Reframing Success: Participatory Impacts of Storytelling in PAR Collaborative with Latinx Middle School Students

This article examines the participatory impact of a storytelling project on a small group of Latinx English learners in a sixth grade classroom. The storytelling project unexpectedly emerged as a positive ripple effect from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiative to foster civic empowerment among middle school students in an English Language Development classroom in Northern California during the 2014–2015 academic year. As the university researcher and classroom teacher worked together on the PAR project, they came to understand the importance of storytelling for this group of students and agreed to create a safe classroom space with appropriate instructional support for the students to develop and write their stories in English. Although the PAR project failed to produce an Action Plan based on students’ research findings, the storytelling ripple effect from the PAR initiative had a transformative impact on the students as they constructed counter-stories to dominant discourses that marginalize and dehumanize Latinx immigrant students and their families. Through the process of writing and reading their stories aloud in English, the Latinx English learners successfully positioned themselves as resilient, hard-working students who are fully capable of participating in civic programs, projects, or debates with their native English-speaking peers

Teaching the American Dream: The Unintended Consequences for Latinx Students Conducting Participatory Action Research

In this paper, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork with Latinx English language learners in Northern California to consider how schools inadvertently contribute to internalized racism by teaching the ideal of an American meritocracy while obscuring issues of social justice affecting students and their families. In what follows I will briefly cover four main points. First, I explain the conceptual framework guiding my analysis of the relationship between school policies and practices and internalized racism. Second, I outline my fieldwork site and the research methods used during my study. Third, I describe how educational policies and practices at the Latinx students’ school taught the ideal of an American meritocracy but obscured issues of social justice affecting students and their families. Finally, I provide ethnographic evidence demonstrating how students’ understanding of an American meritocracy framed their analysis of data collected during a Participatory Action Research Project and led to deficit perspectives about the Latinx immigrant community they were studying

Crossing the Street: Civic Engagement and the Politics of Belonging among Latino and Jewish Middle School Students in Northern California

In this paper, I draw on 10 months of fieldwork with English language learners in Northern California to explore the possibilities and limitations of Participatory Action Research (PAR) in schools doubly segregated by race and class. Today much of the progress integrating American public schools that occurred in the decade following Brown vs. Board of Education has been reversed—even as the overall population of public school students has become increasingly diverse (Orfield et. al. 2014). During the 2011-2012 academic year, 55% of Latino students and 45% of Black students in California attended intensely segregated schools (i.e., 91-100% minority students), and half of these children also attended schools with a student population that was more than 90% low-income (Orfield et. al. 2014). Participatory Action Research has been promoted as a pedagogical approach that actively fosters civic and educational engagement by providing young people opportunities to analyze and engage with inequitable distributions of power and resources (Cammarota and Fine 2008; Clements 2005; Dyrness 2012; Abu El-Haj 2007; Ginwright 2008; Torre and Fine 2008). During the 2014-2015 school year, however, I found that intensely segregated 6th grade students from Spanish-speaking immigrant families conducting PAR in their segregated neighborhoods drew heavily from deficit-oriented perspectives as they attempted to analyze and understand the civic apathy of neighborhood residents during the early months of their research. What stands out in this case example is how the Latino students began to consider the ways in which political agency and citizenship are constituted in relationship with others when, halfway through the academic year, the PAR project was embedded in an integrated after-school program in partnership with a private Jewish day school located across the street from their public school. In what follows, I argue that the integrated setting prompted a shift in the Latino students’ understanding of civic participation in California and fostered new ways of imagining their own civic identities

Tracking Identity: Academic Performance and Ethnic Identity among Ecuadorian Immigrant Teenagers in Madrid

This article examines Ecuadorian students\u27 attempts to contest immigrant stereotypes and redefine their social identities in Madrid, Spain. I argue that academic tracking plays a pivotal role in the trajectory of students\u27 emergent ethnic identity. To illustrate this process, I focus on students who abandon their academic and professional ambitions as they are tracked into low‐achieving classrooms, and in the process participate in social and cultural practices that reify dominant stereotypes of Latino immigrants.[academic tracking, identity, immigration, ethnicity, Spain

Here your ambitions are illusions : Boundaries of Integration and Ethnicity Among Ecuadorian Immigrant Teenagers in Madrid

This study analyzes the relationship between a discourse of integration in the European Union and the ways in which the ethnic boundaries of segregated social groups of immigrant children are conceptualized in one working-class and immigrant neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. I use qualitative data gathered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among Ecuadorian immigrant teenagers to explore the unintended consequences of European efforts to promote the integration of immigrants in member states. My argument is that the pervasive discourse of integration in the European Union is central to a racialized process of subject formation occurring in Madrid through which the children of immigrants come to be recognized as ethnic outsiders in Spanish society. By analyzing in ethnographic detail how discursive forces intertwine with material constraints to shape the subjectivity of immigrant children in Madrid, this study helps to explain how racialized colonial and postcolonial socioeconomic hierarchies are reproduced in current immigration scenarios

If They Tell Their Stories and No One Hears Them, Does It Challenge the Status Quo?: The Role of Audience, Listening and Dialogue in Storytelling

Storytelling is cultural practice long used by African Americans, Latinxs and Native Americans to understand and resist American structures of inequity and oppression. In this paper, I explore the relationship between the social context of storytelling and the construction of Latinx student identities using ethnographic data gathered during 8 months of fieldwork with nine middle school students from Spanish speaking immigrant families in Northern California. This group of students was invited to join an after-school program together with eight students from a private Jewish day school located across the street. Although one aim of the program was to facilitate intercultural storytelling, the minoritized positionality of the Latinx students within this social context hindered their ability to tell stories about their families’ histories and their personal experiences. Once the students were invited to further develop and share their stories within a segregated classroom space, however, the act of storytelling increased students’ positive self-awareness in their ability to confront the many hardships and heartaches they were experiencing as immigrant children and the children of immigrants. What stands out in this case study is that although their storytelling experience allowed students to nurture a positive Latinx cultural identity, a critical component of storytelling--creating a space for listening and dialogue between participants with differing worldviews--was overlooked in the program

Positionality and Power in PAR: Exploring the Competing Motivations of PAR Stakeholders with Latinx Middle School Students in Northern California

In this paper, I provide a case example exploring the complex relationships negotiated by a university researcher when PAR is conducted in a public school setting in order to better theorize how the positionality of PAR stakeholders effects classroom-based Participatory Action Research. I argue that despite a shared commitment to social justice and educational equity, the different positionalities of the university researcher and classroom teacher not only shaped each stakeholder’s relationship to Participatory Action Research, but also led to competing academic motivations in the classroom that undergirded the ultimate shortcomings of the project

Interculturality: Where Do We Go From Here?

This issue provides striking examples of how current educational policies and practices play a fundamental role in processes that constitute immigrant and ethnic minority children as ‘others’. This collective compendium not only interweaves theory and practice but also initiates a trans-Atlantic conversation about intercultural education embracing ethnographic cases from North America (Texas), South America (Bolivia) and Europe (Spain). These conversations lead towards an interesting exercise of similarities and differences in how interculturality is used and understood in the classroom, based on the local fluid composition of ideological, ethnic, political and economic factors. The exercise in comparison of these intercontinental ethnographic exercises points out crucial common themes that authors use as prisms to show the articulation of education policies and epistemological contradictions. It is with particular attention that these contributions examine educational policies and practices in intercultural contexts and their effects in essentializing the concept of culture as if it were a fixed attribute believed to determine students’ behaviours, attitudes, school expectations and social relationships. Most of the ethnographic cases presented clearly document how cultural differences, rather than being seen as an asset in intercultural education contexts, are more often understood in terms of ‘deficits’. In sum, the core anthropological contribution of these articles is centred on the analysis of the processes that lead to cultural reifications, how these transform into stereotypes that weigh down students’ trajectories in schools, and how this culminates in the very opposite of the original intention of educational policies

Comparison and Renaissance of Classic Line-of-Balance and Linear Schedule Concepts for Construction Industry

Line-of-Balance (LOB) is a useful analytical tool for repetitive activities in construction projects, which allows showing which crew is assigned to what repetitive work unit of an activity. LOB is closely related to the linear scheduling method, but possesses some challenges: It must be clarified how it counts, as previous studies displayed an apparent measurement gap at the origin, implicitly representing that LOB starts at the first unit finish. Slopes in linear scheduling and LOB are different, even though both portray a measure of progress of an activity. This paper therefore tracks evolution and current use of LOB versus linear schedules. Its contribution to the body of knowledge is threefold: First, based on a literature review, LOB is found to be rooted in Activity-on-Arrow (AOA) diagrams, which makes it event-centered, not progress-centered. Differences in representing the start and productivity between LOB and linear scheduling are reviewed and explained both mathematically and graphically. Second, different LOB concepts are extracted and assessed to facilitate comparing LOB from its original use in manufacturing against the limited application of its objective chart in the construction industry. Third, a mathematical formulation based on singularity functions is developed, which can model staggering, continuity, and interruptability scenarios. Fourth, the repetitive nature of LOB and LSM enables resource-specific equations that model the level of detail of individual crews performing individual tasks