Education Urban Schooling

Tiera Chante' Tanksley is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies within the Urban Schooling program. Broadly, her research examines the intersectional impacts of race, class, and gender on the educational experiences of African American girls. More narrowly, she explores the ways Black girls read, resist, and revise degrading images of Black girlhood as presented in digital, cyber, and televisual spaces. Tiera's educational background includes an M.

This study explored undergraduate students' use of social media to engage in discussion of racial/ethnic diversity and campus climate. The purpose of the study was to better understand how students utilize social media to talk about issues of racial/ethnic diversity and campus climate to inform how UCLA might capitalize on social media use to promote a safe, welcoming and empowering campus environment. Eighteen interviews and an in-depth content analysis of student Facebook pages were used to explore the following questions: 1) How do students describe their posting behaviors and engagement with issues of racial diversity and campus climate on social media? 2) How frequently do students use social media to discuss issues of racial diversity and campus climate in either positive or negative ways? and 3) What does participant posting behavior and engagement with issues of racial diversity and campus climate on social media say about the utility of social media in promoting a positive campus climate?

If teachers learn to recognize and value the translation work that students do with their immigrant parents, they can better build those skills into academic literacies. Growing up, I was known as "la secretaria." Literally translated this means "secretary," but in my home it meant much more. As "la secretaria," I helped my family speak, read, write, and communicate with the English-speaking world. My parents, aunts and uncles used this as a term of endearment and as a compliment. Calling me "la secretaria" signaled their recognition that I was acquiring the English language skills necessary to translate information between home and the outside world. When my family called out, "Dónde está mi secretaria?" I knew they weren't simply trying to locate me, but that they needed my support as their translator. They might be calling on me to help with almost any facet of our household life-calling the insurance company with questions about our health coverage, filling out a credit card application at a department store, helping my mom with her homework for her ESL classes, or many other things. My work as "la secretaria" was always quite separate from my homework as a student. And while I knew that my role as a translator, and secretaria, was important for my family, I never really thought about the value it had in helping me develop linguistic or academic skills. I also never had the sense that my teachers knew much about my work as a translator, beyond a few who may have had a general awareness. Oftentimes immigrants, and their life experiences, become "invisible" to the general population. Students who translate may be even more hidden because they are children. Thus, the work children do as translators and cultural brokers most often slips under the radar of teachers. Even to children and families it may not be really noticed because it is a normal part of every day life. When I became a teacher, I knew that many of my students did similar kinds of language brokering work for their families, but I didn't necessarily know how to meaningfully build from those experiences in school. Now, as a researcher, I am working with a team to learn more about the wide variety of experiences that children of immigrants (and English learners) have as translators, how to build upon the skills they acquire from these experiences, and find ways to bridge this specific practice with academic literacies.

During the winter quarter of 2007, the UCLA Research Training Grant
(RTG) Spencer Fellows and their faculty advisors began meetings to plan and organize a symposium that would focus on immigrant youth and education. The symposium would be sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and guidance would be provided by faculty advisors, but decisions about the conference structure, goals and focus would be left to the graduate students themselves. Following five months of planning, the Spencer Symposium on Immigration and Education entitled, “We Are Here: (Im)migrant Youth at the Center of Social Activism and Critical Educational Scholarship”2 took place on May 3, 2007.

AMAE Special Issue: Testimonio as Radical Story-Telling and Creative Resistance. Throughout my life I have come home to Modesto, California more times than my heart can remember; it is my heart that remembers and keeps my hometown ever present. Today, I am an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco. Yet, who I am today is profoundly intertwined with the little girl who grew up in the Central Valley as a daughter of working class Mexican immigrants. This is my testimonio—my truth-telling story—of how I learned from the sacrifices my parents made as Mexicano immigrants pursuing a dream of a better life for their children in Central Valley California, and it is the story of learning from my family’s knowledge, strengths, cultural resources, and Community Cultural Wealth.

A staggering one in five students in America is a child of immigrants, and speaks a language other than English in the home. Many view this student population as homogenous, neglecting to notice its vast diversity including: cultural and ethnic backgrounds, academic preparation, age and entry into U.S. schools, and socioeconomic status, to name just a few. In addition to these monolithic views, English language learners (ELLs) are also viewed in deficit terms. By employing a performance ethnography methodology, we invite our readers to engage in a participatory reading of the ways these students' stories deconstruct, counter, and rupture deficit orientations.

In Gloria H. Cuadráz & Yolanda Flores (Eds.) (Nov. 2017) Claiming Home, Shaping Community Testimonios De Los Valles. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Book Abstract: To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community offers the testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican descent people who left rural agricultural valles, specifically the Imperial and the San Joaquín Valleys, to pursue higher education at a University of California campus.

In Youth Held at the Border: Immigration, Education, and the Politics of Inclusion, Lisa (Leigh) Patel, a skillful ethnographer and graceful storyteller, invites us into the daily lives of adolescent immigrants negotiating the politics of inclusion (and exclusion).

Equity Alliance Blog  http://www.niusileadscape.org/bl/topics/authors/rosa-jimenez/

For decades Latinas/os have been called ‘the sleeping giant’ because of their dormant collective political and economic promise. We saw a glimpse of this promise during the 2012 November elections as 71% of Latina/o voters helped re-elect President Obama, signaling to many that the giant had awakened. In order to re-imagine the education of Latina/o immigrant children we must rupture the construction of immigration as a problem, and one that lies within the immigrant herself. Like previous diasporas, Latino immigrants rupture dominant society’s layered yet established forms of social status and cultural/national identities; they disrupt monolithic notions of what it means to be an American.