In this book, internationally migrant families invite us to listen to the storylines of their mostly muted voices as they navigate the local schools in their new cultural context. They call us to hear them as they grapple with issues they encounter. They implore us to feel like an outsider and see the school as a foreign culture with language and communication barriers. The book is organized to enhance this carework. Each chapter begins with a vignette that includes the voices of one or more members of international migrating families, while introducing the context of the chapter. At the end of each chapter readers will find specific implications to consider. These are constructed with preservice teachers, practicing teachers, and educational administrators in mind. As you read each chapter, there is the call for school transformation. The families in this book entreat school personnel to engage with international migrant families and to embrace a risk and resilience model as we strive together for success. These storylines challenge us to examine our personal storylines for biases and deficit understandings and call us all to purposefully rewrite these in the spirit of possibilities as the families in this book have embodied for us.

Adopting a uniquely critical lens, this volume analyzes the relationship between forced migration, the migrations of people, and subsequent impacts on education. In doing so, it challenges Euro-modern and colonial notions of what it means to move across 'borders'. Using Abiayala and its diasporas as theory and context, this volume critiques dominant colonial attitudes and discourses towards migration and education and suggests alternatives for understanding how culturally grounded pedagogies and curricula can support migrating youth and society more broadly. Chapters use case studies and first-hand accounts such as testimonios from a variety of countries in the Global South, and discuss the lived experiences of Afro-Colombian, Haitian, and Indigenous youth, among others, to challenge the rigid disciplinary borders upheld by Euro-modern epistemologies. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and Latin American and Caribbean studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in anticolonial education, diaspora studies, and educational policy and politics will also benefit from this book.

Family and Community Partnerships: Promising Practices for Teachers and Teacher Educators, offers a fresh new look at the competencies, strategies, and practices that effective educators develop to build strong partnerships with families and communities. Written by leaders in the field, the book is an outgrowth of a cutting-edge initiative led by the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement to reimagine how educators are prepared for family and community engagement. Based on four guiding practices - reflect, connect, collaborate, and lead alongside families – each section of the book highlights theory, real-world strategies, discussion questions, and activities that can be used by teachers, teacher educators, and professional learning specialists to inspire new ideas for courses, workshops, and for self-reflection.

Pandemic Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic provides critical insights into the impact of the pandemic on the education system, pedagogical approaches, and educational inequalities. Education is often touted as the best way to promote social mobility and produce informed members of society. The pandemic has significantly threatened those goals by temporarily disrupting education and exacerbating disparities in the education system. The scholarship in this volume takes a closer look at many of the issues at the heart of the educational process including teacher self-efficacy, the gendered and racialized impacts of the pandemic on education, school closures, and institutional responses. Drawing on the expertise of scholars from around the world, the work presented here represents a remarkable diversity and quality of impassioned scholarship on the impact of COVID-19 and is a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to the pandemic.

Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities offers scholars, students, and practitioners important new knowledge about how current policies impact families, schools, and community partnerships. The book’s authors share a critical orientation towards policy and policy research and invite readers to think differently about what policy is, who policymakers are, and what policy can achieve. Their chapters discuss findings from research grounded in diverse theories, including institutional ethnography, critical disability theory, and critical race theory. The authors encourage scholars of family, school, and community partnerships to ask who benefits from policies (and who loses) and how proposed reforms maintain or disrupt existing relations of power. The chapters present original research on a broad range of policies at the local, state/provincial, and national levels in Canada and the USA. Some authors look closely at the enactment of specific district policies, including a school district’s language translation policy and a policy to create local advisory bodies as part of decentralization efforts. Other chapters reveal the often unacknowledged yet necessary work parents do to meet their children’s needs and enable schools to operate. A few chapters focus on challenges and paradoxes of including families and community members in policymaking processes, including a case where parents demonstrated a preference for a policy that research demonstrates can be detrimental to their children’s future education opportunities. Another set of chapters emphasizes the centrality of policy texts and how language influences the educational experiences and engagement of students and their families. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the research for educators, families, and other community partners.

From the fraught world of geopolitics to business and the academy, it’s more vital than ever that Westerners and East Asians understand how each other thinks. As Jin Li shows in this groundbreaking work, the differences run deep. Li explores the philosophical origins of the concept of self in both cultures and synthesizes her findings with cutting-edge psychological research to reveal a fundamental contrast. Westerners tend to think of the self as being, as a stable entity fixed in time and place. East Asians think of the self as relational and embedded in a process of becoming. The differences show in our intellectual traditions, our vocabulary, and our grammar. They are even apparent in our politics: the West is more interested in individual rights and East Asians in collective wellbeing. Deepening global exchanges may lead to some blurring and even integration of these cultural tendencies, but research suggests that the basic self-models, rooted in long-standing philosophies, are likely to endure. The Self in the West and East Asia is an enriching and enlightening account of a crucial subject at a time when relations between East and West have moved center-stage in international affairs.

This edited volume demonstrates how an educational linguistics approach to inquiry is well positioned to identify, examine, and theorize the language and literacy dimensions of refugee-background learners’ experiences. Contributions (from junior and senior scholars) explore and interrogate the policies, practices and ideologies of language and literacy in formal and informal educational settings as well as their implications for teaching and learning. Chapters in this collection will inform advances in the research base, future innovations in pedagogy, the professional development of teachers, and the educational opportunities that are made available to refugee-background children, youth and adults. The work showcased here will be of particular interest to teachers and teacher educators committed to inclusion, equity, and diversity; those developing curriculum and/or assessment; and researchers interested in the relationship between language practice, language policy and refugee education.