“That’s When We Became a Nation”

Abstract

This study investigates how high-achieving Latino adolescents at an urban high school designate significance to events, people, and documents in American history. Survey and interview data of 70 high school students and their advanced placement history teacher document how students attach their own meanings to the history of the nation and employ concepts of freedom and unity as criteria for attributing significance. Unlike other ethnic minority students, however, these almost exclusively Cuban American students complemented and reinforced the official narrative of national uniqueness and progress.

Elicitation Techniques: Getting People to Talk About Ideas They Don’t Usually Talk About

“…The uniformity of students' responses suggests that despite Singapore schools' espoused goal of developing "critical thinkers," the curriculum had not provided them with a way of thinking about alternative historical narratives. Similar tasks have been used to investigate students' ideas about historical significance in a number of countries (e.g., Barton, 2005;Barton & Levstik, 1998;Levstik, 2001;Peck, 2010;Yeager, Foster, & Greer, 2002) and among varied ethnic groups in the United States (e.g., Epstein, 2009;Terzian & Yeager, 2007). Such studies have provided important information on the socially situated nature of students' perceptions of the meaning and purpose of learning about the past.…”

Middle School Emergent Bilingual and Bilingual Students' Perspectives on U.S. History

“…Van Alphen and Asensio (2012) contend that such findings present a moral imperative for history educators: "if a child cannot identify with the master narrative told in school, because her community was not represented in that historical account, we feel that a voice has been smothered and that human rights are violated" (p. 353). To the extent that the participants in this bounded case study represent "extreme" or "maximum variation" cases (Marshall & Rossman, 2011;Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009), the present study may offer "voice" to students and perspectives that have too often been "smothered." In the following sections I explore limitations of the present study and then examine potential implications.…”

“…An interpretivist paradigm informed the collection and analysis of data in order to recognize the positionality of both the participants and the researcher (Flyvbjerg, 2001), building on an ontology that assumes multiple realities (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). In order to capture the multiple experiences and perspectives present among U.S. emergent bilingual and bilingual students (Aud et al, 2012), focal students were purposefully selected through extreme case (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) or maximum variation sampling (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). Data sources included classroom observations and document analysis.…”

“…Case study students. Once I had identified one of Mr. Mitchell's classes and one of Ms. Rogers' classes for the study, I purposefully sampled 6 students from among the consented students in each of the two classes in order to include both variance and similarity across the following characteristics: language proficiency (WIDA scores), first language, country of origin, refugee status, SOL scores, gender, and years in U.S. schools as a means of accessing the diversity found among emergent bilingual and bilingual students (Aud et al, 2012) and incorporate maximum variation (Marshall & Rossman, 2011;Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009). Table 2 depicts the values for each of the selected focal students.…”

“…In this section of the chapter I describe the data collection procedures for the present study. The data collection procedures build on the fundamental understanding that gathering data from multiple sources allows for triangulation and expansion (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995;Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) and "can greatly strengthen the study's usefulness for other settings" (Marshall & Rossman, 2011, p. 253).…”