Search

"Mister, what time is it?" is an account of the evolution of a traditional teacher education program into an alternative certification program in the Arizona borderlands, outlining the theoretical frameworks that shaped the program redesign, program design elements, and challenges encountered along the way. We found many of the perennial problems of teacher education: the disconnect between schools and the university; the challenges of finding critically conscious teachers in rural schools to serve as mentors; and the difficulty of embedding teacher dispositions in observation tools (Zeichner, 2017). The redesign of the program led to two awards from the NSF Noyce program. Early-entry or teacher residency programs have been on the rise in the past two decades addressing the urgent needs of urban schools. Our work adds the rural context to this ongoing, teacher preparation reform movement (Zeichner, 2017).

Understanding the impacts of immigration legislation on Mexican ethnic students who are citizens of the United States is needed. This study investigates how passage of Arizona's antiimmigration law, SB 1070, in 2010 bears upon the schooling experiences of Mexican American high school students. Applying Meyer's Minority Stress Model as the theoretical foundation for this work, the authors ultimately explore, 1) whether perceived discrimination along with acculturation, racial phenotype, familiarity and stress associated with SB 1070 influence school grades, and 2) the effects of SB 1070 stress on the school attachment of Mexican American high school students. The authors find that perceived discrimination and skin color are both negatively related to grades, whereas maintaining Spanish is positively related to grades, and SB 1070 stress and its effects are dependent upon levels of perceived discrimination. Likewise, while the authors find no relation of SB 1070 stress to school attachment, they do find that this relationship is moderated by perceived discrimination such that school attachment decreases as stress associated with SB 1070 increases for individuals with lower perceived discrimination. For individuals with high levels of perceived discrimination, there is a positive association between school attachment and SB 1070 stress. By impacting their acculturative stress, Arizona's SB 1070 has further upset an already precarious schooling experience for Mexican American students.

This qualitative study examines Chicanx students' accounts of teachers' (in)activity in classrooms regarding issues of racism and whiteness. Contextualised within the study of Arizona's anti-immigration law SB 1070, it draws from individual interviews, focus groups, and observational field notes to describe students' emotional responses to avoidance of studying SB 1070 and its related racial/ethnic issues. Findings include that students perceive teachers' silence and avoidance to be a function of (1) teachers' lack of experience or (2) teachers' desires to maintain order. This order depends on avoiding discussions that disturb the emotional tranquillity of teachers and students who are at ease. However, this method of avoidance foregoes offering consolation to those students who are already troubled by oppressive actions. This dichotomy is analysed using the notion of the niceness of whiteness.

The article discusses a legislation that would effectively terminate Mexican American Studies programs in k-12 was passed in Arizona in 2010. In this article, the author traces how this legislation drew from discourses of anti-Americanism and wickedness initiated by the state's superintendent of public instruction against Mexican American Studies and from larger social antagonistic language regarding Mexican ethnics. The author uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) and van Dijk's notion of the discourse-power circle, in particular, to demonstrate how the superintendent along with the author of the legislation, were successful in controlling the voting actions of enough legislators to pass the bill. (Contains 1 figure.)

In 2010, Arizona passed legislation that attacked ethnic studies in k-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade). Specifically, Mexican American/Raza Studies (MARS) was targeted by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), and, in effect, would be eliminated by the Prohibited Courses; Discipline; Schools Law (Prohibited Courses Law). This study utilizes document and content analysis to examine both a letter written by the SPI calling for the elimination of MARS, and the text of the Prohibited Courses Law. Framing the work within critical race theory, these two documents work together to normalize and make property of whiteness in Arizona’s public schools, and re-create a hegemonic status quo. In addition, this study analyzes how MARS acts as a site of counter-hegemonic activity by scrutinizing customary discourses as presented in schools and curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]