Berkeley Review of Education

Introduction to Volume 3, Issue 1.

This article is a version of a lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley on March 7, 2012.

The 2011 Chilean student movement was one of the most massive and original processes of social mobilization in Latin America in the last decade. Led by university students, the movement challenged the longstanding free-market orientation of educational policies in Chile, demanding a more active role for the State in the regulation and supply of education. In this article, we study the main educational and social factors that explain the emergence of the movement. We draw upon social movement theory as an analytical framework and use newspaper articles as basic sources of data. Our research suggests that the simultaneous expansion and privatization of the Chilean education system provided students not only with mobilizing grievances (e.g., disparity in access and quality) but also with capabilities and resources (e.g., critical awareness and higher aspirations) to advance political mobilization. We also find that student organizations created effective frames to take advantage of the windows of opportunity opened in Chilean democracy. Implications for comparative international research on education reform and social movements are also discussed.

A Beijing-based non-governmental organization (NGO) strives to empower rural Chinese women and migrant girls by increasing their awareness of constitutional rights and promoting their capacities to exercise their civil and political rights. This article reports the NGO leaders’ perceptions of the goals, strategies, and challenges in their citizenship endeavor, and analyzes their educational activities in theoretical and cultural contexts. By reporting a tension between the two founding leaders and unpacking the different approaches they take to engaging rural women, we demonstrate how the conceptualization of human rights education in the rural Chinese context is influenced by three approaches to human rights—the Confucian emphasis of rites, the Western tradition of emphasizing law, and the “human functional capacities” approach—and how the implementation process is constrained by China’s political framework, the social conditions of rural women, and the NGO leaders’ vantage points.

This essay describes the importance of transnationalism in the lives of U.S. immigrant students and their families and how public school educators and researchers have neither adequately recognized nor situated this lifestyle. The authors discuss globalization and what propels transnational movement and argue that existing immigrant adaptation research from the fields of sociology and anthropology focuses on immigration processes extensively without making connections to the classroom. The authors maintain that transnationalism remains largely under- theorized in educational research. Drawing on their experiences as researchers and teachers, the authors provide a glimpse into the lives of these ‘overlooked’ transnational students through a series of vignettes. The essay concludes by addressing the teaching and learning implications of working with transnational students.