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Exploring critiques of immigrant segregation, this paper considers how schools exclusively serving immigrant EL students are supportive “counterpublics.” Drawing on data from two ethnograph...

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals ...

Drawing on ethnographic research in urban schools serving recently arrived immigrant students in New York City, this article considers the importance of drawing on transnational attachments in cult...

Drawing on ethnographic research from a small urban high school serving predominantly low-income students in a large northeastern city, this case explores how a school leader seeks to improve the school’s graduation rates by analyzing student data. It asks readers to consider the overall organization of the meeting, the role of the principal, the positioning of teachers, and the resulting conversations about students that the meeting generates. The case suggests that data analysis is not a silver bullet for improvement and considers that organizational, cultural, and contextual elements need to be in place for teachers to effectively improve their practice and student outcomes.

In this paper, the authors focus on everyday narrations of the nation as they are taken up by educators in schools in the United States, Denmark and Spain. As the primary institutions within which children from im/migrant communities are incorporated into the nation-state, schools are the key sites within which young people learn the languages and practices of national belonging and citizenship. Comparing ethnographic case studies in the United States, Denmark and Spain, the authors trace the nationalist storylines that serve to frame Muslim youth as particular kinds of racialized and “impossible subjects”. Across national contexts, the authors document similar, often almost verbatim, stories that educators narrated about the disjuncture between liberal ideals of the nation, and what they imagined to be true of Muslim im/migrant youth. They theorize that, despite differences in US and European approaches to immigration, there are consonances in the ways that Muslims are positioned as racialized O...

Capitalizing on national anxieties, right wing populist leaders promise to enforce national borders with new constellations of policies that regulate and exclude Muslim bodies. Using the theoretical tool of “technologies of concern” (Jaffe-Walter, 2016), this essay critiques how state security discourses operate through public schools. Drawing on ethnographic research with Muslim youth in a Danish public school and an analysis of European integration policies, the author analyzes how policies and practices that ostensibly support young people’s integration enact everyday violence and coercive assimilation. Highlighting the perspectives of the young people she worked with, the author argues that state efforts to transform Muslim students into acceptable subjects of the nation-state encouraged their alienation and marginalization.

This research reports data from case studies of three intermediary organizations facing the challenge of scaling up teacher learning. The turn of the century launched scaling-up efforts of all three intermediaries, growing from intimate groups, where founding teachers and staff were key supports for teacher learning, to large multistate organizations. The authors draw on data from three earlier qualitative studies, as well as newly gathered data on professional development at Big Picture Learning, EL Education, and the Internationals Network, and reveal some of the challenges and benefits of taking teacher learning to scale.

In this paper, we examine the role of teacher collaboration in a school that produces positive academic outcomes for immigrant, English Learners (ELs). We also draw on a comparative case study of another school in the same district that has not achieved the same level of success. We illustrate how the high performing site supports and implements deep and sustained collaboration, while the professional conditions of the comparison site results in fragmentation and the isolation of EL teachers. In doing so, we provide qualitative insight into how schools can foster authentic teacher learning and collective responsibility for EL students.

Montclair Cares About Schools (MCAS) is a citizen-activist group in Montclair, N.J., that used Facebook, emails, and online petitions to inform and organize citizens on local educational policy issues. Emerging in response to a new superintendent’s plans to reshape Montclair schools with new teacher evaluations, administrative hires, and extra districtwide quarterly assessments, MCAS has had some degree of success in opening a dialogue and keeping the community informed about changes to the Montclair School District.

With the growing number of immigrant youth moving into new communities and host nations across the globe (Suarez-Orozco, 2007), it is critical that we deepen our understanding of the ways in which schools enable either the civic engagement or the social marginalization of these young people. In this article Reva Jaffe-Walter presents the results of an ethnographic case study of Muslim students and their teachers in a Danish secondary school. Her findings reveal how liberal educational discourses and desires to offer Muslim immigrant students a better life can slide into processes of everyday exclusion in schools. Jaffe-Walter theorizes that immigrants in liberal democracies face technologies of concern—that is, policies and practices that champion the goals of fostering the engagement and social incorporation of immigrant students while simultaneously producing notions of these youth as Other, justifying practices of coercive assimilation (Foucault, 1977; Ong, 1996). She argues that beyond just producing negative representations, technologies of concern position youth within hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference that complicate their access to educational resources in schools (Abu El-Haj, 2010; Ong, 1996). This article has implications for the education and social integration of Muslim immigrants within liberal societies, as it reveals the troubling persistence of exclusion buried within practices of concern.

Increasing numbers of immigrant youth are coming of age within global cities that are characterized by growing inequalities and few opportunities for social mobility. These youth face numerous educational obstacles that complicate college and labor market access. This article draws from an ethnographic study of public high schools serving low-income, recently arrived immigrant students and explores how the schools provide students with the academic skills and social capital to support college going. It considers how the schools attempt to create new understandings and expectations of the educational possibilities available to low income immigrant students, thus creating a social imaginary that resists the racialized hierarchies of the global city. [immigrant students, English-language learners, college access, social capital, globalization]

In this article, we consider the ways in which educational policies and institutions today enable or obstruct young people who are immigrant English-language learners as they seek to cross cultural and educational borders. Contrasting a class action suit in California protesting high stakes testing that will significantly limit graduation rates, and an ethnographic analysis of the international high schools in which immigrant youth engage with cultural and educational depth and support and graduate at exceptional rates, this article challenges the current policy climate in which immigrant youth are increasingly under siege and at risk of being multiply undocumented. In the spirit of protest, we trace the many sites of resistance and possibility dotting the nation, in which educators, communities, families, advocates, and youth are demanding educational access and justice.