Latinos are now the largest public school minority population in the U.S. Because of a shift in the states, cities, and counties where Latinos are choosing to live, many schools that did not previously serve substantial numbers of Latinos are doing so now. Additionally, many of the Latinos in these new settlement areas are recent immigrants who speak little or no English. This qualitative study examined how immigrant Latino parents who speak little or no English supported their children in the English-speaking school system of the U.S. It specifically examined how 12 Spanish-speaking parents negotiated language and culture with their children's school in a new settlement area in the state of Utah. From the interviews I conducted with the Latino parents and school staff members, along with school observations and the collection of other data such as forms and notices, I examined how the parents negotiated language and culture with the school. I then analyzed the themes that emerged from this collection of data using a theoretical framework consisting of postcolonial theory, social and cultural capital, and the concept of social discourses. Major themes that emerged included the concern the parents had for their children's education, the parents' limited participation in the school discourse, children serving as language brokers, the maintenance and growth of their children's heritage language, the hegemony of the English language, and issues involving social and cultural capital, linking capital, and racism. Recommendations include assuring availability of interpreters, increasing bridging and linking capital, supporting children's heritage language, and being culturally sensitive and proactive to reduce racism. Hopefully, this research will add to the literature that will help educators better serve the growing Latino school population.

This thesis investigates the success of the academic program of El Colegio Fundación Fernando Borrero Caicedo, a small private school in Facatativa, Colombia, and the ways in which the school may be a model for other similar private schools both nationally and internationally. Using observation and personal interviews with parents, administrators and students affiliated with El Colegio Fundación Fernando Borrero Caicedo, this thesis discusses the school’s main strength, its close-knit and compassionate community, as it relates to the school’s success.

Este papel, primero pretende presentar un enfoque informativo de como la cultura latina impacta la educación—con el deseo que se termine por reconocer el verdadero valor de la educación. Segundo, espera que se reconozca en la cultura latina que deben adoptar el conocimiento que a fin de avanzarse en los Estados Unidos, hay que empezar la educación desde temprana edad y alcanzar al menos un título de licenciatura. Tanto la educación de infancia temprana como la educación en la primaria, secundaria, preparatoria, y universidad contribuyen para preparar a los estudiantes latinos para enfrentar y triunfar en la sociedad de los Estados Unidos. Por fin, pretende presentar medidas concretas e ideologías que incorporan la cultura Americana para que los padres latinos puedan adoptarlas y darles una vida mejor a sus hijos, que ultimadamente sería una vida mejor para ellos también.

El enfoque de esta tesis es un proyecto de servicio-aprendizaje en una clase bilingüe de kinder en el área metropolitana de Los Ángeles. Los estudiantes recibieron un temario de educación ambiental por dos horas a la semana durante la primavera de 2008. Un estudio de la educación ambiental y la educación bilingüe da un contexto social y historico a este trabajo práctico. Describe las lecciones y su significado dentro del contexto. Hay recommendaciones a seguir para proyectos similares en el sitio de estudio.

This work deals with mathematics teaching in preschool classes. The purpose of my study is to investigate the preschool classes’ teachers' aspirations for the children learning mathematics in two different preschools. To achieve my goal, I formulated the following questions to be explored and answered through interviews with five teachers.  Does mathematics in preschool classes have a prominent role in educators' planning? What perception do the educators in the field have about the learning and teaching of mathematics in the preschool classes? How do the teachers understand their own work with mathematics in preschool classes in relation to multilingual students?                                 A qualitative interview method was applied. It is based on interviews with teachers who convey math skills in different ways to children in preschool classes. Theories and previous research have been applied to analyze the informants’ answers and to find out the aspirations of the teachers in their mathematics teaching. The results of my investigation show that all teachers in preschool classes agree that mathematics is an important part in preschool classes’ activities. Moreover, the interviews show that the preschool -class teacher's aspirations aims at mathematics learning taking place when children practice math in an enjoyable way, in the preschool classes, and later, during the school years. Some teachers believe that the way of working with mathematics in preschool classes provides even more opportunities for multilingual students to develop their mathematical vocabulary and to be prepared to consolidate what they learned in “playing” with math before starting the first school year. This is why they think that preschool classes should be mandatory for all six-year-old children and especially multilingual students. Many teachers stressed the need for more working hours in preschool classes in order to stimulate children's learning and concretize math in other school subjects. For they think that children can learn mathematics in different activities and operations, as well as through playing, games, outdoor education and during meals, without working with math books. Other educators are working with math books just because the children in preschool classes prefer to work with a book and want to have homework.

Document clustering automatically organizes a document collection into distinct groups of similar documents on the basis of their contents. Most of existing document clustering techniques deal with monolingual documents (i.e., documents written in one language). However, with the trend of globalization and advances in Internet technology, an organization or individual often generates/acquires and subsequently archives documents in different languages, thus creating the need for multilingual document clustering (MLDC). Motivated by its significance and need, this study designs a Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) based MLDC technique. Our empirical evaluation results show that the proposed LSI-based multilingual document clustering technique achieves satisfactory clustering effectiveness, measured by both cluster recall and cluster precision.

In this thesis we will study Luis Landero's Novel, Caballeros de fortuna, specifically the creation by the characters of an alternate life that they create through fiction. As a result of a failed life that resembles the effect of the years that Spain experienced Francisco Franco's dictatorial regime, these characters, unable to fight insecurity and rootlessness produced by the society of this era, become victims of utopian desires that result in the creation of an alternative life lived in fiction. At the same time, we can observe how this life style leads to the emergence of a critical study of historical past events, which is a reevaluation of them. Through the application of Hutcheon’s postmodern theory which appeared in her books A poetics of Posmodernism and The Politics of Posmodernism, this study will judge how the past, which has been fictionalized by the characters, contributes to the emergence of a rewriting of history that opposes the ideology of totalization and homogenization that has been attributed.

Modern transportation has given rise to and facilitated the movement and mobility of populations. While much critical attention has been drawn to the permanent migration of the mobile population, very few scholars in the field of sociolinguistics have stressed the temporary movement of the group of travelers who are subsumed under the appellation, “the sojourner”. In addition, previous research predominantly focused on non-English speakers sojourning to English-dominant countries (Haneda and Monobe, 2009; Lee, 2008; Own, 1999), thus largely neglecting the multilingual contexts in Asia. To fill this scholarly gap, small-scale research was conducted by employing two frameworks, Social Network Theory (Milroy, 1980) and Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992), to examine linguistic practices and identity positioning of Southeast Asian (SEA) sojourners when they interact with Hongkongers and other sojourners. In particular, it tackles a more complex language contact situation in which two major lingua francas, namely English and Mandarin, are available. This study was conducted in a higher education dance school in Hong Kong and three SEA sojourn students were recruited. Multi-faceted identities and multiple communities of practices are found: (1) at Communal Level: Cantonese is the shared linguistic repertoire of this dance community and three SEA sojourn students form the weakest ties with local students; (2) at Group Level: both Mandarin and English are adopted and stronger ties are established with other overseas sojourn students; and (3) at Individual Level: Singapore English is the dominant code choice used among these three SEA sojourners and they are bound together by the strongest ties. Instances of trilingual code-mixing and code-switching are also found in the interaction among the sojourners and Hong Kong locals. The two theories, Social Network Theory and Community of Practice, are complementary in accounting for the social organization of multilingual communities. Ultimately, this study demonstrates the complexity of multilingual communities with the aforesaid language contact in Hong Kong as a case in point. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Culture is studied across many different disciplines and is viewed as a topic of great and valuable interest within research. Agricultural education has come to recognize the value of embracing a multicultural attitude and the need for recruitment of culturally diverse individuals. While definitions of culture can vary from individual to individual, understanding the degree which a topic has been researched within a discipline is necessary in order to know what direction future research should take. Therefore, this study presents the findings of research on culture within the Journal of Agricultural Education from 1960-2015. This study’s findings indicate that culture, as defined as a way of life that outlines how an individual acts, perceives, and believes, has been researched on a very limited basis within the Journal of Agricultural Education. However, findings also indicate that many tenets of culture have been researched and include diversity, multicultural education, inclusion, and teacher preparation. These findings lead to recommendations to expand the research within the topic of culture to include social aspects of culture and youth cultures.

Monolingual, monocultural approaches to education in Canada overlook the tremendous cultural and linguistic resources present in our classrooms and communities. Connecting language teaching and learning with a politics of global location and broader social issues relating to migration and diversity, this dissertation explores how dichotomous understandings of ‘native’/’nonnative’ students neglect these interlocking and intersecting dimensions of experience. The dissertation employed Lather’s (2007) critical praxis methodology to generate data from a collaborative research project involving teachers, students, and university-based researchers. The purpose of this project was to explore the educational significance of engaging students in authentic forms of cultural production that drew upon their cultural and linguistic resources, diverse histories, and multiple modes of representation in classroom-based learning. While endeavouring to contribute to positive change in education practice, the dissertation directs a critical gaze toward the dominant and marginalizing practices and discourses that materialized during this work. Drawing upon ethnographic data gathered over the course of the project, including classroom observations, interviews with students and teachers, multimodal artifacts of student work, and researcher field notes, the dissertation maps moments of ‘otherness’ that marked nonnative ‘others’. Located where sameness and difference meet, these pedagogical pivot points became sites for negotiating understandings of cultural difference. The discoveries arising from the study are presented as two stories, offering what Lather (2007) calls a “double(d) reading” of the empirical work of the project. The first story articulates a critical analysis of the research, based on efforts to incorporate plurilingualism in education and meet the needs of students as plurilingual social actors. The second story deconstructs these aims, examining the desires of liberatory educators to create contexts of empowerment for immigrant students. The significance of the study is its contribution to expanding conversations about how educators and researchers interested in language learning might talk about difference and the social subject in education, adding greater complexity to address the multiple dimensions of students’ experiences in globalized educational contexts.