Research focused on student belonging has used available measures largely in a unidimensional way without adequate attention to the psychometric properties of these data. This study introduces a new measure of school belonging that is psychometrically robust with preliminary evidence of construct validity called the Simple School Belonging Scale (SSBS).

Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI programmes attracts diverse parents from across many different demographic groups, and for a variety of reasons. This study uses an innovative application of cluster analysis to examine the parent population at one TWI Spanish–English elementary school. Survey questions asked were: parents’ income, educational achievement, ethnicity, language spoken at home, religious affiliation, country of origin and residential distance from the school. Our analyses reveal that parents in our sample can be classified into four distinct groups based on the combinations of included characteristics. Our analyses show the emergence of three Latino parent clusters and one Caucasian parent cluster. These analyses show how accounting for the different social dimensions of these parents’ lives simultaneously can provide a more nuanced understanding of the Latino parents at this school.

This research article examines parent motivations for enrolling their children at the Dual Immersion Academy, a charter school in Salt Lake City that is implementing a school-wide Spanish-English two-way immersion program. Parent motives were assessed in a parent survey sent home to parents in the fall of 2007, 2008 and 2009 (N= approx 200 parents). Surveys revealed parent motivations to include bilingualism and biliteracy, heritage language maintenance, heritage culture maintenance, and convenience (the fact that it is a neighborhood school). Critical findings point to how these motives varied by demographic characteristics of the parents, including ethnicity, socio-economic status and distance of home from the school. These trends reveal the heterogeneous parent community at DIA and shed light on parent expectations and conceptualizations of the school, with implications for parental involvement strategies.

This study describes how 72 fifth grade Latina/Latino students express their sense of belonging to their ethnic group. The purpose of this study is to help teachers gain specific understanding of the ways that preadolescent Latina/Latino students express belonging to their ethnic group, in order to become more effective at implementing culturally relevant and inclusive pedagogy. Students in this study spoke in concrete and descriptive ways about ethnic food, their language and their families when asked about the ?ethnic things? in their lives. Findings from this study underscore the importance of listening for expressions of ethnicity among pre-adolescents in order to better support ethnic identity development, as well as school and family connections, for ethnic minority students at the crucial age of transition.

In this time of COVID-19, our public and private spaces have come together in unprecedented ways giving rise to unique challenges and new opportunities to synergize maternal and academic spaces. We use Standpoint theory and narrative inquiry to explore our lived experiences as MotherScholars by conducting three story cycles, using prompts about the past, present, and imagined possibilities for the future. Interim texts were created to facilitate moving personal storytelling to a larger narrative. Data generated from each story cycle included three initial stories, six level 1 interim reflection texts, one level 2 interim research text, as well as transcriptions of our virtual meetings. Analyses were inductive-deductive and iterative. Stories revealed the logistical and emotional tensions inherent in MotherScholarship, pointing to an urgent high-stakes sense of potential failure in both arenas, hiding/compartmentalizing parts of self, and identified similarities between motherhood and scholarship. Rejecting the notion of ‘balance’ as not useful (or real), we re-envisioned our future lives as MotherScholars being ‘braided’ across a ‘third space’ merging both motherhood and scholarship. During COVID-19, moments of grace have emerged that illuminate new possibilities and opportunities to confront the oppressive androcentric assumptions and re-envision our work as MotherScholars.

Historically, Spanish-speaking students have not been allowed to use their home and community linguistic practices in their schooling in the U.S., even in most Spanish-English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, which require standard Spanish with strict language separation policies. These pedagogical practices have led to the reproduction of deficit language ideologies in DLBE classrooms that may harm students. In this essay, we call for programs to adopt vernacular forms of Spanish, including translanguaging practices, in bilingual and biliteracy instruction in order to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking students and combat deficit language ideologies and practices. From a critical pedagogical perspective, deliberate inclusion of vernacular Spanish (and translanguaging) in bilingualism and biliteracy is an ideal means to develop critical consciousness for students in DLBE, which can serve to combat deficit language ideologies, and aligns to the proposal of critical consciousness as the fourth goal of DLBE. We offer recommendations for teacher educators and DLBE practitioners.

See article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WQ4D5FN24KGH8MPDJB3W/full?target=10.1080/13670050.2020.1775778