This project examines the role of learning technologies in Anishinaabemowin (Anishinaabe language) community classes. With the societal push towards using more technology coupled with the shift to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Indigenous language communities have had to decide how to incorporate technology into their classes in a way that honors the language and the learners. Through interviews with Anishinaabemowin language teachers and facilitators, this study examines the benefits and difficulties of using learning technologies. Six themes were identified through qualitative interviews: Accessibility, Pros and Cons of Language Learning Technologies, Community and Connection to Culture, Remote Learning versus In-person Learning, Technological Difficulties, and Opportunity. Each theme answers the questions of benefits and difficulties as well as helping to understand the role of technology in these classes. Highlighting these themes can support this Anishinaabe community and other Indigenous language communities in using technology in positive ways for their self-determined linguistic goals.

This ethnographic study investigates the daily language practices in five Chinese middle class focal families and illuminates the parents’ beliefs about their mother language, English, and language learning in the globalizing post-industrial era. Building on a growing body of research on family language policy (FLP), the study asks an overarching question: What does FLP look like in these middle class families? Specifically, the dissertation seeks to answer these questions: 1) what do the children’s daily language practices look like? 2) How do the parents manage their children’s daily language practices? 3) What ideologies and beliefs about their mother language, English, and language learning do parents hold? In addition, the study explores why FLP matters in the larger contexts of the Chinese Open-up reform policy and processes of globalization. How do intimate language-mediated interactions within the home reflect and refract these larger sociopolitical, sociolinguistic, and economic processes? How might this study of FLP bridge the familial, the national, and the global, connecting family language practices, beliefs, and management strategies to national language policies and processes of globalization?

Findings show that children’s daily language practices incorporate four different types of Mandarin- and English-mediated activities which include daily routines, purposefully planned activities and naturally occurring activities. During the process of language management, parents and children negotiate in dynamic power relations whereby parents exert control and authority, and children display agency, resistance, and autonomy. Parents perceive languages as cultural practices, aesthetic entities, and utilitarian instruments. Findings also suggest that national political policies affect parents’ perceptions of education, language, and language learning, as well as parents’ language policymaking in the home. Larger sociocultural, political, and historical factors have great impact on parents’ ideologies about the construction of multiple language identities in the globalization trend. This study therefore fills a void in the educational linguistics scholarship by connecting the intimate familial domain of language policy with larger informal and formal language policies that privilege English and Mandarin. These language choices within the home among family members greatly influence children’s language acquisition and socialization, as well as their multiple language identity construction in the post-industrial era.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has undertaken an experiment in the education of immigrant students learning English. Over the 2021-2023 school years, the district opened three new high school Academies for recently-immigrated students explicitly tasked with centering their home languages to support their success in school. The students and educators in these Academies are predominately Latinx and 25% of students reported a Mayan language as their home language. Recognizing that Indigenous languages and the home languages of young people from racialized communities represent knowledge- and value-systems historically excluded from and suppressed by schools, this dissertation asks what language policy in “newcomer” schools teaches about the futures we build with and for marginalized young people. Based on two years of ethnographic research across the three Academies, this study examines the official and practiced policies governing students’ home languages and the possible futures those policies facilitate or constrain.

By analyzing classroom observations, student work, more than 75 interviews with students, educators, and district leaders; and participant-observation in a youth-organizing group, this study engages the concept of relationality to argue that the enrollment of Indigenous, immigrant young people in U.S. public schools to achieve their self-determined goals is an insurgency against the colonial design of schooling. Drawing on the critical ethnography of language policy and raciolinguistic ideologies, this dissertation describes how progressive language policy can operate as a form of state counterinsurgency against immigrant young people’s claims to citizenship by operating as a flexible enclosure that works in concert with carceral institutions to control the mobility and sociality of immigrant young people. Thinking with abolition, the study identifies how educators develop subversive solidarity with immigrant educational insurgency through transnational teacher organizing. These insights demonstrate contemporary interrelations between language, race, and schooling from which we can identify the specificities of shared struggle and imagine anticolonial relationships between schools, educators, and racially minoritized communities.

This study explored perceptions of sense of belonging in academic and social contexts at West Coast University for Indian international LGBQ students in the United States with a focus on how institutional contexts and sociohistorical factors influence perceptions of sense of belonging on campus at the intersection of multiple identities. To address individual and institutional factors, a critical qualitative framework of Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) and a constructivist qualitative framework of Sense of Belonging (Strayhorn, 2012) grounded this phenomenological study. The current study used intersectionality to highlight the multiple and intersecting sociohistorical structures that influence Indian international LGBQ students' perceptions of sense of belonging on campus. Sense of Belonging encapsulates how perceptions of personal and interpersonal experiences impact an individual's connectedness and overall success on campus. Strayhorn (2012) conceptualization of Sense of Belonging into seven elements is used in framing and analyzing the study. The seven elements are (a) sense of belonging is a basic human need; (b) is a fundamental motive; (c) takes on heightened importance in certain contexts at certain times in certain populations; (d) is related to, and seemingly is a consequence of, mattering; (e) social identities intersect and affect college students' sense of belonging; (f) engenders other positive outcomes; and (g)m be satisfied on a continual basis and likely changes as circumstances, conditions and contexts change (Strayhorn, 2012).

All four participants partook in three semi-structured phenomenological interviews based on Seidman's (2013) three-part interview structure: (a) focused life history- understanding of individual and cultural values and journey to U.S. higher education; (b) details of the experience – exploring individual interactions in campus and academic contexts; and (c) reflection on the meaning of the phenomenon – how individuals perceive and make meaning of these experiences. The data analysis developed three major themes: (1) Defying Boundaries, Defining Self and Community, (2) Speaking Language to Power, and (3) Centering Self within Sociohistorical Contexts.

Overall, participants did not feel strong sense of belonging on campus. While interpersonal relationships fostered some belonging, there was a clear lack of overall perceptions of sense of belonging within academic and social contexts. The most salient facets of identity influencing sense of belonging for Indian international LGBQ students were sexuality, race, international student status, linguistic ability, and gender. While undergraduate and graduate students had similar perceptions of sense of belonging, graduate students expressed a need for relationships with other Indian international students while undergraduate students intentionally looked for domestic social circles.

At the institutional level, salient factors influencing belongingness for Indian international LGBQ students were: (a) lack of awareness among domestic peers and faculty; (b) lack of visibility of Indian international LGBQ identities and communities on campus, (c) English language testing and requirements and (d) lack of institutional funding support. Intersecting sociohistorical factors influenced individual perceptions of sense of belonging by creating a culture where students did not feel it possible to express their intersectional identities on campus. Finally the study ends with recommendations for practice and research by higher education professionals and scholars.

The study concludes recommendations for practice and research to foster sense of belonging for Indian international LGBQ students by enhancing support and services specifically for this population while also challenging current definitions of sense of belonging and expanding monolithic representations of international students.

This dissertation examines the experiences of the Roses in Concrete Community School (RiC) in East Oakland, California. Conceived as a counter-hegemonic schooling project, RiC responded to the community’s demand for self-determination in education; the school’s founders sought to fulfill this demand by designing a school organized around a culturally sustaining/revitalizing and healing-centered program dedicated to serving predominantly Black and Latinx children and families of Oakland. This project centers on a central research question: How does a school that was deliberately designed to counter the adverse conditions in a low-income urban community meet the social-emotional and academic needs of the students and communities it serves? I conceptualize the theoretical framework of Frontier Education, or white settler colonial schooling practices, and schooling as marronage, or liberatory schooling practices grounded in autonomous community and freedom, to guide this analysis. Decolonizing, critical Indigenous, and critical race methodologies also guide the data collection strategy used in this research. Using a critical ethnographic case study approach, I analyzed observations, documents, and interviews with key stakeholders from the school’s design stage in 2014 until its fifth year of operation in 2020. Three key findings emerged from this case study. First, RiC successfully adopted a community responsive approach to student and family engagement, prioritized an alternative model of student success embodied by the concept of the Warrior Scholar, utilized an Ethnic Studies-based, Spanish-English dual immersion, arts-oriented social justice educational program, and worked in solidarity with students and families. Second, the school’s approach to healing and transformation responded to harm at the community and individual level. Third, despite its efforts and significant accomplishments, the school encountered obstacles in building the long-term capacity of faculty and staff to meet the needs of stakeholders. Despite these challenges, RiC offers an example of education being used to forward social change and disrupt hopelessness that all educators can learn from. The conclusion explores the implications of this case study for teachers and school leaders who seek to pursue a social justice educational agenda.

Postsecondary institutions are working to remedy campus race relations. Although initiatives from course requirements to diversity offices have been implemented, racialized disparities remain a pressing concern. The online domain has also challenged institutions to consider what responsibility campuses have in the racial climate experiences of students’ web-based interactions. This dissertation study therefore examines whether diversity work has created institutional change and positively shaped the campus experience for racially diverse students. Drawing upon critical race theories in education, I conducted a qualitative phenomenological study to explore how undergraduates make sense of their contemporary campus racial climate experiences in relation to their perceptions about their institution’s historical legacies of racism. Data collection methods included textual analysis of campus artifacts, video-elicited focus groups, semi-structured walking interviews, and ethnographic observations of 12 undergraduate students attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Three findings emerged from the study. First, minoritized students negotiate their online experiences with a greater sense of autonomy to avoid racial hostility. Their on-campus experiences, in contrast, are often fixed by uncontrollable circumstances such as required courses taught by racially insensitive instructors. Second, Students of Color identified direct parallels between their contemporary experiences and the racialized ideologies behind past racial incidents at UCLA. They noted, for example, how stereotypes used in the YouTube video “Asians in the Library” (2011) were consistent with how their contemporary peers envision Asian and Asian American students as the “model minority.” Third, despite UCLA’s public history of racial incidents, participants came to their studies believing UCLA would be a “dream”-like escape from their racialized pasts. Their individual encounters with racial microaggressions from peers and instructors marked the beginning of their idyllic expectations of UCLA to fade away.

Participants’ experiences demonstrate, despite advertised institutional investments in diversity over time, little substantive improvements have occurred within their campus’ racial climate. Findings have implications for how administrators and practitioners work to better serve the needs of racially diverse students. Moreover, this study contributes to methodological practice by situating social media texts as elicitation devices to nuance the study of campus racial climate within contemporary digital cultures.

Within the National Park Service, interpretation is utilized to create emotional connections between the visitor and the site, to convey to the public the value of National Park resources, and to impart a need for their protection. This research project seeks to explore this topic by analyzing the ways in which Oglála Lakȟóta continuing and historical relational connections are represented through interpretation at Wind Cave National Park, a site chosen for its status as a site of relational significance and associations with Lakȟóta oral history, its location within the contested Black Hills area of South Dakota, and its proximity to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Employees from Wind Cave National Park and the Oglala Sioux Tribe were interviewed for this study, which combines both storytelling and analytical emphases.

This project seeks to understand the role that Indigenous languages, and specifically those of Latin America, play in mainstream United States film and television. Drawing on tools and ideas from American Indian studies, linguistic anthropology and film studies, this project constructs a chronology of Indigenous-language film dialogue from 1894 to 2021. Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) and Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019) serve as case studies, highlighting Quechua- and K’iche’-speaking characters respectively. A comparison of these two programs initiates a larger conversation around grassroots language advocacy, federal policy initiatives and hemispheric approaches to the study of Indigeneity in the Americas. Ultimately, City of Gold and OITNB reveal the extent to which language issues have permeated the public consciousness. Their presence in Hollywood reaffirms the need for interdisciplinary and hemispheric analyses on Indigenous migrant languages, realities and cinema.

Framed by Spolsky’s (2004) three-part model for language policy, this qualitative case study examines the ways in which supplementary education and family language policies assist in raising bilingual and biliterate speakers of Russian and English. It explores two domains of the children’s life: the contexts of family and a Russian Saturday School by investigating specific language beliefs, practices, and language management strategies at the Russian School and the families of five of its graduates as well as by providing a threefold perspective of parents, teachers and adolescents. Observations, interviews and surveys provide different types of data that helps us understand of how these different contexts impact the adolescents’ language development and their attitude towards their heritage language.

In line with previous research, this study confirms the leading role of parents in heritage language preservation. The main components of the parents’ language policy that supported bilingualism were (1) dedication to the home language and culture, (2) adherence to strict rules about when each language is used, and (3) support of Russian language development by providing additional opportunities to practice both receptive and reproductive skills in Russian. In the family context, language management was largely implemented through language practices and parental language use was one of the main tactics of such management.

The study demonstrates that the Russian School played an important role in the lives of these families not only as a place of supplementary education but also as a community builder where children socialized in the Russian culture in a pressure-free atmosphere. It played an important role in building a positive attitude towards the Russian language in adolescence.

The analysis also reveals a diminishing role of parents and teaching in affecting language choices and language practices of children in adolescence. At this stage, their choice to use Russian for personal activities was closely related to the opportunities to use the Russian language outside of the home and the Russian School, especially in communication with their peers.

This study has implications for the theory of family language policy, heritage language educators, program planners, and immigrant families interested in raising bilingual-biliterate children.

The rapid evolution of globalization and neoliberal economic policies has resulted in U.S. agro-corporations exporting their operations south of the border to Mexico in order to benefit from cheaper land and labor. While working families previously cyclically migrated during harvest seasons, many have been able to permanently settle in the San Quint�n Valley due to the year-round demand of labor in the region over the past two decades (Zlolniski, 2011). Consequently, migrant youth have increasingly had the opportunity to attend formal schools in the San Quint�n Valley without repeated disruptions in their school attendance (Evaristo, 2006). However, despite increased school opportunities, many migrant youth continue to work in the fields alongside their parents. While migrant families widely acknowledge that formal education is crucial to accessing higher paying jobs and improved living standards, a critical question arises: Why do migrant youth continue to work despite increased educational opportunities? Accordingly, this study examines the schooling and working experiences of migrant youth to illuminate how neoliberal economic policies and globalization processes have shaped their lived realities; particularly their educational experiences and perceptions of life trajectories.

My study explored shifting aspirations in school and work settings among migrant youth working for agro-corporations in the San Quint�n Valley by employing ethnographic methods. While this study is based on six months of fieldwork, I also draw upon previous interactions with the community built upon sixteen years of close relationships and active involvement in a local elementary school. Through participant observations, in-depth interviews and semi-structured activities, I focused on the narratives of local youth describing their working and schooling experiences in the community. My fieldwork was guided by three research questions: 1) How does the labor market in the community affect study youth’s schooling experiences? 2) How do youth's relationships within their social networks shape their aspirations?3) What is the relationship between youth’s aspirations and perceptions of their life trajectories?

The findings of my study reveal the ways in which the restricted labor market, close proximity to the United States and presence of gangs in the community shaped the perceptions of life trajectories, particularly aspirations, amongst migrant youth in San Telmo. While most youth acknowledged that formal schooling is a critical means to accessing higher wages and living standards, the restricted labor market in the community provided little motivation for them to continue their schooling beyond primary school. Consequently, the aspirations of youth in this study varied from moving to the United States for higher wages to gaining respect in the community through involvement in local gangs. Despite my study participants’ attempts to resist their structural constraints through differing aspirations, the limits of such resistance is evident as many of them ended up working for agro-corporations only a year after my study.