Yesterday I read a paper by Gert Biesta, a professor of education drawing from philosophy and political science whose interdisciplinary thinking inspires those of us like myself who are unconvinced by the all-too-often superficiality and dilettantism of the field of education. (I will write about this this week, as it bothers me greatly that those…
Getting started
It’s a funny title for a post, since I’ve been writing this blog since 2014. However, what began as a scholarly exercise, to be executed faithfully but unhurriedly, has shifted in my mind. The stream of conversation now, in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, has become a torrent…
What immigrants are good for
It’s an interesting question. A crude parallel can be made between this question and the question of bilingualism. Both enrich the host country (the former, the U.S. or any other literal receiving nation; the latter, the “host” of the speaker’s brain/cognitive function), both contribute various forms of diversity, benefitting the economy in the former case and…
Silence in education and ed research: taking off the crusader’s cape
I’m reading a book entitled “Perspectives on Silence,” an oldie-but-goodie text on the various constructions, interpretations, and meanings of silence from various disciplinary perspectives. I’m very interested in this topic as it relates to my work on how research involving asymmetries of power influence the construction of knowledge, particularly in interviewing and survey-based data collection. Explorations of…
Immersion and the bilingual “every-child-USA” narrative
Students who are first-language speakers of a language other than English are, in America, categorized as English Language Learners, or ELLs, and our country’s history of working with these learners has been complicated and politically fraught. Oftentimes, references to federal decisions such the landmark Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols in 1974 or state-level legislation such as…
Pro-immigrant activism in Boston
Yesterday morning I went with organizers from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (https://www.miracoalition.org/) to the State House in Boston to advocate for the support of amendments to the state budget which protect immigrants’ access to housing, in-state tuition, education, and health care. We spoke with representatives and their aides and interns about this complicated…
The eye in the sky and “low-status” domestic workers
Not long ago, I watched a PBS Frontline video called “Rape on the Night Shift,” an expose delving into the abuse of and violence, often by their own supervisors, against female immigrants who work as janitors for poor wages in buildings that I would wager the majority of Americans have frequented for one reason or another. One…
Hesitation and dehumanization in the Syrian refugee crisis
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…
