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 entrée 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 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.

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.

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for '€œAmerican 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.

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 show candor about the emotional performances and management of emotions for belonging at school. Recommendations for being authentic, nice, and friendly emerged as relevant for belonging. Findings suggest that students perform niceness and friendliness in order 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 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 to male students were more likely to suggest each of the three dispositions for belonging in 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.

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).

Mandates for technology integration (TI) in teacher education courses continue to gain momentum. However, most teacher educators are not trained in the practices of instructional technology and, when mandated or strongly encouraged to do TI, they can face challenges and even crises of practice and identity. Like other teacher educators facing the seemingly inevitable advancement of TI in teacher education, we were excited, yet cautious, about a program for faculty development on blended learning course development (FDBL). This article reports the self-study of our experiences and the subsequent designing and offering of our courses in a blended learning format. We situate our systematic account of our practice within larger research considerations of how self-study of teacher education methodology can shed light on digital practices. This self-study provides a rich description of how teacher educators can integrate technology as a prolonged and iterative endeavor as opposed to a one-time project that does not fit in with their practice. Three major themes emerge from our study: (1) authentic pedagogical problems and content-area expertise, (2) learning theories and pedagogical beliefs, and (3) design iterations vs. summative evaluation. These three themes provide touchstones for teacher educators to consider when incorporating technology in their situated practice while remaining true to their content area and learning theory commitments. This self-study illustrates the ways in which the characteristics of self-study methodology actually facilitate teacher educators'€™ authentic engagement with TI.