(2007). On the Limits of Sexual Health Literacy: Insights from Ugandan Schoolgirls. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p285-305 Sep. This article makes the case that current conceptions of sexual health literacy have limited relevance to the Ugandan context because they assume that knowledge of unsafe sexual practices will lead to changes in behavior and lifestyle. Drawing on a longitudinal case study with 15 Ugandan schoolgirls in rural Uganda from August 2004 to September 2006, this study argues that despite being well-informed about the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity, poverty and sexual abuse severely constrained options for these young women. Although many believed in the value of abstaining from sexual activity until marriage, they engaged in transactional sex to pay for school fees, supplies, clothing, and food. Further, fear of sexual abuse, early pregnancy, and HIV-AIDS compromised attempts to embrace sexuality. The article concludes with implications of the study for research and policy on sexual health literacy in Uganda and other poorly resourced regions of the world. (Contains 9… [Direct]
(2007). Eagle and the Condor: Indigenous Alliances for Youth Leadership Development. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n2 p135-148 Apr. This narrative describes the growth of an alliance between two indigenous organizations in North and South America, illustrating how a shared indigenous vision of cultural survival and connection to the land led to the creation of an ongoing collaboration for indigenous youth leadership development, which has extended to encompass collaboration with other South American and Caribbean indigenous groups. Allowing organizational relationships to emerge from naturally occurring personal relationships was vital for success. Mutuality of the exchange was key in developing a partnership of equals. Visits to each others' territories, internal stability of the organizations, sound financial arrangements, and the contribution from other aspects of organizational activities to the alliance were also necessary ingredients for strength and continuity…. [Direct]
(2007). Educational Reform in the Global City: The Case of the Quality-Schools-for-the-Poor Initiative in New York City. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n2 p127-134 Apr. Globalization has not only created the conditions that have made such educational reforms necessary, but it has also provided market-based ideology to undergird reform efforts from Santiago to New York City. Although a neoliberal approach to education is clearly en vogue, many educators and critics nonetheless have questioned the premises behind the current reforms. Does a market-based paradigm really work to improve schools? Does it indeed improve the educational opportunities for poor families? Can a market-based approach combat social inequality? In this article, the author seeks answers to these questions through a close examination of a prototypical educational reform effort, the New Century Schools Initiative (NCSI) in the United States. Specifically, the author considers how NCSI has appeared to work in New York City, drawing upon 3 years of observations from her work as a staff developer and consultant in 15 NCSI schools. This article is not an empirical study, but a critique… [Direct]
(2007). Gifted or Not, Parental Perceptions Are the Same: A Study of Chinese American Parental Perceptions of Their Children's Academic Achievement and Home Environment. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p217-234 Jul. This study offers insight into the perceptions of a group of Chinese American parents, many of whom have children who excel at school. The results indicate that the Chinese American parents had high expectations of their children's educational success, placed high value on education and effort, tended to sacrifice for their children's education, and followed a "training" parenting style. When comparing parental perceptions between different groups (parents of gifted-talented vs. average students; fathers vs. mothers; parents of boys vs. girls; and parents of different backgrounds), no significant differences were found between groups except that parents with different occupational status differed in perceptions of their children's academic achievement. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)… [Direct]
(2007). Global Multiculturalism: Africa and the Recasting of the Philosophical and Epistemological Plateaus. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p251-264 Sep. This article focuses on the problematic relation between African worldviews and their attendant educational and epistemological systems, on the one hand, and the dominant European discourses that have attempted to negate the validity of those, both in historical and contemporary Africa, on the other hand. The article first deals with its subtitle (i.e., it critically problematizes and interrogates the way African knowledge systems and cultures have been portrayed mainly in the writings that emanated from the European metropolis) and how this has facilitated not only false and untenable perceptions about the continent and its people but, as well, the continuing psychocultural colonization of Africans. In its domain of analyzing culture and its conceptualizations and practices, the article minimizes the fixed categories of the case and assumes a more active and multidirectional intersection of culture, society, and overall social being. Via its concluding remarks, the article proposes… [Direct]
(2007). Is This an African I See before Me?. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p313-322 Sep. In this speech, the author uses five moments of his own existence to speak to how he thinks the West conceptualizes and depicts Africa and Africans. This involves autobiography in a sense because he used his own life, but the discussion is not about him. It is about western conceptions and representations of Africans as reflected in the following five contextual moments, namely the present, his birth, his initial move to Canada, his more recent move to UBC (University of British Columbia), and the possible future. The author speaks mostly to how the academic disciplines in the west have contributed to western conceptions of Africa. He choses to play on Macbeth's soliloquy for the title of his talk to convey the idea that, in his view, Africa and Africans have been continuously mis-recognized and overdetermined by western academic discourses, seen not in reality, but as Africans of the Western mind, a false creation, proceeding from the collective historical and contemporary… [Direct]
(2007). Meeting the Challenge of Health Literacy in Rural Uganda: The Critical Role of Women and Local Modes of Communication. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n4 p265-283 Sep. This article seeks to better understand the relation between local and traditional modes of communication and health literacy within the context of a rural West Nile community in Northern Uganda. Drawing on social semiotics (multimodality) and Bakhtin's notion of the carnival, the focus is on a group of women participating in a grassroots literacy program and their use of local modes of communication to address the endemic problem of malaria in the West Nile region of Uganda. The argument is that women and local modes of communication can serve a critical role in disseminating primary health care information in particular and in community health care development in general. This article also makes a case for adopting a more holistic approach to health literacy promotion; one that brings together local and new modes of communication and knowledge with desperately needed health care services and trained personnel. (Contains 4 footnotes.)… [Direct]
(2007). Multiple Perspectives of Chinese Immigrant Parents and Canadian Teachers on ESL Learning in Schools. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n1 p43-64 Jan. Interest in home-school communication has paid little attention, to date, to the experiences of English as a second language (ESL) parents. This article examines recent Chinese immigrant parents' and Canadian teachers' perspectives of ESL learning presented at Parents' Night. On the basis of observations of three annual Parents' Nights, interviews of teachers and bilingual assistants who served as interpreters for parents and focus groups, the study reveals a deep division between the two on both what and how students should learn. Teachers believed that the ESL classes help socialize students into Canadian school and social cultures and develop language and study skills and appropriate attitudes to help prepare them for entry into mainstream classes. In contrast, in the parents' views, the current ESL program has many problems, such as the lengthy time students stayed in the program, the lack of exams, mixed grades, the low level of content, and the lack of grammar instruction…. [Direct]
(2007). Resisting Educational Exclusion: The Baha'i Institute of Higher Education in Iran. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n1 p65-77 Jan. This article explores the motivational causes for learning and community service of students, faculty, and volunteer supporters of the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE) in Iran. BIHE is a grassroots initiative launched by Baha'i academics, who–after having been expelled from public universities as a result of their allegiance to the Baha'i faith–opened up an alternative Institute of Higher Education, which services equally discriminated and marginalized Baha'i youth. The article presents results of a descriptive cultural/phenomenological study that distills the essence of experiences of 180 BIHE students, faculty, and staff performing under unusual sociopolitical circumstances. BIHE presents a minority community initiative that successfully created a "social space" needed by Baha'i students and staff to remain academically and socially engaged; and to bond and share with peers and colleagues equally suffering from persecution and sociopolitical marginalization…. [Direct]
(2007). The African Diaspora: Using the Multivalent Theory to Understand Slave Autobiographies. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p199-216 Jul. In simple terms, diaspora can be defined as the identity community that is formed when people move. Although the term African Diaspora seems relatively new, a number of 20th century scholars have utilized a diasporic framework to explain the commonalities among people of African descent around the world. The earliest scholars did not use the term; however, scholars post-1950 have consistently used the analytical concept when studying and describing Black communities that were dispersed from Africa and germinated in the New World. This article highlights the competing attempts at theorizing the African Diaspora from its earliest proponents to its more contemporary adherents. Finally, this article illustrates the usefulness of the multivalent concept by applying the framework to slave autobiographies…. [Direct]
(2007). The German-Speaking Diaspora in Turkey: Exiles from Nazism as Architects of Modern Turkish Education (1933-1945). Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, v1 n3 p175-198 Jul. This article discusses a little-known aspect of higher education history. The Republic of Turkey was established in 1923. The system of higher education Turkey inherited from the Ottomans totaled some 300+ Islamic "madrasas", one of which was converted into a fledgling university at the turn of the century; and three military academies, one of which was expanded into a civil engineering school around 1909. Starting in 1933, Turkey reformed its higher education using invitees fleeing the Nazis, for whom America was out of reach because of restrictive immigration laws and wide-spread anti-Semitic hiring bias at its universities. Almost overnight, the University of Istanbul was referred to as the best German university in the world. Historians of higher education might have difficulty matching so significant a qualitative transformation implemented at the national level in so short a timeframe. One country's great loss was another country's gain, and a third country's benefits… [Direct]
(2016). Looking Inward to 21st Century Pedagogy. McGill Journal of Education, v51 n3 p1197-1203. Through the lens of a student, this Note from the Field responds to a historical research project which engages pre-service teachers in critical citizenship and social imagination. Looking inward facilitates a personal learning experience of identity that is applied to learning in the 21st century. When 21st century pre-service teacher education looks inward rather than forward and outward, we learn to live in the 21st century rather than envision it…. [Direct]
(2016). Using Critical Digital Literacies Pedagogies to Reframe Preservice Teachers' Work with "At-Promise" Students. AERA Online Paper Repository, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Washington, DC, Apr 8-12, 2016). Public education's distinctive and primary challenge is to ensure all children, across all communities, have access to the skills and knowledge required for their full participation in democratically regulated social, cultural, and vocational life. This is an aspiration increasingly difficult to realize under present-day conditions of austerity in both K-12 and post-secondary education. However, a clear and undeniable relationship between income and educational achievement long pre-dates today's distinctively digital 'divide' (Gorski, 2014). In this research, we explore the outcomes for preservice teachers of a program intervention with a group of youth in care, focusing specifically on improving student achievement and increasing preservice teachers' capacity, experience and specific fluency and expertise with technologies supporting critical digital literacies pedagogy…. [Direct]
(2015). The Nigerian Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy: Perspectives on Literacy Learning. South African Journal of Childhood Education, v5 n1 p125-141 Jun. Many scholars and researchers now have a broadened vision of literacy that encompasses the social practices that surround literacy learning. What accompanies this vision is a shift towards thinking that children, and their families, can contribute actively to literacy learning by drawing on their strengths and life experiences to create and draw meaning from a broad range of everyday sources. For many, reading and writing from print-based texts is no longer considered the only, or most desirable, avenue to literacy learning. It is now recognised that children's social and cultural lives should be used as a resource for literacy learning. Using four literacy learning lenses, we examine the Nigerian National Policy for Integrated Early Childhood Development. These lenses are: collaboration with families, the role of educators, literacy-rich environments, and diversity and multimodality. Recent research around early literacy learning underpins our analysis to identify where the policy… [PDF]
(2017). Development of Fieldwork Activities to Educate the Youth for the Biological and Cultural Preservation in Rural Communities of Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, v12 n3 p441-449. In order to achieve the regional sustainability and bio-cultural preservation, environmental education of youth will be critical, however due to the lack of the specific subject of regional studies at the educational curriculum, students are not able to achieve the skills to understand the local environment and feel isolated from nature. We decided that, it would be very important to create active nature fieldworks where students can connect with nature by using five senses of perception (hearing, seeing, smelling, touching and tasting), to educate the feeling of connection and belonging to the nature and later develop the awareness of nature-human-culture interactions through the on-hands participatory fieldworks with local communities. Fieldworks were divided in two main parts; biodiversity experience with nature activities (NA) to increase the sense of belongings to the nature, by using five senses; visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), tactile (touching), gustatory (tasting), and… [PDF]