Curriculum & Instruction

The changing demographics of today's urban schools coupled with the corresponding shortage of bilingual teachers to provide an education for language minority students means that monolingual English teachers will have to carry out content area instruction for students with limited English proficiency (LEP) in the foreseeable future. This paper explores the cultural and linguistic complexity of teaching these students, focusing on the areas of social studies and history. It also provides a rationale for using oral history in classrooms with language minority students, offering examples from an oral history project being carried out with an extended Puerto Rican family to demonstrate the potential for such an approach. The oral history approach allows students to practice their oral skills in both languages, improves writing skills since students need to transcribe the oral tapes and summarize what is important, and enhances their knowledge of historical concepts because they can ...

Surviving in a culture different from one’s own requires a variety of adjustments in ways of thinking and behaving. Many immigrants to the United States have made this transition, assimilating to the new culture, forgetting their mother tongue and becoming “Americans.” Many recent Latino immigrants, especially Mexicans, have attempted to accommodate to U.S. mainstream culture without assimilating, thus trying to maintain their own language and customs. The use of the term transnational communities in relation to Mexican immigrants is appropriate not only because many Mexican immigrants return regularly to their communities in Mexico, but also because even within the mainland United States, they manage to recreate many of the cultural patterns of their home communities. Of course, the presence of Mexican Americans throughout the United States, frequently concentrated in particular geographic areas of the country and neighborhoods of major cities, facilitates this process of cultural ...

Engaging literature selections bridge the gap between students' in-school and out-of-school lives. and who support the students' active participation in authentic tasks and “real-world” dialogue (Henderson & Milstein, 2003; Stanton-Salazar & Spina, 2000).

The field of education is saturated with studies documenting the poor performance and achievement deficits of African American males throughout their school years. National reading achievement data continue to Indicate that as a group, African American males—particularly adolescents in middle and high school classrooms—are not performing well.