Erin Feinauer Whiting

Students in online courses continue to feel disconnected, frustrated, isolated, and anxious even as they continue to enroll in online courses. This contradiction presents a puzzling challenge for online instructors in higher education contexts. Using microethnographic methods, this case study explores how instructors and students emotionally engage in online spaces. Using video recordings as primary data sources, we inquire into the online interactions of participants. Data analysis revealed how emotion was linguistically, visibly, and verbally managed through chat comments and emojis, physical gestures, and video feeds. Additionally, instructors and students suggest that online connection is fatiguing. We hope by highlighting the textual, visible, and verbal exchanges of emotion, instructors, and students can reduce emotional distance and fatigue in online classrooms. Additionally, by highlighting and utilizing text-based exchanges of emotion, we hope our findings help instructors and students feel more connected and encouraged to teach and learn in online spaces.

Animating equity in teaching and learning depends on teacher dispositionsorientations to self, others, and society that underlie how we think and act. Teacher dispositions are virtues or qualities of moral character that modify the ways we interact with students and educator colleagues. Although interest in measuring to improve teaching and teacher education has grown recently, most measures lack validity evidence for practical usefulness. Integrating Messicks unified validity framework with Janssen et al.s notion of practicality (as face validity), we find through an iterative, mixed-methods analysis of interviews with equitable educators and survey responses from teacher candidates that incorporating recognizability, relevance, and feasibility concerns of equity disposition concepts (i.e., Social Awareness, Meekness, Advocacy for Students) within survey items enhances item-to-factor structure of a self-report measure. We discuss implications (a) to develop and appraise formative measures and (b) to support teacher learning and development to become equitable educators.

Student belonging is associated with academic, social, and emotional outcomes for youth. However, few studies are designed to capture ample student voices and articulations of belonging from their perspectives. We explore open-ended student responses of what matters for fitting in and advice for belonging from all students in one junior high school. Nearly 5% of responses indicated that there was no way to belong. A variety of ideas about what matters for belonging in school emerged, including features of academic life and relationships with teachers, as well as friendships. Surprisingly, responses suggesting personal dispositional qualities far exceeded any of the other emergent themes. We also use chi-square analysis to investigate the emergent themes across student characteristics. Gender and grade level differences in particular stood out as relevant to differences in responses, raising questions about how schools can organize to support belonging for all students as they transition into secondary education.

‘Affective polarization’ refers to the amount of negativity that people feel for those who belong to a political party other than their own. This self-study reports on our particular use of a narrative cycle model and documents its validity as a tool for doing the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice without the pressure of engaging in public emotional discourses. We focused on the contradiction between our intention to teach anti-oppressive teacher education and inadvertently silencing students who exhibited affective polarization. Our narrative inquiry analysis documented patterns of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that we assert could help improve the practice of anti-oppressive teacher educators from a variety of political leanings and pedagogical orientations responding to affective polarization. They are 1) recognizing the ineffectiveness of persuasion, 2) recognizing a commonality of emotions, and 3) recognizing an ethical commitment to all students. Practically, our narrative cycle model is a tool to inquire into the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice. Our findings offer a more nuanced understanding of the emotional work involved in responding to affective polarization while enacting anti-oppressive education ideals. Our model also advances a theoretical understanding of how to interrupt the immediacy of time, place, and sociality in the classroom to allow teacher educators to confront their own discomforting emotions. We assert that our narrative cycle tools can help teacher educators turn and face their own emotional and intellectual reactions to affective polarization in the classroom and do so in a manner that upholds the ideals of anti-oppressive teacher education.

<i>Aims: We explore student lunchtime experiences as they relate to student sense of belonging.<br>Methods: We use SPSS Two-Step cluster analysis and logistic regression of data from a schoolwide survey (n= 830) in the United States. Stepwise modeling is used to determine the importance of clusters representing lunchtime activity preferences and love of lunch on belonging scores. <br>Results: Loving lunch significantly positively affects school belonging. Students naturally group into five distinct different activity profiles based on lunchtime preferences. These profiles are significantly related to a sense of belonging. Being active with peers during lunch was most strongly correlated with sense of belonging.<br>Conclusion: Lunchtime warrants more attention for fostering a sense of belonging in the school community. Broadening lunchtime activity options, especially in schools where there are few available ways for socializing and being active, has the potential to support diverse needs of students and increase belonging.</i>

Intercultural competence (IC), a desired outcome in many international schools, comprises the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively navigate intercultural situations. However, international schools are often elite institutions catering to affluent expatriates and host country nationals, thus aligning the development of IC to elite norms. This study explored the perspectives of six local scholarship students in a Central American international school, finding that these students have internalised this elitism as part of their IC development. This suggests that international schools could better serve the broader community by incorporating a critical stance towards IC that promotes equity without reinforcing elitism.

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.

This study examines how six teacher candidates in one U.S. based teacher preparation program articulate understandings of critical multicultural education concepts after a practicum experience during a study abroad program in New Zealand. Teacher candidates were interviewed about their understandings of cultural difference and social inequality after their practicum, where they were placed in high poverty elementary schools with high numbers of linguistic and ethnic minority students. Teacher candidate responses reveal a celebratory understanding of culture as something external to be learned about and appreciated, rather than a dynamic system that is enacted by people in everyday life. Teacher candidates further had difficulty articulating issues of power enacted either in the New Zealand context, or in their home cultural context in the United States. These interviews also revealed that, despite a somewhat surface treatment of culture overall, teacher candidates are beginning to grapple with issues related to their own cultural identities.

Feeling a sense of belonging in schools has been shown to be important for all students. However, little systematic attention has been paid toward belonging for young children. Mechanisms for inclusion connect to belonging in the context of diversity that is regularly a part of school settings. Two-Way immersion (TWI) programs provide one educational context ideally suited for exploring the constructs of belonging and inclusion in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. This study explores how kindergarteners articulate a sense of belonging in a socio-linguistically diverse international Two-Way immersion school. Focus groups were conducted with kindergarteners asking children to help English and Spanish language dominant puppets understand what it would be like as a new student at the school and what they would need to fit in and belong. Findings reveal that these kindergarteners recognize the utility of language but do not segregate peers by language group. Language proficiencies were articulated as a procedure for being able to ‘do school.’ These young children appear to experience language diversity as a ‘de facto’ context and something to manage procedurally. Comments on friendship-making also express the importance of conforming to concrete social interpersonal norms, namely friendship as compliance to social norms and procedures of asking someone to be your friend and being nice. A consideration of inclusion as the negotiation of belonging in this diverse context allows us to consider the specific ideas and solutions of these kindergarteners as a shared project of belonging in which they all work to enact inclusion.

Although mentored undergraduate research has been shown to deepen student engagement across various disciplines, this type of extended learning opportunity is not a prominent feature of research and practice in teacher education. Our article addresses this gap by analyzing the experiences and growth of a group of five preservice teachers engaged in a mentored undergraduate research experience in several sections of an introductory critical multicultural education course. Specifically, we examined how pre-service teachers’ personal, academic, and professional engagement with critical multicultural education is impacted when they are positioned as researchers and receive additional training outside the traditional class format. Our findings indicate that their involvement as student co-researchers fostered a new awareness, sensitivity, and emotional investment in issues of social justice beyond what they gained in their introductory multicultural education course. Pre-service teachers described navigating personal relationships with new awareness and sensitivity and adjusting future plans in accordance with their deeper understanding and commitment to educational equity. We argue that mentored research opportunities are an innovative way to address professor/student power differentials in teacher education research and offer a unique model of critical multicultural teacher education that promotes deep engagement with issues beyond the classroom setting.

This original year-long study by an undergraduate teacher candidate explores the challenges of student investment in relation to issues of identity and emotionality within emotional geographies in teacher education. Personal reflections, analytic memos, and notes were created to capture and explore student investment decisions. Further, we employed both a critical and meta-critical friend to rigorously develop and interrogate themes and interpretations. Findings revealed that decisions to invest in any particular learning context did not merely constitute an intellectual commitment. Rather embodied emotional responses to persons, ideologies, and environments challenged her to make sense of her place in emotional geographies. Her decision-making process involved moving toward investing in learning or presenting a more superficial performance. These decisions depended, in part, on her deliberations of whether the emotional geographies provided opportunities that she perceived would ‘build her’ or ‘break her.’ We assert that learning actively requires students to make decisions about their position, identity and belonging within educational relationships. Attending to embodied emotional work in classroom learning is often understudied, and yet is relevant to issues of power and equity with teacher education. This self-study offers teacher educators insight into the benefits of being aware of students’ emotional work and the potential influence it can have on student decisions to invest in learning. This research contributes a deeper understanding of such emotional work and how self-study involving students can be used as a source of knowledge in teacher preparation programs.

This mixed-method research explores how students (ages 12–15) describe dispositional qualities for belonging and fitting in one junior high school. Inductive coding of open-ended responses about perceptions of belonging in school shows candor about the emotional performances and management of emotions for belonging at school. Recommendations for being authentic,<br>nice, and friendly emerged as relevant for belonging. Findings suggest that students perform niceness and friendliness to conform to emotion norms while seeking to retain authenticity. Smiling in particular was referenced as a way to perform niceness and friendliness. Chi-square and binomial logistic regression analyses add context to how advice categories were distributed<br>across status groups at the school. Students who speak a language other than English at home, or with minority religious affiliation were more likely to report a need for authenticity. Female as compared with male students were more likely to suggest each of the three dispositions for belonging in<br>the school. The emotional work of students is noteworthy wherein there are potential sanctions for those not considered nice, or nice enough, and this work augments existing research on school belonging to add the often missing student voices to enhance the corpus of research about belonging in adolescence.

This mixed-methods study was designed to measure and elaborate constructs of faculty online readiness from pre- COVID-19 pandemic literature. Bringing together the validation of a scale to measure these constructs and insights from a focus group, findings suggest that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to teach online seem to have been mitigated by a combination of affective factors such as humility, empathy, and even optimism. Teacher educators explained that transitioning online in a context of a crisis contorts normal longitudinal perceptions of preparation and readiness. This new sense of temporality was connected to unexpected benefits of bringing them into partnership with their students. However, quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted to show that assessing students equitable access to online learning and managing the demands of scholarship and university-based and academic community service duties are areas in need of attention from professional development designers and policy makers.

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for “American Mexican” students—Mexican‐heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US‐born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American‐Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world.

Building on scholarship that establishes the discourse of individuality as a typical response to critical multicultural education, this study examines emergent discourses from 175 teacher candidates in their explanations of personal privilege. Open codes were applied to end-of-semester written responses from pre-service teachers asking them to explain the unearned privileges in their lives. Data was coded with attention to ideologies and meaning making. Analysis reveals three discourses present in the teacher candidates’ written responses explaining their personal privilege: 1) a discourse of personal achievement relying on an ideology of meritocracy (n=12); 2) a discourse of inheritance that references an ideology of luck (n=118); and 3) a discourse of systemic inequality that begins to evidence more critical ideologies (n=45). These three distinct emerging discourses of individuality drawn on a general discourse of individuality in varying levels. Yet, empirical evidence from this study extends previous research related to a discourse of individuality by documenting additional discourses and ideologies in how students grapple with privilege. We assert that recognizing the discourse of inheritance that emerges in our study is particularly important because, in addition to representing the largest responses from students, it has practical and theoretical implications for teacher educators.

Claims abound in the research literature regarding multicultural teacher dispositions, including how to foster them in teacher preparation programs. However, measures of multicultural dispositions of teachers that (a) capture the range of conceptually rich constructs and (b) demonstrate strong psychometric properties are not represented in the literature. In this article, we discuss the iterative development and psychometric properties of the Multicultural Teacher Dispositions Scale (MTDS), a survey of 15 items designed to assess three dispositions/factors: Meekness, Social Awareness, and Advocacy. We analyze responses from 372 preservice teachers in three samples and analytic phases, and discuss factor and item analytic results from the final phase. Results demonstrate strong support for Meekness, though moderate support for Social Awareness and Advocacy. We discuss limitations, implications for measure refinement, and eventual use for research and practice improvement.

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).

This study examined how our non-personhood experiences (NPHEs) contributed to our teacher educator identity process. We took up exploration of these experiences, which were very painful for us, not as entre into victimhood, but because we wanted to learn something about how, in the face of such experiences, we could engage with these troubling interactions in order to renew our commitment to our work as teacher educators in the academe. During the analysis process, we considered our stories along four overlapping dimensions (1) our Selves in our own story, 2) others in the story, 3) colleagues not in the story, and 4) non-colleagues and others not in the story. A framework for looking at our NPHEs resulted that allows teacher educators to attend to students needs while simultaneously reasserting their own teacher educator identities in more honest and vulnerable ways. Analyzing NPHEs has the potential to help teacher educators engage and invite students to recognize teacher educators personhood and therefore better position them to recognize the personhood of their future students.

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 SpanishEnglish 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.

Living in poverty is associated with high levels of protracted stress associated with health problems. Economic and food insecurity are particularly poignant aspects of poverty and condition the work of securing basic daily needs of families. Recent studies suggest that levels of stress increase as family food needs rise. This paper presents new findings which clarify the relationship of food provisioning to stress levels, by examining actual food provisioning strategies and food insecurity among the Northern Cheyenne Indians of southeastern Montana. Results clearly show that stress varies by types of food acquisition strategies. Contrary to our expectations, more complex strategies, including relatively unpredictable and cumbersome food provisioning activities, are not linked to higher stress levels in our analysis. Controlling for food security levels, households using a combination of local programs and informal subsistence sources are the least stressed, despite the demands of managing a large number of food sources. Households primarily using Food Stamps are the most likely to experience high levels of stress. Interviews with food stamp recipients show that potential sources of stress include inadequate allocations of food stamps, difficulty achieving and maintaining eligibility, challenges to complying with paperwork and appointment requirements, as well as personal obstacles and community barriers to making the food stamps last. Analyses indicate that contradictions between local cultural norms for food provisioning and the realities of food insecurity in this context promote strategies emphasizing greater independence of federal food programs.

Rural education is often characterized by professional isolation. However, the experiences of rural teachers encompass professional, community, personal and other factors in specific contexts and social networks. This mixed method study uses quantitative data from social network analysis, community belonging scales, and demographics from 90 rural science teachers with qualitative interview data from 11 focal teachers from this sample to describe rural teaching experiences. Three general descriptions of isolation emerged and depict distinct opportunities for connection and support. Some teachers were extremely isolated professionally in addition to expressing low community attachment; others described multiple professional and community connections that provide pedagogical and emotional support in their rural teaching experiences. Teachers expressing high levels of isolation in one area tended to experience isolation in other areas as well. Although all teachers express some isolation in teaching, rural teachers in this study provide insight into the multiple dimensions affecting rural teachers’ isolation.

This study explores the ways seventeen Fijian college students at one U.S. based university in Hawaii describe the role of languages for constructing identity and promoting belonging. Focus group interviews revealed the importance of language for students’ lives at the university as well as in their previous schooling experiences in Fiji. Analysis was grounded in post-structural perspectives of identity and belonging. Students described native language proficiency as reinforcing kinship relationships and fostering participation in cultural traditions and practices. Students noted the affordances of speaking English to participating in academic and professional discourses. The Oceanic notion of vā, that encompasses identity and belonging, was used to discuss findings. Implications highlight the need for educational practices and pedagogies that empower Fijian students to be successful in academic and public spaces, while helping them maintain connection to their ethnic communities and identities – to maintain their positions in the vā.

Oceanic college students in the U.S. drop out of university at high rates (Teranishi et al., 2020). One important predictor of academic success and retention at the secondary level is student sense of school belonging. This qualitative study explored Oceanic college students’ perceptions of how university instructors fostered or undermined their sense of school belonging. Focus groups were conducted with 97 Oceanic students at one university in Hawai’i. Open coding explored ways that participants talked about how their instructors did or did not help them feel a sense of belonging at the university. Responses revealed that Oceanic students felt a sense of school belonging when instructors showed care and explicitly built bridges for academic success. Instructors who were Oceanic themselves or who provided Oceanic cultural representation in the curriculum and classroom promoted school belonging. Conversely, when instructors failed to show care and build bridges, or were discriminatory, students articulated how devastatingly their sense of school belonging was undermined. Finally, Oceanic students articulated how cultural norms and positionalities as people from Oceania impacted their connection with their instructors to foster school belonging. School belonging was positively related to academic motivation and college completion for these students. Implications from this study inform how university instructors can foster school belonging for Oceanic students by seeking to learn about and understand their Oceanic students' lives and backgrounds, creating safe spaces for them to share and interact in the classroom, and being explicit in their instruction for both social and academic expectations.