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Archive for August, 2005

August 13, 2005

Cummins, Jim. “Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention.” Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. Ed. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. 101-117.

August 13th 2005 Posted to Latina/o American

Cummins argues for a reciprocal interaction model—as opposed to a transmission model—of instruction. Whereas the transmission model is based on the premise “that the teacher’s task is to impart knowledge or skills that he or she possesses to students who do not yet have these skills,” the reciprocal interaction model empowers students “to become active generators of their knowledge” (111). (Read the article)

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August 10, 2005

Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres. After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. New York: New York UP, 2004.

August 10th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, The Academy

In this book, Darder and Torres critique the concept of “race” in contemporary political and academic rhetoric as a mask for the class oppression that underlies late capitalist American society. “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “race”—an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness,” write Darder and Torres (1). Darder and Torres focus their Marxist analysis on the United States education system, and specifically on the key issues of bilingual education, standardized testing, critical race theory and Latino studies departments. They argue that if any real changes are going to be made in educational policy, the concept of ‘race’ must be dismantled and the underlying class issues revealed and critiqued. (Read the article)

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August 8, 2005

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

August 08th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, The Academy

This groundbreaking book reports the findings of Valenzuela’s three year ethnographic study of immigrant Mexican and Mexican-American students at Juan Seguín High School (a pseudonym) in Houston, Texas. According to Valenzuela, the much-studied achievement gap between first generation Mexican immigrants (who tend to have a pro-school attitude and perform well) and second or third generation immigrants (who typically have an antischool attitude and perform poorly) can be traced directly back to the schools themselves. Valenzuela argues that, “For the majority of Seguín High School’s regular (non college-bound) track, schooling is a subtractive process. It divests these youth of important social and cultural resources, leaving them progressively vulnerable to academic failure” (3). (Read the article)

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August 3, 2005

D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Free Press, 1991.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Academy

D’Souza writes that there is a “victim’s revolution” underway across U.S. college
campuses, a movement conducted “on behalf of minority victims” and seeking to “put an end to bigoted attitudes with permit perceived social injustice to continue, to rectify past and present inequities, and to advance the interests of the previously disenfranchised” (13). This revolution, D’Souza critically observes, is altering higher education admissions policies, curriculum, and student life. Analyzing episodes at Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard, D’Souza concludes that the “controversial claims of the new politics of race and sex” (20) are actually promoting “an education in closed-mindedness and intolerance, which is to say, illiberal education” in the name of liberal education (229). (Read the article)

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Weis, Lois and Michelle Fine, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Beyond Silenced Voices is a compilation of articles focusing on institutionalized silencing in public schools. Divided into two parts, Weis and Fine’s collection begins with a series of studies that analyze the ways marginalized voices are systematically silenced according to race, gender, and class affiliations. These pieces are each concerned with the ways certain voices are silenced by both implicit and explicit institutional structures imbedded in the public school system, as well as the way in which these silences are sustained and naturalized by the institution. In the second part of the book, writers attempt to listen to these institutionally silenced voices by incorporating individual testimonials into the articles. It is only by hearing and centering these “once marginalized” voices, Fine and Weis argue in their Introduction, that we can move “‘beyond silenced voices’” and “understand and interrupt the perversions and pleasures of power, privilege, and marginalization in public schooling” (2). (Read the article)

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Portes, Alejandro and Dag McLeod, “Educational Progress of Children of Immigrants: The Roles of Class, Ethnicity and School Context,” Sociology of Education, 69.4 (1996): 255-75.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and Globalization, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, Asian American

This article addresses two major factors that contribute to the success or failure of students from immigrant families: socioeconomic status and the social influence exerted by ethnic communities on students. As Portes and McLeod write in their abstract,

“Recent immigration to the United States has spawned a rapidly growing second generation, most of whom are of school age. This article reports the findings of a study of 5,255 second-generation high school students in Florida and California, who were children of Cuban and Vietnamese immigrants (representative of relatively advantaged groups) and of Haitian and Mexican immigrants (representative of relatively disadvantaged groups). The study found that parents’ socioeconomic status (SES), length of U.S. residence, and hours spent on homework significantly affected the students’ academic performance, but did not eliminate the effects of ethnic community. Attendance at higher-SES schools increased the average academic performance and the positive effect of parents’ SES, whereas attendance at inner-city schools flattened the negative effect of ethnic disadvantage. However, school context had no appreciable effect on children from advantaged ethnic backgrounds” (255). (Read the article)

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Ogbu, John U. “Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning,” Educational Researcher, 21.8 (1992): 5-14.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, African American

In this article Ogbu argues that two major approaches in the current school reform movement, core curriculum and multicultural education, are inadequate methods of dealing with the struggles faced by minority students in public schools. He suggests that the main reason these methods have failed is that they ignore the often oppositional nature of minority cultures to American mainstream culture. As Ogbu writes, “the crucial issue in cultural diversity and learning is the relationship between the minority cultures and the American mainstream culture. Minorities whose cultural frames of reference are oppositional to the cultural frame of reference of American mainstream culture have greater difficulty crossing cultural boundaries at school to learn” (5). (Read the article)

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August 1, 2005

Flores-González, Nilda. School Kids/Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002.

August 01st 2005 Posted to Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (2000), 28% of all 16-24 year old Hispanics are high school drop-outs, as compared to 7.3% of whites, 12.6% of blacks and 4.3% of Asians (Flores-González 2). In School Kids/Street Kids Flores-González addresses the high drop-out rate of Latino high school students by conducting a study of thirty three Puerto Rican students at Hernández High School in Chicago, a school whose student body is comprised mostly of low income Hispanic students. Flores-González divides the students in her study up into what she calls “school kids,” or students who adopt an identity based on participation and achievement and “street kids,” or students who form an identity in opposition to school and authority. According to Flores-González, there are several specific steps schools can take to reinforce “school kid” identity formation among Latino students, thus lowering drop-out rates. (Read the article)

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