My thesis explores the social construction of identity of 50 second generation migrant-Australian women aged 17 to 28 years using a qualitative methodology. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 women from Latin American backgrounds and 25 women from Turkish backgrounds. My study investigated the intersections of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality. I found that the Latin women constructed their ethnic culture in reference to their country-of-origin traditions, and that they also identified with a pan-ethnic Latin culture that included migrants from other South and Central America countries. I found that the Turkish women constructed Turkish culture in reference to their religious practices, and they saw themselves as �Muslim-Turks� who identified with an Islamic pan-ethnic culture that included Muslim migrants from different national backgrounds. The women in both groups drew upon Anglo-Australian culture when it came to their gender and sexuality constructions. The Latin and Turkish women did not see themselves as �typical� women from their migrant communities. Instead, their sense of femininity was informed by what they saw as Australian egalitarianism. The women in both groups saw Anglo-Australians� gender relationships as an ideal, and as one woman said of Anglo-Australians, �how much more equal can you can get?� The women�s social construction of the nation was equally influenced by multiculturalism and an Anglo-Australian identity. They highly valued their Australian citizenship and felt positive about their lives in Australia. At the same time, they had faced ongoing racism and they reported that other people judged their Australian identities through racial characteristics. One woman said that in order for people to be accepted as Australian, �you have to be Anglo and not look like me�. Despite this sense of social exclusion, the majority of my sample held hybrid migrant-Australian identities. I develop a threefold typology of the women�s identities, and I found that 13 women did not see themselves as Australian, 36 women saw themselves as partly-Australian, and one woman held an exclusively Australian identity. I argue that narratives of multiculturalism and Anglo-Australian identity influenced the women�s social construction of identity. Their belief that Australian identity was multicultural was at odds with their experiences of racism and their own self identities, and so I examine the women�s beliefs in reference to an �ideology of multiculturalism�. This ideology supported the women�s contribution to the nation as second generation migrants, and ultimately, they expressed an unwavering support for Australian multiculturalism.

The purpose of this ethnographic research was to understand four Chinese immigrant children and their families' beliefs and uses of literacy in their intersecting worlds of home, school, and community in a Canadian context from a socio-cultural perspective. The data were subjected to thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the nature of the home literacy practices is multifaceted and complex. Factors such as the families' literacy experiences and heritage in China, their experiences in Canada, and the social context of the families' lives interweave in their daily literacy and living. The Chinese literacy traditions and cultural values of the parents dominate the families' home literacy practices. These literacy traditions, embedded in Confucianism and the socio-cultural context of modern China, differ from the values of mainstream Canadian schools, and thus contribute to the mismatch between immigrant children's home and school literacy practices. The findings also indicate that family physical environment and economic status have relatively little impact on children's literacy development. Rather, parental educational background, and the social environments including parent-child interactions, shared family activities, and the degree of parental involvement and support for children's learning play an important role in the families' literacy practices. This research also demonstrates that the four families' literacy and living were influenced by the choices made by the families around access to and utilization of media. The disparity between immigrant children's home and school literacy practices often hinders their literacy development and cultural integration into Canadian society. Implications of this study highlight the importance of communication between home and school. There is a need for teachers to take a proactive position to connect classroom practices with children's literacy experiences outside school. The study suggests immigrant parents need to provide a variety of learning opportunities for their children and be involved in all aspects of their children's learning. Furthermore, they need to empower themselves by learning English language and become informed of the literacy practices in schools in the host society. The implications also suggest that it is necessary to connect policy with practice and make first language and literacy education a part of school curriculum.

This thesis examines the discursive messages and specific practices that Latino families use to transmit messages about culture, race, and racism. Scholars have not fully explored the complexity and range of practices and discourses that are involved in Latinos’ ethno-racial socialization. The use of the phrase “ethno-racial socialization” is important because it combines the concepts of racial socialization and ethnic socialization in an effort to account for how the lived experiences of Latinos who mostly think of themselves as a racial group, are treated as one race, and thus, discuss race with family members. This research explores this process using twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews with seven U.S. born children of immigrants between the ages of 18-30 and five of their parents (3 immigrant, 1 migrant, and 1 U.S. born). The immigrant families were middle-class and had at least one parent that was born in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, or Puerto Rico. To theoretically ground the project, I draw on Annette Lareau’s concepts of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth, which are two major frames to describe how middle-class and lower-class families socialize their family members. I apply this framework to strategies of ethno-racial socialization and develop through the concepts of ethno-racial concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth, which, I argue, respectively correspond to ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ socialization approaches to conveying messages about culture, race, and racism. I argue that ethno-racial concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth stand in opposite ends of a continuum of approaches to instilling messages related to race and ethnicity. In some cases, the strategies can be mutually reinforcing because a practice that can be considered ethno-racial concerted cultivation can create opportunities for the accomplishment of natural growth to occur (and vice versa). Intra-familial differences in how family members socialize their children mean that they receive diverse and at times contradictory messages about culture and race from different family members such as parents and extended family members. The differences in how family members use ethno-racial socialization strategies are further heightened due to the experiences of the family member (such as their maintenance or rejection of immigrant culture and experiences with racial discrimination or lack thereof) and family structure (such as the varying messages children receive in single-parent households with extended family members living in the home, two-parent households, and households with transnational family ties). The young adults who were consistently exposed to encouraging and empowering messages that implicitly or explicitly emphasized a sense of commitment, belonging, and identity to the ethno-racial group experienced the most positive outcomes, some resulting in cultural capital, such as: racial literacy, preparation for bias, ethnic/racial identity, language skills, access to co-ethnic networks, cosmopolitanism, social flexibility, and social capital (in the form of familial capital). The young adults who did not receive consistent messages or who received messages that promoted anti-blackness or erased the importance of their immigrant family’s culture experienced some of the following outcomes: limited racial literacy, ambiguous ethno-racial identity, limited Spanish skills, limited access to co-ethnic networks, and parent-child conflict. Overall, this research illustrates how ethno-racial socialization in Latina/o families does not easily fit into one discrete model of socialization, but rather is a complex, multi-layered interplay of mechanisms that draw on both ethno-racial concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth approaches. This interplay also brings sometimes conflict due to the various and, at times, opposing messages that children receive from different family members.

This qualitative study addresses the interrelation of residency status, ethnic identity formation and schooling among young children of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in mixed legal status families in Central Texas. Through critical case studies, the researcher worked with Latino children of immigrants and undocumented immigrant mothers. The dissertation examines the following question: What is the interconnection between immigration experiences, residency status, and ethnic identity for children in mixed status families from Mexico and Central America? Informed by identity formation theories, Critical Race Theory, LatCrit theory and Chicana Feminist epistemology, this study shows how undocumented immigrant mothers support the development of an ethnic identity development in their children. A reason to work towards understanding identity formation among children of Latino ancestry is to open a space where their unique experiences are valued just as much as those of mainstream students. Latinos in the United States are not a homogenous group; we have diverse social, cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. Schools and communities have inadvertently overlooked Latino children of immigrants by classifying them with the 1.5 and 2nd generation Mexican American students, but this classification does not acknowledge their unique needs and their particular familial experiences. This study also brings to light the experiences of undocumented immigrant mothers as important to the analysis of the phenomenon of immigration itself. This project is relevant to the growing field of immigration studies, education, educational administration, and anthropology of education, among other fields because it concentrated on young children ages 7-10, what the researcher considered an under researched population. The intention of this research is to disrupt monovocal, discriminatory discourses about Latino immigrants. Preliminary findings suggest the need to reframe Latino children of immigrants as individuals with rich, complex lives composed of different elements such as legal status, English/Spanish languages, immigration experiences/traumas, cultural traditions, and family composition. We need to work at the intersections of these different dimensions of identity and experience as well as to consider how each aspect is relevant for the education of children of immigrants of Latino descent. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

Tutoring is a rapidly increasing but under-researched component of the education of immigrant students. This study examines one-on-one tutoring of Taiwanese high school immigrant students in Vancouver. Viewing tutoring as a social practice rather than an instructional tool for teaching academic content, this exploratory study attempts to understand how participants construct tutoring in the British Columbian educational context. Factors such as the patterning of tutorials, the participants' perspectives, and the wider educational context have been considered in this study. This study recruited 12 tutor-tutee pairs, 12 parents, and 10 school teachers. Tutoring interactions were tape-recorded over a ten-month period. Combining aspects of discourse analysis and qualitative research, this study used discourse analysis to study tutoring interactions and qualitative interviews to explore the participants' beliefs about tutoring and schooling. This study explored the interaction patterns of tutoring, examined the participants' assumptions and expectations, and investigated the relationship between the tutoring (informal learning) and the schooling (formal learning) process of immigrant students. The varied patterns of tutorials suggested that tutoring went beyond teaching academic content and served multiple functions for the immigrant families. The patterns focused on addressing the needs of parents and students to interact with their schools, and providing emotional and cultural support. In addition, there seemed to be conflicting voices among the participants regarding the tutorial practices. For example, participants expressed strong and opposing views about the goals of tutoring and the quantity of homework, academic content instruction and grammar instruction in tutoring and in schools. These different voices seemed to cause tensions which were explored and negotiated in tutoring interactions. Lastly, the relation between tutoring and its wider educational context was both cooperative and conflictual. For example, while tutoring offered students homework assistance, this assistance caused the school teachers to be concerned with tutor over-helping. Thus, there is a complex and interactive relationship between tutoring and the educational system. To conclude, studying tutoring as a social practice acknowledges the varied tutorial patterns, the conflicts, the dynamics, and the complexity of tutoring interactions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2030. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-329).

Dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Akron, Dept. of Sociology, 2008. / "December, 2008." Title from electronic dissertation title page (viewed 12/30/2008) Advisor, Matthew T. Lee; Committee members, Kathryn Feltey, Susan Roxburgh, Baffour Takyi, Carolyn Behrman; Department Chair, John Zipp; Dean of the College, Ronald F. Levant; Dean of the Graduate School, George R. Newkome. Includes bibliographical references.