This dissertation presents two participatory action research case studies focusing upon how students viewed the influence of the pedagogy and curriculum of the Chican@ Literature, Art and Social Studies (CLASS) program upon their personal, ethnic, and academic identities. In addition, these studies examined the various ways that youth perceive their role in addressing critical issues in their lives. I conducted this study as a teacher researcher in collaboration with my students. The first study focuses upon eight of the students in the CLASS program as a collective, and the second study is concentrated upon the only student in CLASS who was not of Chican@/Latin@ descent. Both case studies were ten months in duration where I used ethnographic research methods for data collection, which included transcripts from one-on one interviews with the students, as well as artifacts they produced during CLASS. The eight students in this study were an average age of 18.5 years old and all but one had experience in the now defunct Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in Tucson; a program that produced positive educational outcomes in terms of graduation rates and state standardized tests through culturally responsive and critical pedagogy rooted in Indigenous epistemologies (Cabrera, Milem, Jacquette, & Marx, 2014). CLASS was a similar in structure and practice to MAS since I was a teacher in both programs. However, due to unprecedented legislation in Arizona banning Mexican American Studies, CLASS became the last vestiges of the former program outside of public school spaces in order to adhere to the law (Acosta, 2014a; 2014b). Implications include the impact of Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing and humanizing methodologies and theoretical frameworks upon teaching practices for Chican@ students and other students of color. Furthermore, culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical multicultural and responsive curriculum can increase student engagement and the formation of a positive academic identity (Banks, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Paris & Alim, 2014; Valenzuela, 1999). Finally, counter narratives (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), ethnic studies, and social justice curricula (Sleeter, 2011) coupled with Indigenous epistemologies can assist in the development of critical consciousness in students, and serve as a guide to taking collective action in their community and lives.

There is a considerable body of research showing that before children enter school they are already equipped with language competencies and concepts developed particularly in their sociocultural environment. Although some studies have explored to some extent the lives of Indigenous children in their socio-cultural contexts, most of these studies do not systematically focus on the early years of their socialization processes. Furthermore, in Brazil, researchers have only recently–in the last 15 years–started to look at the child as a capable and competent being. Thus, the purpose of this study was to document and analyze the socialization practices used by and with Mbya Guarani children in the Tekoá [reservation] Marangatu Indigenous reservation in Imaruí, Brazil, particularly within the school and community contexts. The overarching goal of this dissertation study was to explore the role of Indigenous children's socialization processes in the development of bilingualism, biliteracy, or biculturalism within the school environment and how the bilingual school supports or hinders the development of the Guarani language. In this study, children are seen as social actors (Cohn, 2005a; Marqui, 2012; Mello, 2006; Tassinari, 2011), who transmit knowledge amongst themselves, the adults in their lives, and the different contexts in which they live and experience bilingualism and biculturalism, and in some cases, biliteracy. In this qualitative study, I used ethnographic instruments (Heath & Street, 2008; Seidman, 1998) to document in-depth the several literacy practices performed by first- and third-graders in the Escola Indígena de Ensino Fundamental Tekoá Marangatu (E.I.E.F. Tekoá Marangatu). Data include fieldnotes from participant observations, video and audio recordings, literacy samples (in the form of photographs), and informal interviews, which were collected during three months of fieldwork. Through open coding, I delineated specific domains regarding the use of literacy events (Heath, 1982) and the socialization practices of this specific Indigenous community, following previous empirical studies on immigrant and Indigenous children's emergent literacies (Azuara, 2009; Reyes & Azuara, 2008; Reyes, Alexandra, & Azuara, 2007; Teale, 1986). Through the use of narrative inquiry (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011), I demonstrate how the role of translanguaging (García & Beardsmore, 2009) and the role that peers (Gillanders & Jiménez, 2004; Halliday, 2004; Moll, 2001) took in the socialization processes of these children are some of the important findings of this study. By also interviewing key members of the school, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, I was able to understand more in-depth the importance of maintaining these children's cultural heritage at the same time that they learned their native language. In many instances the children in this study relied on more capable peers to understand the worlds and contexts in which they live. As they interacted with each other and with adults, children translanguaged across these multiple contexts as they brought their funds of knowledge (Gonzaléz, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) into the school setting. The modo de ser e viver [way of being and living] in this Indigenous community was intrinsically connected to how they saw themselves as Guarani and how they have adapted to the ways of living on the reservation. Being Guarani encompassed many aspects of their religion, ways of thinking, cosmology, and thus many times it was difficult to separate all of the aspects that composed the Guarani individual. The constant transformation of this reservation has been reshaping the social structures and activities the Guarani perform on a daily basis, yielding new forms of literacy. Even though Portuguese is the dominant language in the school context, both adults and children used Guarani as a way to escape the homogenization almost required by the outside world. Thus, understanding the role that the bilingual school plays in this community was also a key aspect of this research since both adults and children reinforced the use of Indigenous socialization practices within the school setting as a way to adapt to their way of living and being.

This dissertation is a case study that explores how 8th grade former English language learners, or RFEP students, interacted with texts in their social studies class across a unit of study on World War II. This study is based on three assertions: we have a limited understanding of language and literacy among newly reclassified adolescent English language learners due to a shift in state language policy, examining students' interactions with texts in a secondary content classroom is a valuable perspective, and the decisions teachers make to meet the perceived needs of their students warrants examination. The primary source of data in this study was the text annotations students completed when reading the teacher adapted texts. Annotations included any underlining, circling, questioning or commenting on the texts. Annotations were analyzed for patterns across students and across texts. Analysis of texts for linguistic features and structures was completed using the Coh-Metrix (Graesser, McNamara & Kulikowich, 2011) text analysis tool. Analysis of teacher talk during whole class text annotations as well as interviews with teachers and students showed additional patterns. Three key findings emerged: the teacher is a designer or relevant, meaningful and comprehensible instruction, teacher modeling matters to RFEP students, the adapted texts were used as instructional tools to promote content learning. These findings suggest directions for future research and have implications for practice. A critical area for research is the selection and adaptation of content area texts. With the advent of the Common Core State Standards and their emphasis on primary source documents and complex texts, it is essential to explore which texts are used and how they are adapted to facilitate access to those texts. This study also indicates the possibility for the further use of text annotations as a primary source of data for research and to facilitate instructional decisions by the teacher.

This project involved exploring the mathematics stories of three, first-generation adolescent fluent English proficient (FEP) seventh grade Latina students who attended an urban middle school in Arizona. In this study, I also explored the mathematics stories of one primary caregiver for each student as and that of their mathematics teacher. My goal for this project was to understand the factors that attributed to the formation of the young girls' mathematics identities and how these identities informed their decisions to engage with mathematical activity. Through relationships and experiences with their peers, teachers, family, and community, students come to know who they are relative to mathematics. My study addressed the construct of identity, drawn from Sfard and Prusak's (2005) framework of narrative identity, as a way to view students as they developed as mathematics learners. The findings illuminated important classroom experiences, how they made sense of these experiences, and how they took up and rejected opportunities to engage with mathematics because of those experiences. They also illuminated how their relationships with their primary caregivers and mathematics teachers influenced their level of classroom mathematics engagement and the development of their actual and designated mathematics identities. The findings further revealed a relationship between students' immediate future identities and actual identities. Examining middle school students' immediate future mathematics identities provides a more complex and nuanced understanding of how young adolescents make sense of their classroom mathematics experiences. My study showed that the mathematics identities students created were highly influenced by the messages they perceived were narrated by their primary caregivers and their mathematics teachers. Students used their relationships with these individuals as a way to read their mathematics classrooms and make decisions regarding their level of engagement with mathematical activity. They were constantly translating caregiver and teacher messages about mathematics, teacher moves, instructional environments, and social norms for participation and learning through the lenses of their mathematics identities. This study supports understanding of why students with similar social backgrounds, equal instructional mathematics environments and the same mathematics teacher developed different mathematics identities and affiliations with mathematics.

This study examines representations of intercultural learning in global children’s literature through critical content analysis. Cosmopolitanism provides a vision to connect individuals to the global communities through a critical lens. According to Rizvi (2009), intercultural learning should bridge the local and the global, move between cultures and communities, and develop transnational compassion and collaboration. Intercultural learning involves explorations of culture, active participation in the world, and critical thinking on issues that are normally taken for granted. Intercultural learning is not just learning about other cultures but focuses on individuals’ awareness of their roles in the world and collaboration with people from global communities to make the world a better place. With this idea in mind, global children’s literature is a useful resource to introduce readers to the global community and to their responsibility in the world. This study is based on the importance of engaging with high quality global children’s literature to widen and deepen readers’ worldviews. Because readers are influenced by what they read and share, how books depict cross cultural experiences and international communities is crucial. Therefore, how books portray intercultural learning experiences in a global context is important to examine. This study provides a new lens on global children’s literature because limited research has been done to understand how the idea of intercultural learning through international travel is portrayed in books at a time when many readers have the opportunity to travel across the continents. The theoretical framework of this study consists of intercultural theories, global competency and critical literacy. This study looks at culture as ways of living that involve people’s thoughts, values and engagements in daily life. In addition, two intercultural learning theories are used to examine the protagonists’ learning including a continuum of intercultural learning by David Hoopes (1979) and a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity by Milton Bennett (1986, 1993, 2004, 2009). Theories relate to global education such as global competence by Hanvey (2000) and Case (1993), intercultural communicative competence by Michael Byram (1997), and cosmopolitanism by Rizvi (2005, 2006,2007, 2008, 2009 ) and Calhoun (2002). These theories inform my notion of intercultural learning in different ways. In addition, critical literacy is crucial to this study because it focuses on the characteristics that allow individuals to discover their role, relationship and responsibility with others in the world. Nine children and young adult’s realistic fiction novels were selected for this study. The books all involved protagonists’ explorations of new cultures, places, and people as they traveled to another country for short term visits. All of them have close relationships with at least one local friend. Critical content analysis is used to examine the text from a critical point of view to understand whether the international journey enables the protagonists to critically examine their privileges and responsibility in the world. In this study, critical literacy supports my concept of intercultural learning and it is also used to develop useful thinking tools (adapted from Jones, 2006) to examine the texts from a deeper perspective. First, the findings indicate that intercultural learning is portrayed with exoticism in this text set. In several of the books, international travel is associated with romance and exotic cultural icons. Secondly, insider authors and the authors who have close relationships with the groups they write about are more careful about cultural authenticity than outsider authors. Many of the insider authors care about the cultures they wrote about; therefore, they embed social messages in the stories. Additionally, several writers employ a writing formula to depict international travelers’ intercultural learning process. The formula does not reflect readers’ diverse cultural backgrounds in the current world. Lastly, throughout the journey, only a few protagonists develop critical consciousness regarding their roles in the global community. Conclusions from the analysis suggest the need for more sophisticated global children’s literature that highlights international travel and cross cultural relationships. The implication section provides recommendations to educators, teacher educators, and publishers and suggestions for further research.

This study explores cultural representations and cultural adaptations made by translators in translated children's picture books. This study has two focuses. In the first part of this study, which is a critical content analysis, I examine the cultural representations depicted in Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean translated picture books, using cultural studies as a theoretical framework. In the second part of this study, I compare original and translated editions of Caldecott and popular Korean picture books to find out how the translators adapt cultural, ideological, and linguistic conflicts in the process of translation, using translation as a dialogic process. For the first part of this study, I found four categories related to the cultural representations: (1) a sense of belonging and societal membership; (2) constructing and challenging gender stereotypes; (3) constructing images of childhood; and (4) dominant visual images of South Korea/the United States. These findings indicate that the insider authors of Korean culture try to show authentic images of South Korea, using contemporary fiction stories. The Korean translated books also deal with various images of American culture authentically from historical fiction to contemporary fiction. However, a small number of books do not show broad cultural representations of both cultures. In the second focus of this study on cultural adaptations, the analysis directly compared original and translated editions of the same texts. The themes of cultural familiarity, adaptations regarding illustrations, completely different translations, omissions, additions, and changes of titles or book jackets were identified. These findings indicate that most American and Korean translators purposely made cultural adaptations in the process of translation in order to help target readers to have better understanding of these international books. Additionally, they did not change essential authentic features, such as the characters' names and geographic names. I also found mistranslations between the original and translated editions of books. These changes could have occured because the translators lacked knowledge of both cultures or of the deep structures of the stories. The implication section provides recommendations to publishers, translators, educators, parents, teacher educators, and researchers and suggestions for further research.

According to critical scholars there is a global education policy community that contributes to the increasing convergence of national education policies (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Key players in this community include the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Although the scholars point out that global education policies are not uniformly copied or implemented, missing from the literature on globalization and education are the voices of the students and educators impacted by them. The process of policy implementation is neither seamless nor mechanical. The intended impact of a policy is not necessarily its outcome. Not only may there be unanticipated consequences, but educators and students may also resist, adapt, or transform practices suggested by the policies. This study examines international influence on the classroom practices of educators in one high school in northern Mexico by tracing the implementation of a recent national high school reform. Mexican education officials drew on the examples of recent high school reforms in Europe in designing the reform and, in addition, borrowed money from the World Bank for its implementation. Analysis of key official documents related to the reform along with participant observation and interviews of teachers, students, parents, a union representative, and education officials reveal that although just like the policies of the global education policy community the reform promotes neoliberal and human capital views of schooling, these views are not shared by all of the participants in this study. In addition, participants do not believe that the reform is adequately adapted to the context of Mexican schools. Judging from the teachers participating in this study, Mexican schools and educators have strengths that were overlooked in the development of the reform.

This study is aimed at analyzing how contemporary urban Aymara youth hip hoppers and bloggers are creating their identities and are producing discourses in texts and lyrics to contest racist and colonial discourses. The research is situated in Bolivia, which is currently engaged in a cultural and political revolution supported by Indigenous movements. Theoretically the study is framed by a multi-perspective conceptual framework based on subaltern studies, coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, interculturality and decolonial theory. Aymara young people illustrate the possibility of preserving Indigenous identities, language, and knowledge while maximizing the benefits of urban society. This challenges the colonial ideology that has essentialized the rural origin of Indigenous identities. Moreover, this research argues that the health of Indigenous languages is interconnected with the health of the self-esteem of Indigenous people. Additionally, this study provides information about the relation of youth to the power of oral tradition, language policies, and the use of technology.

This dissertation research showcases six ethnographic case studies that focus on the experiences of Puerto Rican transnational youths and their families upon returning from the US to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is a remarkable setting to study transnationalism because of its particular historical and sociopolitical relationship with the US, which grants Puerto Ricans citizenship and thus ease of movement, while retaining a strong attachment to the Island. It can be argued that Puerto Ricans define transnationalism, being simultaneously insiders and outsiders to the US national scene. The youths involved in these dynamics learn to navigate different educational and social settings on the Island and the US. Factors like language and the educational contexts are highly influential in the students' lives and their educational outcomes. The study was conducted over a period of seven months in two public schools in Puerto Rico. The data were collected through interviews, classroom observations, and home visits with return migrant students, their parents, and their teachers and school staff. The combination of these data collection methods and the variety of participants, provided a nuanced portrayal of the nature of their transnationalism and the social and educational experiences of the families in and out of the school context.

Most research on low-income, racial minority students' access to higher education has been conducted in urban communities. Little research explores these students' experiences within rural settings. Using Ríos-Aguilar, Kiyama, Gravitt and Moll's framework (2011) that bridges Yosso's (2005) "community cultural wealth" with alternative forms of capital, this case study investigated how three alumni students from a low-income, rural, border community accessed information and resources for college within their school, homes and community. Narratives, one-on-one interviews, and a survey questionnaire helped determine multiple forms of capital participants leveraged towards higher education. Participants' college pursuits and choices were influenced by information from family members, teachers and guidance counselors, community scholarships, and emotional support of family, friends, and community members. Research must continue to follow the experiences of rural, low-income, minority students access to higher education and create better opportunities and connections for them to attend college.