Hispanics are the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States. Puerto Ricans are the second largest Hispanic group. As a result, research on Puerto Rican educational attainment has received increasing attention over the years. However, some areas of their educational experience remain virtually unexamined. This study explores Puerto Rican high school students' educational ideologies. It seeks to uncover students' attitudes and responses toward education as well as their postsecondary education attitudes, perceptions, and choices. It examines differences based on class, birthplace, and gender. This study finds that an education is perceived to be a necessity and believed to be the best route to gain a comfortable middle class lifestyle. It was found that a high school education was not enough to guarantee success and that a postsecondary education was critical to reach their personal and professional goals. Furthermore, differences in the utility of 4-year and 2-year colleges are discussed.

This study examines the impact of service-learning on native and non-native English speaking college composition students. The general research question is: In what ways does participation in service-learning impact student learning? Specific research questions pertaining to the general categories of student writing performance, motivation, and social orientation, are as follows: (1) Does service-learning impact students' perception of self, school, community, and society? If so, how? (2) Do native and non-native English speaking students respond to service-learning similarly? Why or why not? (3) Are native and non-native English speaking students affected by service-learning similarly? Why or why not? (4) What other factors--such as learning style, previous experience with community service, and career goals--impact service-learning outcomes? (5) Does service-learning lead to improved student writing? If so, in what ways? The study consists of treatment and comparison groups of native and non-native English speaking students, for a total of four classes in the case study. Critical pedagogy, complexity theory, teacher research, experiential and service-learning theories provide the main theoretical rationales for the study. Data collection involved surveys, student interviews, participant observations, analysis of students' journal and essay writing, and course evaluations. Douglas Biber's (1988) multifeature/multidimensional approach to textual analysis was used, along with holistic and primary trait analyses of student texts to determine what, if any, impact service-learning had on the student's writing performance. The initial results document cognitive, sociocultural, and affective factors that contribute to the writing performance of linguistically and culturally diverse learners. Service-learning had a positive impact on participants' self-perception as members of the local community and on their personal agency in promoting social change. ESL students were especially enthusiastic about improved cross-cultural understanding and oral communication skills as a result of their community service. More students in the service-learning sections also thought their writing had improved as a result of the course than in the comparison sections, and independent assessments of their essays supported this view. Textual analysis of the students' writing found more situated and interactive features in the comparison essays than in service-learning essays, however.

If you had a choice to be in an environment that ignored you and made you feel insecure and inferior, or one that affirmed your individuality, your identity, and made you feel welcome, which one would you choose? This study is about such decisions. "Stories from the Heart: Youth Narratives on Alternative Schooling Experiences" seeks to understand the social and educational conditions that lead growing numbers of "minoritized" youth to enter alternative education settings. The term minoritized refers to youth who have been disenfranchised educationally by the systemic interactions of socio-economic, socio-political, and linguistic forces that structure their everyday experiences; however, they are not necessarily minority in a numerical sense. It is my premise that these structures of feeling frame how these youth experience living in a modern world with competing interests and how they negotiate multiple subjectivities and identities. Increasing concerns about standards, safety, and accountability in American public education have given rise to a growing number of alternative school settings. Students arrive at these schools largely due to culminating negative experiences. The reasons range from school failure due to academic and/or behavior problems, poor home-school communication, excessive truancy, social alienation and juvenile delinquency to those motivated students who are working full-time to accomplish life goals in the fastest way possible. At many of these alternative schools, Hispanic/Latino and other minoritized students comprise a majority of the student body. As a teacher in the alternative-charter school where this research took place, the qualitative methods utilized revealed some surprising results. Although the data confirmed some prior findings in research on alternative schools, the results of this study bring forth new understandings of and possibilities for the education of disengaged youth. This study confirms that minoritized students enrolling in alternative education settings have a historical and enduring dissatisfaction with traditional public schools. And yet, provided with a more positive schooling experience, minoritized youth express genuine excitement for learning and even came to view school as a congenial environment. They profess learning more "than in any other school" in both academic lessons and the moral education of enhanced life skills. Grounded in Critical Theory and understanding of a caring approach to schooling, this study espouses the need for "love" in schooling as a pathway for positive educational change and revolutionary social transformation.

This teacher research study examines the use of stories told by five second grade Latinas as a means to gain an understanding of their lives and the literature they were reading and discussing during small group literature discussions. The questions guiding the research are (1) what stories do these Spanish-speaking girls bring from their lives to literature discussions and (2) how do these girls use their stories to make sense of literature? The study is based on a qualitative research design and is also phenomenological in that I wanted to understand how the children created meaning from the books we read and discussed and how their individual experiences shaped their understandings. Although there were a total of seven literature discussions held during the time of the study, I decided to focus on two of the discussions. Included in the analysis are profiles of each the five girls in the study, case studies of both literature discussions and Narrative Intertextual Analysis (NIA) Maps. Findings indicate that sharing their life stories during literature discussions gave the girls an opportunity to deliberately scrutinize the emotionally charged events in their lives that they chose to share through story. The life stories the girls shared helped them understand the book we were reading and also allowed them to step away from their lives, if only briefly, and reflect on, think about, and see connections between the events in their lives so far; the girls used stories as meaning-making devices.

This study explores the interactional achievement of intersubjectivity between native speakers (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS) of English engaged in high stakes teamwork. I term the interactional achievement of intersubjectivity Interactional Accommodation. In particular, this study examines how strategies that NSs and NNSs employ to interactionally accommodate are related to language proficiency, successful team outcomes, and to the construction of team hierarchy. The context of the study is the team meeting associated with a design course in the department of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at an American university, a setting in which NSs and NNSs work together on teams throughout the year to design operable electronic devices. Data was collected during one year from seven teams and a total of 27 participants through participant observation, video and audio taping of team meetings, and participant playback sessions. Data analysis incorporated an integrated approach informed by a variety of discourse analytic approaches. Findings demonstrate that the ability of teammates to interactionally accommodate to each other is correlated with the team's success. However, NSs and NNSs tend to employ strategies with different frequencies and in qualitatively distinct ways. These differences become important to the development of team hierarchy because strategies that NSs and NNSs employ tend to allow NSs control over the interpretive frame, which contributes to the construction of NSs as higher status team members than NNSs. The ability to control the interpretive frame is related to language proficiency, but in some cases NNSs develop strategies that allow them to control the interpretive frame and gain high status.

This micro-ethnographic case study explores backgrounds, experiences, and recommendations of Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) advocates for Native Alaskan dialect speakers. Background information includes the researcher's experience, socio-historical perspectives on Alaska's education/language policies, information on Alaskan Englishes, implementation of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Position on Social Dialects, and cultures of speech/language therapy and special education. SLP advocates were identified by themselves or others as knowledgeable, experienced, and concerned with appropriate speech/language services to Native Alaskan communities. Six SLPs participated in in-depth interviews, which explored their backgrounds, experiences, and insights. Interview tapes were transcribed and sorted by emergent themes to identify patterns, and analyzed by critical theory, within a socio-historical framework. The resulting data examined what shapes SLPs to become advocates for dialect speakers, what systems oppose and support this advocacy, and the advocates' recommendations. I found the following implications: (1) Activities and systems that support advocacy for dialect speakers in schools are not supported by the dominant cultures of schools and society; (2) SLPs who have withstood subordinate power relations may be more likely to become advocates and question dominant culture institutions; (3) SLPs with a background of subordinate power relations, who have experienced positive systemic change, are better at advocating for both themselves and others; (4) Work experience in rural Alaska increases the likelihood that SLPs will advocate for speakers of Native dialects; (5) More Native Alaskan and Native American SLPs are needed to provide advocacy for Native Alaskan dialect speakers and their communities; (6) A critical need exists for degree programs in education and speech/language pathology that provide access and support for rural Native Alaskan communities; (7) To increase the number of Native Alaskan and Native American SLPs, programs for these populations should increase recruitment and provide comprehensive financial, academic, social-emotional, and cultural support; (8) Training programs designed for Native Alaskan and Native American SLPs should address Native community issues, and include Native staff, Native experts, and internships with Native professionals; (9) Certain characteristics and backgrounds may predispose SLPs to become advocates for dialect speakers.

This dissertation examines the political and educational perspectives regarding English Language Learner (ELL) education. The broad context is the state of Arizona between 2000 and 2004. The specific context is the community of Rio Verde, a border town in Arizona. The data for this study consisted of a document review and analysis and interviews. The document review was of public documents. The interviews were with 10 study participants from the community of Rio Verde consisting of teachers, administrators, former students, and parents. The document analysis revealed two distinct positions regarding the education of ELL students; those in favor of English-only policies and practices and those against English-only policies and practices. The study participants from Rio Verde focused on beliefs about bilingualism and binationalism, immigration, the local history of ELL education, systemic inequities, and the role of the teacher in ELL education. Implications from this study that may be used to inform ELL policy and practice included: effective methodologies for ELL students based on educational research, collaboration in language policy development, placing value on the local context and history, discussion, reflection, and research as decision-making, and, teacher education programs' focus on ELL education.

Today, a large number of multicultural publications and resources are available for elementary classroom use. The purpose of the study was to examine existing multicultural elementary art curricula and resources to evaluate their adequacy and availability to the classroom art teacher, according to criteria, methods, and materials recommended by scholars in art education. The examination included price range and adaptability of material, audiovisual resources, art production, art criticism, art history, aesthetics, sequential organization, developmental appropriateness, cultural integrity, and multicultural content level. Upon completion of this study, two of the five curriculum publishers proved to consistently produce multicultural art education curriculum at a high quality level. Crizmac and Crystal Publications offer a number of curriculum settings that comply with current NAEA standards as well as the criteria set forth in this paper. Supplementary resources and the future of multicultural art education in respect to curriculum and classroom implementation are also discussed.

<p> In spite of growing numbers in high schools and colleges, US-resident adolescent bilingual learners, sometimes termed "English as a second language" (ESL) or "Generation 1.5," are not succeeding academically in proportion to their monolingual English-speaking peers. This achievement gap is evident in their writing as they enter college. Depending on the elementary and secondary schools they have attended, bilingual learners may have received no extra English learning support (often termed "immersion"), ESL support classes, or bilingual education. In addition, depending on school and community resources, bilingual learners have varying knowledge of their first language (L1): some may only speak it, others may have basic L1 literacy, others may have studied their L1 as a school subject, while others may have studied in the medium of their L1, either in their family's home country or in a bilingual education program in the US. The purpose of this study is to determine which kind of English learning support and which kind of L1 education are more likely to prepare bilingual learners to write English successfully at college. </p><p> This study uses three sources of data: a survey on language background, a writing sample, and an optional interview. Twenty-nine college undergraduate bilingual learners participated. Their survey responses develop a profile of the varied kinds of English and L1 education they received. Each participant's communication course placement composition, written as she was applying to college, is analyzed with 12 different measures: six for surface features, four for discourse/rhetorical features, and two for coherence. The writing analysis scores are correlated with the survey data and enriched with interview excerpts to discover which forms of English and L1 education correlate with high or low writing analysis scores. </p><p> The results for this group of participants show that bilingual education and ESL support correlate most often with highly-rated communication placement compositions. Moreover, formal education in the L1 explains the writing analysis scores more accurately than the kind of language learning education the participants received. Interview data suggests that bilingual education and formal L1 education may assist students' English composition skills by helping them develop metalinguistic awareness.</p>

<p> The United States is experiencing an increase in young students developing literacy in English and Spanish. Schools providing dual-language English/Spanish instruction need technically adequate tools to assess reading skills in the languages of instruction, and interpretation of results needs to acknowledge the complexity of cross-linguistic learning. Although passage reading fluency in English strongly predicts overall reading proficiency in English in the primary grades and there is some indication that passage reading fluency in Spanish provides equivalent information regarding Spanish reading skills, rarely have the two been examined simultaneously and within a dual-language instructional context. The current study examined predictive and concurrent validity of passage reading fluency in English and Spanish within third grade within a dual-language instructional environment. Using a state assessment of reading as the criterion measure, a correlational design was used to investigate the relation between passage reading fluency in English and Spanish and performance on the statewide assessment of reading in English. Findings indicate that within a dual-language context, passage reading fluency in English is the stronger predictor of performance on the state assessment in English, regardless of the student&rsquo;s home language. Spanish reading fluency is also strongly related to English reading fluency but did not explain additional variance in predicting performance on the statewide large-scale assessment of reading in English beyond what English fluency explained. Results are consistent with the idea that same language assessments are more predictive of reading performance than cross-language assessments are, but the benefits of formative assessment in the language of instruction remain.</p>