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Open Access Publications from the University of California

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Welcome to the Berkeley Review of Education, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published online and edited by students from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley Review of Education engages issues of educational diversity and equity within cognitive, developmental, sociohistorical, linguistic, and cultural contexts. The BRE encourages submissions on research and theory from senior and emerging scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers. To submit a paper, please click on "Submit article to this journal" in the side bar.

Articles

“We teach in English here”: Conflict between language ideology and test accountability in an English-only newcomer school

Drawing from a six-month ethnography of tenth grade immigrant students from Mexico and their teachers in a Central Texas English immersion program, this article documents multiple contradictory teacher practices regarding the use of English and Spanish in the classroom. This article argues that these varying practices represented a tension between Literacy High’s official English-only policy and a contradictory political ideology prioritizing performance on standardized tests that led to tolerance of Spanish language use.

Mobilizing Blackness: Analyzing 21st Century Black Student Collective Agency in the University

Black student activism in the 21st century has gained international notoriety with popular movements such as #StudentBlackOut, #FeesMustFall, and #ConcernedStudent1950. Between 2014-2017, Black students manipulated the momentum of a larger social movement (the Movement for Black Lives) in order to secure organizing victories for racial justice, both on and off their college campuses. This essay explores the meaning making processes of Black student activists who participated either in on campus or off campus activism between 2014-2017. Emerging themes from the interviews have demonstrated that Black student activists are both politicized and enter movement organizing because of catalytic events, and they see themselves as resource brokers who funnel university resources, labor, and energy into dispossessed communities. I argue that students use their racialized subjectivities in the neoliberal university space to leverage resources. In addition, Black students are highly aware of their positionality, and they raise critiques of their class-fluid positions as college students and the protections that student identity provides them.