Search results

This paper aims to explore how one elementary school administrative team responded to their changing student populations to include Latin(x) within their black community. The responses included looping practices, relationship building with families and culturally relevant pedagogies. In particular, this paper considers how the three aspects of the change worked together toward the goal of providing its students with quality educational opportunities and enhancements.

The research presented here is part of a longitudinal (four-year) qualitative study where ethnographic approaches to data collection were adopted.

The four-year immersion in the values of culturally relevant pedagogy created a reciprocal growth in understanding among the teachers and the students of the black and Latin(x) populations, sustained the overarching ideas of deep family connections and contributed to asset-driven curriculum.

A national trend shows rapid changing demographics where Latin(x) families are moving into black neighborhoods and schools. This change in schools’ student populations finds educators facing new challenges in addressing the educational and cultural needs of two minoritized populations. This research adds to the existing scholarship by documenting how one school shifts their learning atmosphere to deeply engage students in culturally relevant pedagogies.

In September 2014, 1,200 unaccompanied immigrant youth, from a region of Central America known for high rates of violence and homicide, enrolled in a suburban school district of New York State. This paper aims to highlight the stories of the newly arrived Central American high school youth, as told through Bilingual (Spanish/English) digital testimonios completed in the English Language Arts classroom. The author examines how the telling of their stories of surviving migration offers a way for the youth to respond to political and emotional struggles. The author also explores how the youth become active participants in the telling of political narratives/testimonios.

Part of a larger ethnographic case study, the author adopts the ethnographic approaches of the new literacy studies. Testimonios as a research epistemology privilege the youth’s narratives as sources of knowledge, and allow the youth to reclaim their authority in telling their own stories.

The integration of critical digital texts into the English Language Arts classroom created a participatory classroom culture where the Central American youth’s digital testimonios can be seen as a shared history of struggles that make visible the physical toil of their journeys, the truth of their border crossings and their enactments of political identities. As a collective, the youth’s stories become part of national and global political dialogues.

At a time when immigrant youth struggle for rights, to further their education and to negotiate the daily experiences of living in a new country, this research offers a unique perspective on the politics of inclusion and exclusion for unaccompanied youth.

The purpose of this paper is to study the decline of the Tuareg, and explore the emergence of traditional elements of Tuareg culture to circumvent formal barriers to trade.

This paper examines the history of the Tuareg through the lens of the New Development Economics.

This paper examines three elements of past Tuareg wealth: the caravan trade as spontaneous order; the unintended consequences of forced modernization policies under colonization and post-colonial states; and contemporary problems from hindered freedom of trade. The bad news is that the Tuareg are facing impediments from failed states with low economic and political freedom. The good news is that traditional elements in the Tuareg’s entrepreneurial culture are re-emerging to circumvent formal barriers.

The literature on the Tuareg is largely pessimistic, as the Tuareg’s traditions have largely been quashed by post-colonial boundaries and failed states. The New Development Economics offers a new perspective, with two implications. First, there is hope for the Tuareg, and a possible win-win, if the local states adopt a policy of laissez faire and international trade, rather than assimilation or repression. Second, this theoretical lens can be used in other cases throughout Africa (and the world) involving post-colonial borders.

There already exists a rich literature on the Tuareg. This paper uses the New Development Economics to examine the history of the Tuareg’s decline – and to find hope in traditional elements of Tuareg entrepreneurship emerging to circumvent local failed (and predatory) states.