Pope Francis, a beacon of what many from various quarters hope could be a new trend in religious leadership, today has taken three families who are refugees from the Syrian Civil War with him to the Vatican. The war, which rages on into its fifth year and finds thousands of people continuing to flee the conflict, often ending…
Immigration and the question of assimilation
When I was in in masters program at UMass Boston, the word assimilation came up occasionally in conversations about how immigrants adapt — or not — to their new cultural, social, and political environments. The old model of assimilation (defined here on Wikipedia) gets a bad rep, in part because it implies that (1) immigrants who…
Undocumented immigrants and schooling: a class discussion
I’m teaching a grad course on Bilingualism and tonight we discussed the important but under-explored issues related to working with students who are undocumented/unprotected. Students in my class come from all backgrounds, some of which include being children of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, and some have even been undocumented at some point in their own…
Imagination, play and un-justification
Noam Chomsky, world-famous linguist and probably the best-known living public intellectual in the 21st century, said in an interview published in Truthout in 2013 entitled Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond: Kids don’t know how to play. They can’t go out and, you know, like when you were a kid or when I…
With a pure heart
A Hungarian friend shared poetry from her homeland on Thursday, which she has translated and continues to engage with in her off hours when not studying and soaking in new brain-stretched ideas. One in particular struck me, a beautiful slash through reality written in 1925 by Attila József, a poet who died at the age of…
Scholarly enterprise
Full title for this post = Scholarly enterprise: quilting, loping, slutting it up casting my line I just attended a graduate workshop/mini-conference at the GC entitled “Failure,” an annual event hosted by the Social and Political Theory Student Association. I was there for about 11 hours and when I left, the stimulating conversations were very much still going…
Interdisciplinarity
Since I’ve started taking classes at the Graduate Center in 2014, I’ve consistently gone outside my department to swim — awkwardly — in new fields. I’ve taken classes in the areas of philosophy, sociology, and Hispanic-Luso Brazilian studies and am pulling from these fields as well as linguistics, social and critical theory, and others to construct the interdisciplinary theoretical…
The “I don’t know” of student data collection
I mentioned a podcast I listened to recently called Clearing the FOG, a left-leaning independent radio station that explores a variety of issues that revolve around corporate avarice, inequality, and the ways in which democracy as we know it is being bent to the will of the few. In this podcast, entitled “Education Under Attack,…
Transculturation: a new culture of signs, new signs of culture
Cultural transformation and the movement of immigrants into, among, within, and across cultural repertoires is an idiom, un modismo, which requires a shift in thinking. Those of us whose realities are nested, in earlier contexts if not the current one, in mainstream thinking, being, and knowing must challenge our assumptions about what is true, what is valid, and,…
A call to action: adult immigrants as heterogeneous learners (too)
Tonight, Ofelia Garcia and Jim Cummins, two of the world’s most well-respected linguists and educators, spoke at the Graduate Center of CUNY where I am doing my PhD. I work with Ofelia and tonight, my graduate students got a chance to tune in with me to watch the discussion, which dealt with multiliteracies and multilingualism…
