Hispanic American Education

Latinos, recognizing the importance of a college degree in being successful in the United States, are pursuing higher education in greater numbers. The Latino Student's Guide to College Success, written by Latino education experts, provides solid, up-to-date advice directed specifically to Latinos contemplating, preparing for, or already in the university or community college setting. This volume contains the "8 Steps to College Success," numerous vignettes of notable Latinos in many fields who give their personal story of how they succeeded in college and their advice for today's students, and a directory of top Latino universities and community colleges. Every Latino high school student as well as school counselors and libraries serving the Latino community will welcome this helpful guide.

The author examines political, curricular, and instructional issues in workforce education, and concludes that such policies are inequitable and that they are marginalizing Latinos. She proposes changes that will provide avenues for economic and educational advancement for Latino adults with low levels of formal education and literacy.

This book describes the educational welcome accorded Latino newcomers in a small Georgia city, which was a product not just of the particular, unorthodox, binational partnership that was created to respond to rapid demographic transformation, but also of the dialectic between local and national scripts regarding what immigrant newcomers deserve and need and whose prerogative it is to determine how they are schooled.

Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers is intended to stimulate broad thinking about how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society. It is a powerful resource for in-service and preservice multicultural education and professional development. The Guide presents a framework for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the value system of the home. It shares what researchers and teachers of the Bridging Cultures Project have learned from the experimentation of teacher-researchers in their own classrooms of largely immigrant Latino students and explores other research on promoting improved home-school relationships across cultures. The framework leads to specific suggestions for supporting teachers to cross-cultural communication; organization parent-teacher conferences that work; use strategies that increase parent involvement in schooling; increase their skills as researchers; and employ ethnographic techniques to learn about home cultures. Although the research underlying the Bridging Cultures Project and this Guide focuses on immigrant Latino families, since this is the primary population with which the framework was originally used, it is a potent tool for learning about other cultures as well because many face similar discrepancies between their own more collectivistic approaches to childrearing and schooling and the more individualistic approach of the dominant culture.

Two-year colleges are often the most financially, geographically, and academically accessible means of higher education for ethnic minorities and women. This book examines five types of two-year special focus schools. Within each chapter, the contributors, all scholars of education, cover the same topics: the history of each type of school; case studies of exemplary institutions to illustrate how a particular type of college serves its students; and an analysis of the school's contribution to the education of its particular student body. The book concludes with a discussion of why these schools work, and how predominantly white male focused schools can improve their services for minorities.

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy--based on four years of intensive fieldwork in a small rural community in Southern Illinois--is a landmark work in the area of adult literacy, combining insights from linguistics, anthropology, literacy studies, and education in a culturally situated exploration of the language and literacy practices of migrant workers. As such, it is a substantive contribution to the linguistic study of indigenous literacies; to sociocultural approaches to language, learning, and literacy; and to ethnographic and critical approaches to education. The book begins with a true story about "illegal aliens" who, in the summer of 1980, in the town of Cobden, Illinois, decided to help each other write down English como de veras se oye--the way it really sounds. The focus is on why and how they did this, what they actually wrote down, and what happened to their texts. The narrative then shifts to how and why the strategies adult immigrants actually use in order to cope with English in the real world seem to have little in common with those used by students in publicly funded bilingual and ESL classrooms. The book concludes with a discussion of the ideal of a universal alphabet, about the utopian claim that anyone can use a canonical set of 26 letters to reduce to script any language, ever spoken by anyone, anywhere, at any time. This claim is so familiar that it is easy to overlook how much undocumented intellectual labor was invested over the centuries by those who successfully carried the alphabet across the border from one language to the next. From this undocumented labor, without which none of us would now be able to read, everyone profits. To make his story and his argument as accessible as possible, Kalmar steers clear of jargon and excessive technical terminology. At the same time, however, readers who are familiar with any of the current postmodern discourses on the social construction of symbolic forms will be able to bring such discourses to bear on what he has to say about the game, the discourse, and the scene of writing that constitute the focus of his theoretical analysis. When people today argue about "illegal aliens" in the United States, probably the last question on their minds is the one to which this book is devoted: how do "illegal aliens" use an alphabet they already know in order to chart the speech sounds of colloquial English? It is the author's hope that readers will interpret his story as a parable with serious political implications. Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a compelling, vitally relevant book for researchers, students, practitioners, and anyone else interested in language and literacy in social, cultural, and political contexts, including bilingual and ESL education, second-language acquisition and development, applied and sociolinguistics, multicultural education, educational anthropology, and qualitative research.

The level of education Hispanics achieve will largely determine whether their role is commensurate with their demographic importance and whether they partake in the full benefits of living in the U.S.