Refugee Children’s Adaptation to American Early Childhood Classrooms: A Narrative Inquiry

Researchers have suggested that a paucity of research exists on refugee youth in early child hood education settings. Arguing that children’s stories provide educators a valuable resource for understanding the meaning children make of initial cross - cultural experiences, this article presents a narrative inquiry into the stories and artwork of three early childhood students, along with the narratives of their families, all Karen refugees from Myanmar. Examining what these stories reveal about the children’s initial experiences in an American early childhood setting, we share their stories of adaptation, their experiences of cultural dissonance, and their illustrations of change over time. In addition to developing these themes, we also promote the use of multi - modal storytelling and the collection of family stories in narrative inquiries into young children’s experience. As educators strive to provide high - quality educational experiences for all children, listening to children’s stories of their adaptation experience and the narratives of their families may help us to foster smooth transitions into American early childhood classrooms for young refugee students

Mixed messages: Critical educational discourses and the cultural production of school change

This dissertation is an ethnography that explores what happens when critical educational discourses influence a mainstream school. That is, it follows ideas from critical educational theory, which enter the school through educators and reform discourses, into classrooms, a youth program, and a school to illuminate how educators and youth make meaning from them. I use a cultural production framework to document the ways in which youth and educators appropriate these discourses of social critique and/or social justice in their production of new school practice. This study contributes to the existing critical ethnographic literature by foregrounding the breaks in hegemony that many critical educational ethnographies neglect. Exploring these breaks, as well as the complexity of the cultural production of educational practice associated with them, constitutes a significant contribution of this study. The study is based upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at an urban public middle school in Philadelphia, in which I conducted participant observation, interviewed participants individually and in focus groups, and collected documents. The findings of this study center on the mixed educational messages that result from the interface of diverse educational discourses, subjectivities, and social context. At Cavner, critical educational practice, which I define as educational practice that—at some level of explicitness—purports to be counterhegemonic and engage youth in action or critique around themes of social justice and their role in the social world, influenced the school through practitioners\u27 grassroots work, which was linked to their subjectivities and participation in social and/or educational movements. This work was complicated, however, by the high-stakes school reform environment and the school\u27s construction of an image of a “good school.” For youth, explicit curricular discourses of social critique, social justice, and democratic participation were in competition with hidden curricular practices that privileged some students at the expense of others, as well as broader social discourses that stigmatized urban poverty. Both educators and youth engaged their social agency and appropriated from the fields of contested educational discourses and practices in complicated and often surprising ways. Their appropriations and productions of new cultural discourses and practices have important implications for promoting social justice through schooling

Social Media Use in Social Movement Organizations: Categorizing and Connecting Analyses in an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Contemporary qualitative researchers must contend with a type of qualitative data that did not exist a quarter-century ago: social media data. Social media has become a fundamental aspect of social life and communication in major segments of the social world. For social movement organizations (SMOs), social media use has become a requirement. SMOs use social media for organizing, communicating information, and building solidarity within their movements. Qualitative research on social movements’ engagement with social media has been growing rapidly, but this work has not extended into the study of Teacher Activist Groups (TAGs). TAGs are a type of SMO featuring collectives of teachers engaged in inquiry, consciousness-raising, and collective action aimed to improve public education. The purpose of the study to be presented was to develop an understanding of the twitter activity of several TAGs. At the 2018 TQR conference, I presented the challenges I faced analyzing social media data during the pilot phase of this study. Specifically, I found that the coding I was using to conduct a qualitative content analysis decontextualized the twitter activity from its local and historical contexts. Coding obscured the real-time nature of twitter activity—how it reflected the news and events of the day—as well as its embeddedness in networks of real people and communities. At the 2019 conference, I will present the ways I addressed these challenges using two different types of qualitative analysis: categorizing through content analysis and connecting through chronological case studies of each group’s twitter activity. After discussing the analytic methods used in the study, I will also present the findings from two of the TAGS featured in the completed study

A qualitative analysis of Twitter activity among teacher activist groups: Questions, challenges, opportunities, and findings

Qualitative researchers are increasingly recognizing social media as both context and artifact of everyday practice and meaning making. The challenges and opportunities of qualitative inquiry into social media are relatively different from those of traditional fieldwork. In this paper, I discuss methodological issues related to conducting a qualitative analysis of the Twitter activity of five teacher activist groups. In the first half of the presentation, I describe the questions, challenges, and opportunities I had to consider in conducting a qualitative analysis of Twitter data. This discussion addresses the range of approaches to analyzing social media data, the challenges of tools and technology, and some ethical dilemmas I encountered (among other topics). In the second half of the presentation, I discuss how my decisions related to these varied challenges and opportunities played out in my data analysis and findings. As I describe the findings of my study, I reflect on the strengths and limitations of my approach, as well as alternative approaches I plan to take in a follow-up study. A contribution of this presentation is its potential to help other researchers anticipate the questions, challenges, and opportunities they may face in embarking on a qualitative analysis of social media data

“Facebook Me”: The Potential of Student Teachers’ Online Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach

This study examined the ways in which early childhood pre-service student teachers (PSTs) used an online community for discussions related to teaching. Using the lenses of communities of practice, our goal was to understand what happens when the PSTs begin to share new learnings about teaching through ongoing practice in online communities. We investigated characteristics of the conversations of PSTs and their professors when using Facebook. This study was based on the postings of seven early childhood PSTs and five university faculty members. PSTs were interviewed at the conclusion of the semester to share their experiences from posting on Facebook. Two categories from the data include PSTs’ views of the viability of Facebook and the kinds of talk that surfaced within the Facebook group conversations. Findings suggested that Facebook has the potential to sustain informal dialogues. However, PSTs require strong faculty support to solve issues related to complexities of practice

“Facebook Me”: The Potential of Student Teachers’ Online Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach

This study examined the ways in which early childhood pre-service student teachers (PSTs) used an online community for discussions related to teaching. Using the lenses of communities of practice, our goal was to understand what happens when the PSTs begin to share new learnings about teaching through ongoing practice in online communities. We investigated characteristics of the conversations of PSTs and their professors when using Facebook. This study was based on the postings of seven early childhood PSTs and five university faculty members. PSTs were interviewed at the conclusion of the semester to share their experiences from posting on Facebook. Two categories from the data include PSTs’ views of the viability of Facebook and the kinds of talk that surfaced within the Facebook group conversations. Findings suggested that Facebook has the potential to sustain informal dialogues. However, PSTs require strong faculty support to solve issues related to complexities of practice