Volume 6, Issue 2

This article focuses on the experiences of undocumented students attending colleges and universities as a result of Texas House Bill 1403 / Senate Bill 1528. Through a qualitative interview, the authors seek to provide an overview of the issues and challenges many of these students face, as well as concepts for higher education professionals to focus on in order to better serve these students.The results of this case study indicate that these students face incongruent expectations based on whether they are on or off campus. On campus, they are of legal status with many of the same rights as their fellow students. Off campus, they face a number of challenges associated with being an undocumented immigrant. This stark dichotomy creates a remarkable tension through which these students navigate daily.

The real crisis in Black education is a crisis of culture. It is a crisis of culture because culture, as the medium wherein life is defined and developed, is where the meaning of being human is found. Culture, though multifaceted, is where human beings give fundamental expression to their meaning, possibility and potential. Hence, the crisis in Black education is found in the organized structure and process of education that has absolutely no regard for the African meaning of being human nor respect for educational requisites of reproducing and refining African possibilities and potentials as cultural phenomena. In response to the lack of cultural congruency in the education of Black children, this article identifies the specific cultural ideas and techniques designed to establish a teaching and learning environment wherein a teaching/learning process is created to help the teacher to connect deeply with the spirit (essence) of the child so as to animate, arouse, affect and/or influence the student’s exalted feelings, thoughts or actions in the service of learning.

In recent decades, the composition of classrooms in the U.S. has reflected larger numbers of children who use English as their second language (ESL), including children of professional families from Indian backgrounds. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the perspectives of Indian parents regarding their children’s early childhood education in the U.S. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Indian parents of 6 children from a midwestern early-intervention preschool program. Each interview was coded by multiple researchers using line-by-line coding. Categories were developed, refined, expanded, and cross analyzed. Confirmability was achieved through triangulation, expert validation, respondent validation, and member checking. A discussion of findings is presented with recommendations designed to lay the foundation for a more productive relationship between early childhood education professionals and the parents of Indian children.

This microethnographic case study focuses on patterns of interpretation and decision making of undergraduate preservice teachers as they participated in observations, co-teaching, and teaching in elementary schools in northern Mexico. At the core, this study explores the deeply embedded assumptions preservice teachers may bring to new cross-cultural interactions. Drawing from participant documents, surveys, and interviews, the study seeks to investigate the meaning perspectives and schemes (Mezirow, 1991) that study abroad participants used to make sense of their experiences. Also explored are ways the study abroad experience may have helped to alter or solidify meaning perspectives. Finally, recommendations based on lessons learned are provided for designing study abroad experiences that prompt preservice teachers to view and use cultural differences as assets in classroom practice.

The objective of this study was to identify factors that predict resilience and social mobility in persons living in extreme poverty in Mexico by analyzing an extensive set of school-related variables. A total of 913 adults were surveyed, with 65.2% women and an average age of 43.71 years. Significant correlations were found between the seven educational variables measured and resilience, and only one of them was correlated with social mobility. Regression analysis identifies achievement motivation and a reflexive learning style as predictors of resilience. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for this segment of the population.

The “biopsychosocial model” is the education paradigm of knowledge that is expected to inform medical practice. Yet in medical education, medical science is the gold standard. Social science barely features in the formal curriculum, and when it does, it is considered best done through experiential learning. This paper analyses “the social” through the issue of language and culture following medical and dental student exposure to experiential learning in a primary health care setting. Using qualitative accounts set out in student reflections, it explores the insights they gain from their experience and the implications these have for medical education and professional knowledge. The evidence suggests that when social issues are not grounded in social scientific theory (through formal education) they are incorporated idiosyncratically into learning and, more often than not, are relegated to the bottom of the medical knowledge value chain. This weak or absent grounding in social science carries major implications for the ability of medical education systems to create skilled clinicians capable of working with the biological, psychological and social complex that is individual and collective health in the contemporary world.