Educational policy usually overlooks Cambodian American students as a unique ethnic group, attending instead to the positive statistics that aggregate Asian American students into a single group of successful students. Through ethnographic interviews, this article examines how successful Cambodian American students interpreted values from their multiple worlds in relation to their paths into the university and provides insight into the academically supportive features of their different worlds. Family obligation emerged as a coherent theme that figured prominently in their school experiences. This study complicates the simplistic view of how traditional cultural values influence immigrant ethnic minority school achievement.
The current article examines the experiences of successful Cambodian American students as a unique ethnic group to understand their patterns of social and academic college integration. Cambodian American students' sense of academic belonging related closely to perceptions of personal connections. Our data suggest that integration into the campus environment and maintaining contact with the prior community are both important for Cambodian American students' successful adjustment. These data offer direction for college administrators, student affairs staff, and faculty in supporting the retention and academic success of Cambodian American college students.
Purpose: This article describes how trust emerged as an issue in one school district and the processes by which central office administrators enhanced trust with its school site leaders.Method: This exploratory participant observer case study uses multiple sources of data including surveys, interviews, observations, and documents collected during a 4-year period from central office and school site leaders. Findings: The article illustrates how a university partner can play a critical role in surfacing and bringing forth action on an undiscussable issue-trust between the central office and its schools-and the actions taken by the central office to address specific facets of trust: openness, communication, risk, and integrity. The site administrators' response to these actions revealed that trust can be developed at both the relational and organizational leadership levels. Significance to the Field: The study is significant in illustrating that building trust between the central office and school sites can be an essential step in an underperforming district and can serve as a resource in achieving and sustaining school district reform. It also shows that attending to specific facets of trust can be useful when examining the development of trust between school sites and the district office.
Research suggests that Cambodian students often endure conflicting ethnic stereotypes from larger society and their school and communities. We examine the ways in which Cambodian youth negotiated their ethnic identities in response to these stereotypes and argue that Cambodian students adopted, rejected, and affirmed certain ethnic identities in relation to perceived advantages associated with different labels across varying school contexts. [Asian American identity, Cambodian/Khmer students, ethnic stereotypes, model minority]
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.