Review of \u3ci\u3eArab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community\u3c/i\u3e, by Elizabeth Boosahda

Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community offers a detailed history of the lives of Arab immigrants in Worcester, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Booshada conducted primary source research, interviewed nearly 200 people, and documented the immigrants\u27 stories of their families\u27 lives from 1880-1915. The author\u27s personal and family connections to the community, in combination with the candid interview excerpts, provide a fascinating and much needed account of a people who survived, thrived in, and helped to create an important part of American society. The book\u27s main focus is to describe, from the perspectives of elderly immigrants of mainly Christian Arab ancestry, their experiences in the United States. Booshada gives a brief history of the Arab world at the time of their migration, and each chapter provides extensive depictions of their neighborhoods, workplaces, traditions, education, culture, the process of Americanization, and the legacies that they left to their progeny

Discontinuities and Differences among Muslim Arab-Americans: Making It at Home and School

Cohen and Neufeld (1981) have remarked that schools are a great theater in which conflicts of culture get played out. The same can be said about homes and families in relation to schools. In fact, scholars and educators have attempted to understand, define, and refine the parameters and connections that bind schools and homes together. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which students’ success at home and school has been conceptualized in scholarly literature, and then connect this literature to the lives of Arab-American youth and their families. The underlying premise undergirding the ideas in this chapter is that identity development as it is enacted in home and school discourses is related to socialization, learning, and achievement. I discuss cultural capital theory (Bourdieu, 1987; Lareau, 2000; Bowles & Gintis, 1976) and a cultural-ecological perspective (Ogbu, 1982a) to examine models of congruence and difference and to explain students’ achievement in two worlds. Then, I proceed to describe and analyze the two theories in relation to data collected in Arab-American neighborhoods by situating each within the context of research conducted in education. Next, I offer an ethnographic case of Yemeni youth and their literacies and a socio-historical case of Palestinian women’s lives and situate these within the afore-mentioned theoretical models. Before concluding the chapter, I offer some suggestions for teachers and schools in relation to Muslim Arab populations

From Neologisms to Social Practice: An Analysis of the Wanding of America

In this article I discuss how individuals and communities in the United States re-present themselves in the context of the September 11 tragedy and its complex aftermath. My aim is to explore the American discourse on inclusion and discrimination by examining the neologisms and social practices that were amplified by the attack in local and national debates. This document file contains both a page-image version and a text version of the essay

In-betweenness: Religion and conflicting visions of literacy

In this article, I examine the multiple uses of religious and secular text at school, home, and in the community. Specifically, I focus on how Yemeni American high school girls employ religious, Arabic, and secular texts as a means for negotiating home and school worlds. The frame of reference—in-betweenness—is a powerful heuristic with which the contextual uses of texts and language among the Yemeni American students can be delineated. In-betweenness signifies the immediate adaptation of one’s performance or identity to one’s textual, social, cultural, and physical surroundings. During 1997–1999, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Yemeni and Arab community in southeastern Michigan. I examined the literacy practices of the Yemeni girls in and out of school by considering more closely both their use of language in the cultural and religious locus and their use of texts. I did this by exploring the hidden texts in their high school, the texts of weddings and parties, the texts of Arabic school, and the texts of muhathara (lecture). Within these spaces, the girls’ identities shifted to reflect their textual interpretations as either Yemeni or American. The texts were manifested in different contexts and served to bridge, subvert, and recreate Yemeni and American social and cultural norms. I argue that in order for researchers and educators to support diversity in public schools, they must be aware not only of its existence but also of its manifestation and acknowledge that diverse literacy practices are part of a larger geopolitical way of life. Awareness is the first step toward schools that not only focus on individual students but that also privilege those students’ communities. Knowing that there are conflicting visions of literacy and that there are multiple ways to enact them is crucial to the development of powerful and engaging social and academic curricula

“You Pulled the Chair from Right Under Me!”: How a Black Young Man Disappears from a High School Reading Class

Relational identities in the classroom shape teachers and their students as well as the researchers who study them for the long term. Researchers whose fieldwork is located at “home” simultaneously embody with research participants the past, present, and future interactions on a shared continuum of experience. The collaborative enterprise of fieldwork is relived, retold, remade, and it is always present. In this chapter, the shared, embodied experience that infused the ethnographic space in situ transformed one’s understanding of young people, their teacher, and the researcher. The study was focused on better understanding students’ experiences with literacy in high school. Within the context of ethnography and education, it is important to examine carefully teacher and student interaction relationally in connection to the reproduction of social class tropes and gendered identities as well as discourse norms. Of particular interest was the exploration of literacy learning within the contexts of multiple texts, such as assigned novels and newspapers, standardized tests, school district Reading Graduation Demonstration Exam (RGDE), and students’ reading and writing interests. Questions that informed fieldwork included what does “a reading class” mean in high school? What practices constitute such a class, and how do students resist these practices? And, how do relational activities around texts and also between teacher and students create a sense of belonging in connection to reading as an academic home in the classroom? Adolescents’ literacy practices, interaction with teachers and with texts are in part influenced by both their self-perceived and imposed identities (Beach and O’Brien, 2007). Male students, in particular, sometimes become less engaged with literacy as time passes in high school reading classes. How can reading play a more central role in young men’s lives such that it engages them rather than alienates them? The dynamics around literacy presented here, especially for young men, whether from the school or home literacy context, seem to defy the notion of a possible commonality

Literacy Access through Storytime: An Ethnographic Study of Public Library Storytellers in a Low-Income Neighborhood

While early literacy achievement continues to be stratified by social class in the United States, public libraries often offer programs such as “storytime” in order to bolster the literacy development of youth in their communities. The purpose of the present ethnographic study was to explore how storytellers recruited and maintained participation in this free literacy program in a lower-income neighborhood. Via participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection, storytellers recruited new patrons to storytime by (1) appealing to community members to enter the physical space of the library and (2) appealing to library patrons to attend storytime. Once patrons attended storytime, storytellers acted in order to maintain storytime attendance by (1) facilitating meaningful learning experiences, (2) fostering enjoyment through participation, (3) developing nurturing relationships, and (4) offering flexibility in storytime expectations. By exploring a contextualized account of the work of storytellers, the findings suggest important avenues through which public programs may contribute to more equitable access to literacy learning

Critical Pedagogy in Classroom Discourse

The classroom is a unique discursive space for the enactment of critical pedagogy. In some ways, all classroom discourse is critical because it is inherently political, and at the heart of critical pedagogy is an implicit understanding that power is negotiated daily by teachers and students. Historically, critical pedagogy is rooted in schools of thought that have emphasized the individual and the self in relation and in contrast to society, sociocultural and ideological forces, and economic factors and social progress. In addressing conceptualizations in Orthodox Marxism (with Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim) in the mid-19th century and the Frankfurt School (with Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, and Walter Benjamin), contemporary critical theory still embodies the concept of false consciousness, the idea that institutional processes and material mislead people, and the internalization of values and norms, which induce people to act and behave according to what it is expected in society (Agger 1991). The problem of domination (which cannot be reduced to oppression, nor is it akin to it), a complex understanding of how social structures mediate power relations to create different forms of alienation (Morrow and Brown 1994), mainly depicts the reproduction of social struggles, inequities, and power differences, reflecting some of the main aspects of critical pedagogy classrooms. Theoretically, critical pedagogy in classroom discourse embodies the practice of engaging students in the social construction of knowledge, which grounds its pillars on power relations. In utilizing critical pedagogy in the classroom, teachers must question their own practices in the process to construct knowledge and why the main knowledge is legitimized by the dominant culture. Moreover, through emancipatory knowledge (Habermas 1981) educators draw practical and technical knowledge together, creating a space for understanding the relations of power and privilege that manipulate and distort social relationships. In the end, participants in critical pedagogy classrooms are encouraged to engage in collective action, founded on the principles of social justice, equality, and empowerment (McLaren 2009). In literacy studies, the discourse of critical pedagogy embodies the emancipatory force that challenges the idea of literacy as not being politically neutral, observing that with literacy comes perspectives and interpretations that are ultimately political (Gee 2008). In using literacy as a skill to prepare individuals to “read the word” and “read the world” (in Freirean terms), classroom discourse adds to the idea of learning the ability to decipher symbols and acquire the academic language to empower participants in their contexts, calling educators to open spaces for marginalized students to voice their struggles in political, social, and economic spheres. Freire (1985) defends the idea that literacy in itself does not empower those who live in oppressive conditions, but it must be linked to a critical understanding of the social context and action to change such conditions. In these terms, Auerbach (1995) refers to critical literacies as the “rhetoric of strengths’” (644) for focusing on cultural sensitivity, celebration of diversity, and empowerment of parents, and she also highlights that empowerment is not regarded in individual terms but in social terms (655). An essential aspect of critical pedagogy in literacy learning includes the ongoing recognition of the power relationships amongst individuals who are involved in education, such as the power dynamics within family, classrooms, programs, and institutions. Street (1990) also argues that the failure of literacy campaigns reflects the non-consideration of significant aspects of literacy practices by those more powerful outsiders such as teachers, administrators, and politicians

Book review: Neha Vora, \u3ci\u3eTeach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar\u3c/i\u3e

With a provocative title that inherently questions who might be served and educated best by the branch campuses of top US universities in Qatar and Gulf states, Vora’s new book debunks some old myths and reminds readers from the outset that “liberalism has Arabian roots” (18). Vora wonders about and studies the transplant of liberal education into “so-called illiberal” countries like Qatar and other Gulf States. Her timely book offers on-the-ground perspectives of students and faculty in these transplant institutions as they engage with curriculum and one another in a new knowledge economy. The book contributes to scholarship about how the cultural ideological framework of liberalism informs and shapes discourses on educational policies and the restructuring of nationalistic reforms for development across the Arab world. Vora frames the book through a knowledge economy perspective that is tension filled. For example, throughout the book she examines the ef­fects of educational reform and nationalism as they are enacted in the US branch campuses of the Gulf. As Vora notes, branch campuses such as Education City in Qatar are simultaneously “spaces of contradiction” and “sites of new agencies and belongings” (29). As such, she argues that conceptions of knowledge economy become realigned with on-the-ground Arab nationalist orientations in combination with notions of the civilizing mission of Western knowledge economies. Furthermore, Vora examines the tensions that non-national students—the majority of the stu­dent population in the branch campuses—and Qatari students attending college experience, but as the author notes, there is no critical mass of Qatari students, and more importantly, there is little Qatarization of the workforce in this oil-rich Gulf state, wherein most people do not work. ... As Teach for Arabia demonstrates, Gulf branch campuses are contest­ed pedagogical, national, public, and global terrains wherein a microcosm of the world gets educated. Unlike many other places, diversity character­izes their populations of students, faculty, and staff. Ironically, even in this transnational, diverse milieu, there is a paucity of recognition and under­standing of the Qatari student population vis-à-vis their work futures and their academic trajectories socioeconomically and culturally within the campuses and nationally. As Vora astutely shows throughout the book, the divergent discourses of nationalism and education reforms puts young college students at cross-roads in the “new” Qatari society

What Is “New” in the Study of Religion and Language Teaching: An Essay From a Middle Ground Point of View

One of the main arguments [Huamei] Han makes in her article [“Studying Religion and Language Teaching and Learning: Building a Subfield,” The Modern Language Journal, 102, 2, (2018), pp 432-445] is that “few scholars have studied religion and language teaching and learning in religious or secular institutions” and that a “subfield of religion and language teaching should “(a) focus on but also go beyond pedagogy and language classrooms at places of worship, such as church, synagogue, mosque and temples, or at religious schools, and into the wider religious and secular contexts in general, (b) treat language, religion and economy as intertwining and political, and (c) simultaneously address local and global issues, contexts and processes.” By the end of the article, she advocates for and suggests situating the study of religion and language teaching “in relation to the secular sector and the larger society, bearing in mind that the social processes of the current globalization are unfolding” because the role of religion has largely been ignored in applied linguistics. Because international migration has nearly tripled between 1960 and 2015 (from 77 million people living outside their birth countries worldwide to more than 244 million) and with political turmoil, climate change, and changing notions of hospitality precipitating still more movement and/or displacement, Han’s proposed subfield of research in applied linguistics makes sense, and it is incumbent upon researchers and educators to continue to find ways to better understand how and what people do to navigate ever-shifting and fluid social, religious, cultural, linguistic, economic, institutional, national, legal, and geopolitical boundaries. However, in response to Han’s eloquent call for further study in what she sees as a burgeoning field of study, it is not entirely clear that researchers have not already considered the interplay of religion and language teaching as situated in geopolitical as well as socioeconomic contexts, and while it is important for educators and researchers alike to better understand how people use language in different and across multiple contexts, including classrooms, it does not necessarily follow that they ultimately see or are aware of the nuances that religious faiths or religious texts and language in the everyday lives of people until people come into contact during such practices. Importantly, one might argue that the growth of secularization in many societies in the world may be a consequence for the need of ‘in-between’ spaces wherein different collectives of people of the world may come into contact productively, even as they simultaneously engage with their own religious, cultural, and linguistic practices. Part of Perspectives: THE ISSUE: Seeing Religion in Language Teaching Contexts and in Language Learning Processes, Martha Bigelow, University of Minnesota, Associate Editor. Participants included: Huamei Han, Simon Fraser University; Sharon Avni, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York; Ema Ushioda, University of Warwick, Centre for Applied Linguistics; Jason Goulah, DePaul University; Loukia K. Sarroub, University of Nebraska–Lincoln; and Jill A. Watson, St. Olaf Colleg

Religious influences on the growth of literacy practice

Religious influences on the growth of literacy practices are well documented and span more than a century of research ranging from disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology to sociology to language and literacy studies in education. Intellectuals known across disciplines such as Benedict Anderson, Lila Abu-Lughod, Pierre Bourdieu, Jonathan Boyarin, Clifford Geertz, Michaela de Leonardo, Shirley Brice Heath, Alan Peshkin, Claude Lévi Strauss, and Brian Street broke new ground in the 20th century in connecting literacy to religious literacies. In recent years, the work of contemporary language education scholars such as Huamei Han (2018) as well as English education and literacy scholars such as Juzwik et al. (2022) have illuminated the nexus of education, literacy, and religious expression in an intellectual and academic milieu that has typically espoused secularly-minded scholarship. This chapter explores contemporary research in the 21st century that suggests that researchers’ questions about religious influences on literacy practices has shifted over time and is also indicative of scholars’ own changing reflective stances toward the impact of religious literacies in education