention to the extent to which individuals stay within the symbolic boundaries that separate the homeland and the host-land; and (3) Display an ambivalence toward affiliation with the host country by accentuating and emphasizing the linguistic and cultural practices of the homeland. Based on these findings, I call for a language socialization approach to studying transnationalism which recognizes the role of the local and the global, the contemporary and the historical, and the orthodox and heterodox in everyday transnational practices.

By focusing on the shlichim’s transition from Israel to the United States, the dissertation obtains a view of migration often unavailable to researchers: the preparation for departure and initial arrival to the country of destination. This period of transition is formative in the emissaries’ experiences and as they define themselves vis−à−vis their country of origin and their host country. In this sense, this dissertation contributes to an understanding of the role of language in transnational practices, thus supplementing the growing field of research around questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and identity.

With a blend of case study and Language Socialization research, this 2-year ethnographic study explores the ways in which four Mexican immigrant families with a child in middle school navigated the U.S. public school system during a time of increased educational reform. With a combination of participant and direct observation within homes and schools, video-recordings of dinnertime talk, audio-recordings of parent narratives, semi-structured interviews with focal families and school officials, and text-based artifact analysis, this study traces the educational discourses that enter family talk to reveal the ways in which focal parents and students use educationally-based language to demonstrate their understanding of the school system, educational practices, and their roles in the business of doing school.

This twenty-three month ethnographic study seeks to understand how citizenship status impacts the everyday lives of undocumented youth in mixed-status families, examining their experiences at home, in public schools, and community settings. The focal participants in this study lived in Millvalley, Pennsylvania (a pseudonym) and were mixed-status families in which the parents and eldest siblings were undocumented migrants from Mexico and the younger siblings were U.S. citizens by birth. This research examines three critical issues: first, the home and school learning experiences of mixed-status Mexican families, second, the way that language use functions as the central medium through which migrant families co-construct their identities, and third, the local policy shifts that occur in response to emerging Spanish-speaking communities. The findings indicate that migratory status influenced the ways in which parents and children engaged in or discussed educational activities, and these activities varied according to the ages of the focal children. At the same time, there were shared linguistic resources that all families used to co-construct national identity and to account for the relationship between citizenship and education. In addition to contributing theoretical and methodological insights about undocumented migrant youth attending U.S. public schools, the findings from this study can inform the development of educational pedagogy and policy in a growing number of post-industrial urban centers where mixed-status Mexican communities are beginning to emerge.

This dissertation examines the work of diasporic Pacific Islanders to reconnect with lands/seas of Oceania and suggests storytelling, place-making and multimodal creativity as intrinsic to cultural reclamation education. The research is derived from a community engaged project of a Pacific Islander educational non-profit in developing a travel program for cultural exchanges between Northern California and Hawai’i. Research was conducted using ethnographic observations, interviews and participant generated art projects to generate a diasporic pedagogy and explore concepts of cultural identity, belonging and reclamation. This work enters at the nexus of “rooted” place-based educational practices and adaptivity of “routed” migrancy pedagogies in service of decolonial potentiality. It argues that cultural reclamation pedagogy in diaspora can be guided by both pedagogies in order to refashion connections across time and geographies to exceed colonial containment logics of modernity and Indigeneity. It also contends that a practice of ARTiculation guides these efforts through multisensory meaning-making and multi-modal generation.

Rooted in Chicana/Latina feminism and interdisciplinary frameworks, this dissertation uses autoethnographic (Behar, 1996), participatory (Baquedano-López, 2021; Irizarry & Brown, 2014), and art-based research (Leavy, 2015; Delgado Bernal, Burciaga & Flores Carmona, 2012) to document Mexicana/Latina campesinas' education in agriculture in the homelands of the Yakama Nation. Agricultural land-based education, the education paradigm that I am theorizing, encompasses Mexicana/Latina campesinas' education or their active and intentional production of knowledge in which they are generating ways of being/knowing that entail sensibilities, skills/movements, and relationships to live, be, work, and teach/learn in agriculture. Guided by campesinas' conceptualizations of words, I break down three interconnected elements of campesinas' education: coyote literacies, ligera strategies, and pedagogies of barbear. The first element, coyote literacies, captures campesinas' ways of being/knowing and their reading sensibilities (in mind.body.spirit) to navigate across the terrains of agriculture to sobrevivir (survive and thrive) (Galván, 2015). The second element, ligera strategies, shows campesinas' life methods that actively build solidarity and meaningful interactions. The third element, pedagogies of barbear, highlights campesinas' teaching/learning approaches that draw on body-land-agriculture as the educational material. I argue that through campesinas' education, they demonstrate not to be passive workers but intersectional social actors/educators that create knowledge, literacies, and new identities to live and work with dignity.