An investigation of the way a segment of the ethnic minority youth in China overcomes staggering obstacles to achieve educational success and admittance to universities. The book suggests how the micro- and macro-level strategies and initiatives that facilitate this success might be adopted in other educational settings.

Indigenous people have often been confronted with education systems that ignore their cultural and historical perspectives. Largely unsuccessful projects of assimilation have been the predominant outcome of indigenous communities' encounters with state schools, as many indigenous students fail to conform to mainstream cultural norms. This insightful volume is an important contribution to our understanding of indigenous empowerment through education. The contributors to this volume work in the fields of education, social development and community empowerment among indigenous communities around the world. Their essays create a new foundation for implementing specialized indigenous/minority education worldwide, and engage the simultaneous projects of cultural preservation and social integration. This work will be vital for scholars in Native American studies, ethnic studies, and education.

Ethnicity Matters - Rethinking How Black, Hispanic, and Indian Students Prepare for and Succeed in College focuses on four model programs that are highly effective in preparing students from underrepresented groups for college and in supporting these students through baccalaureate degree completion. The four model programs serve students from those ethnic groups that face the most serious problems of underrepresentation in American higher education - African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians. What sets these four programs apart from most other minority college recruitment and retention efforts is that they are built on this premise: Ethnic identity plays an empowering role in educational achievement.

This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education. A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.

As part of a growing nationwide movement to bring Ethnic Studies into K-12 classrooms, Rethinking Ethnic Studies brings together many of the leading teachers, activists, and scholars in this movement to offer examples of Ethnic Studies frameworks, classroom practices, and organizing at the school, district, and statewide levels. Built around core themes of indigeneity, colonization, anti-racism, and activism, Rethinking Ethnic Studies offers vital resources for educators committed to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in our schools.

Conflicts between different racial, ethnic, national and other social groups are becoming more and more salient. One of the main sources of these internal conflicts is social and economic inequality, in particular the increasing disparities between majority and minority groups. Even societies that had been successful in dealing with external conflicts and making the transition from war to peace have realized that this does not automatically resolve internal conflicts. On the contrary, the resolution of external conflicts may even sharpen the internal ones. This volume, a joint publication of the University of Haifa and the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg, addresses questions of how to deal with internal issues of social inequality and cultural diversity and, at the same time, how to build a shared civility among their different national, ethnic, religious and social groups.

"Drawing on Christine Sleeter's review of research on the academic and social impact of ethnic studies commissioned by the National Education Association, this book will examine the value and forms of teaching and researching ethnic studies. The book employs a diverse conceptual framework, including critical pedagogy, anti-racism, Afrocentrism, Indigeneity, youth participatory action research, and critical multicultural education. The book provides cases of classroom teachers to 'illustrate what such conceptual framework look like when enacted in the classroom, as well as tensions that spring from them within school bureaucracies driven by neoliberalism.' Sleeter and Zavala will also outline ways to conduct research for 'investigating both learning and broader impacts of ethnic research used for liberatory ends'"--