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Growing numbers of working-class Puerto Ricans are migrating from larger mainland metropolitan areas into smaller, "safer" communities in search of a better quality of life for themselves and their families. What they may also encounter in moving to such communities is a discourse of exclusion that associates their differences and their lower socioeconomic class with a lack of effort and an unwillingness to assimilate into mainstream culture. In this ethnographic study of a community in conflict, educator and anthropologist Ellen Bigler examines such discourses as she explores one city's heated dispute that arose over bringing multiculturalism and bilingual education into their lives and their schools' curricula.

The impassioned debate that erupted between long-time white ethnic residents and more recently arrived Puerto Rican citizens in the de-industrialized city the author calls "Arnhem" was initially sparked by one school board member's disparaging comments about Latinos. The conflict led to an investigation by the attempts to implement multicultural reforms in the city's schools. American Conversations follows the ensuing conflict, looks at the history of racial formation in the United States, and considers the specific economic and labor histories of the groups comprising the community in opposition. Including interviews with students, teachers, parents, and community leaders, as well as her own observations of exchanges among them inside and outside the classroom, Bigler's book explores the social positions, diverging constructions of history, and polarized understandings of contemporary racial/ethnic dynamics in Arnhem. Through her retelling of one community's crisis, Bigler illuminates the nature of racial politics in the United States and how both sides in the debate over multicultural education struggle to find a common language.

American Conversations will appeal to anyone invested in education and multiculturalism in the United States as well as those interested in anthropology, sociology, racial and ethnic studies, educational institutions, migration and settlement, the effects of industrial restructuring, and broad issues of community formation and conflict.

Within the past few decades, there has been great progress in deaf education in Latin America and growth in the empowerment of their Deaf communities. However, there is little awareness outside that region of these successes. For the first time, this book provides access, in English, to scholarly research in these areas. Written by Latin American Deaf and hearing contributors, Change and Promise provides a counter argument to external, deficit views of the Latin American Deaf community by sharing research and accounts of success in establishing and expanding bilingual deaf education, Deaf activism, Deaf culture, and wider access for deaf children and adults.
       Change and Promise describes the historical, cultural, and political contexts for providing bilingual deaf education in Latin America. Bilingual deaf education uses students’ sign language, while simultaneously giving them access to and teaching them the majority spoken/written language. This book describes current bilingual deaf education programs in the region that have increased society’s understandings of Deaf culture and sign languages. This cause, as well as others, have been championed by successful social movements including the push for official recognition of Libras, the sign language of Brazil. Change and Promise covers this expanding empowerment of Deaf communities as they fight for bilingual deaf education, sign language rights, and deaf civil rights.
       Despite the vast political and cultural differences throughout Latin America, an epistemological shift has occurred regarding how Deaf people are treated and their stories narrated, from labeling “deaf as handicapped” to being recognized as a linguistic minority. This panoramic study of these challenges and triumphs will provide an invaluable resource for improving outcomes in deaf education and help to secure the rights of deaf children and adults in all societies.

Educators, scholars, and community activists recognize that immersion education is a key means to restoring Indigenous and other heritage languages. But language maintenance and revitalization involve many complex issues, foremost may be the lack of local professional development opportunities for potential language teachers.

In Alaska, the Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education (SLATE) project was designed to enable Indigenous communities and schools to improve the quality of native-language and English-language instruction and assessment by focusing on the elimination of barriers that have historically hindered degree completion for Indigenous and rural teachers. The Guided Research Collaborative (GRC) model, was employed to support the development of communities of practice through near-peer mentoring and mutual scaffolding. Through this important new model, teachers of both the heritage language, in this case Central Yup’ik, and English were able to situate their professional development into a larger global context based on current notions of multilingualism.

In Communities of Practice contributors show how the SLATE program was developed and implemented, providing an important model for improving second-language instruction and assessment. Through an in-depth analysis of the program, contributors show how this project can be successfully adapted in other communities via its commitment to local control in language programming and a model based on community-driven research.

Communities of Practice demonstrates how an initial cohort of Yup’ik- and English-language teachers collaborated to negotiate and ultimately completed the SLATE program. In so doing, these educators enhanced the program and their own effectiveness as teachers through a greater understanding of language learning. It is these understandings that will ultimately allow heritage- and English-language teachers to work together to foster their students’ success in any language.

 

Educating Across Borders is an ethnography of the learning experiences of transfronterizxs, border-crossing students who live on the U.S.-Mexico border, their lives spanning two countries and two languages. Authors María Teresa de la Piedra, Blanca Araujo, and Alberto Esquinca examine language practices and funds of knowledge these students use as learning resources to navigate through their binational, dual language school experiences.

The authors, who themselves live and work on the border, question artificially created cultural and linguistic borders. To explore this issue, they employed participant-observation, focus groups, and individual interviews with teachers, administrators, and staff members to construct rich understandings of the experiences of transfronterizx students. These ethnographic accounts of their daily lives counter entrenched deficit perspectives about transnational learners.

Drawing on border theory, immigration and border studies, funds of knowledge, and multimodal literacies, Educating Across Borders is a critical contribution toward the formation of a theory of physical and metaphorical border crossings that ethnic minoritized students in U.S. schools must make as they traverse the educational system.

During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia’s indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in southeastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Bilingual education was a component of education reform linked to foreign-aid development mandates, and foreign aid workers figure in New Languages of the State, as do teachers and their unions, transnational intellectual networks, and assertive indigenous political and intellectual movements across the Andes.

Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.