This article analyzes illustrative classroom events documented during an ethnographic study of bilingual classrooms in a "high-achieving" school. Through a performativity lens that emphasizes the discursive constitution of subjectivities, I demonstrate how discourses around achievement and success in the current reform context exacerbated one…

Dual-language education is often lauded for providing high-caliber bilingual instruction in an integrated classroom. This is complicated, however, when a dual-language program does not include all members of a school community. This article examines a "strand" dual-language program that attracts middle-class white students to a predominantly black…

Drawing from sociocultural theories of identity, this study uses ethnographic tools to compare how displaced children living in two distinct international contexts, who are linked by their participation in a community-based photography project, negotiate their identities and the discourses constructed around their experiences of displacement. We…

In this article, I aim to demonstrate the relationships between the educational policies of the Brazilian and French Guyana governments and the sociopolitical structure of the Wayapi in respect to these educational practices. My main objective is to go beyond the normal concept that the school is an external interference that catalyzes processes…

The article analyzes the Brazilian Indigenous formal educational policies through two ethnographic cases (Karipuna and Mebengokre-Xikrin) that allow us to approach the Indigenous perspective on schooling. We first discuss the possibilities and limitations of past and current legal references and educational policies. In the analysis of the two…

This article explores the sense of belonging promoted by the current program of Educacion Intercultural Bilingue (EIB) of the province of Neuquen for Mapuche children, examining the design and implementation of this program. The analysis reveals how this program reinforces a hegemonic definition of Mapuche identity, which relegates Mapuche culture…

This article describes Mazahua children's participation in learning interactions that take place when they collaborate with more knowledgeable others in everyday activities in family and community settings. During these interactions they coordinate their actions with those of other participants, switching between the roles of "knowledgeable…

Drawing on data from an ethnographic study in a Quechua rural community in the Peruvian Andes, this article examines hybrid literacy practices among bilingual rural speakers in the context of the household and the community. I examine the coexistence of two types of textual practices that operate side by side, at times integrated in the same…

This article discusses the findings of an ethnographic research study exploring the experiences of Puerto Rican women attending a family literacy program in Chicago. In particular, the study investigated the repositories of knowledge and information available to participating women that figured into the development of their notions about…

Building on an ethnographic study of American Muslim undergraduate women at two universities in Washington, D.C., I examine undergraduate Muslim women's construction of gendered discourses. Stereotypes feed into both majority and minority constructions of Muslim women's gendered identities. I highlight Muslim women's resistance to and adoption of…

This article addresses how preadolescents produce and perform race through an ethnographic study of 8- to 11-year-old students in four fourth grade classrooms in the southeastern United States. Although Asian, Latino, and white students tended to avoid explicit talk of race, many white students constructed black students as disruptive…

In this article, I examine how black students construct their racial and achievement self-concepts in a predominantly white high school to enact a black achiever identity. By listening to these students talk about the importance of race and achievement to their lives, I came to understand how racialized the task of achieving was for them even…

In this article, I examine the contested and racially coded cultural politics of creating mixed-income schools in mixed-income communities. Policymakers claim deconcentrating low-income people will reduce poverty and improve education. However, based on activist research in Chicago, I argue these policies are grounded in "culture of poverty"…

In this article, we present a model for thinking about how learning settings provide resources for the development of the practice-linked identities of participants, drawing on data from a study on an African American high school track and field team. What does it mean to make an identity available in the context of a learning setting? In this…

This article explores an Arab American community arts organization as a site for promoting youth civic participation and social activism. Studying a citizenship education project outside the school walls, and focusing on the arts as a medium for this work, foregrounds the role of the symbolic for engaging youth as active participants in democratic…