Social Medicine

Using an applied anthropological approach focused on language, this study investigates the relationship between linguistic, racial, and ethnic identities and school resource access in the context of migration. This project examines how these identities are established, experienced,
reified, and resisted by various school actors. Exposing power at its roots through a multi-level analysis, this research informs on how people negotiate socialization into particular identities, propelling them toward positions in school and society of varying opportunity.

Focused on two elementary schools in a central Florida county that has been and is undergoing demographic changes, this work offers applications for educational institutions dealing with migration. One school’s orientation to meeting needs of non-English speaking
students significantly impacts its ability to reach and form relationships with parents and improve the educational outcomes for children. The second school’s culturally responsivity makes it possible to meet higher expectations. At both schools, there is a disconnect between
how the school and state think about people and how those people think about themselves, which erases groups and raises questions about how well students from those groups are served.

While the ideologies promoted in dominant society are constraining, struggles and resistance do impact and reorganize the system. This study provides recommendations for the research site and similar schools to address linguistic, racial, and ethnic educational inequity. For
instance, this project emphasizes the need to provide linguistically appropriate school-home communication. It also offers a means for the schools and state to better serve students by understanding the nuances of identity through more appropriate measures of race and ethnicity.

Situated within local school practices, state policies, national laws, and global ideologies, I examine K-12 school registration in the Florida Heartland as a site where student and family demographics (language, race, and ethnicity) are quantified and qualified for consequential school and state use. First, using Flores and Rosa’s (2015) raciolinguistics as a complementary explanatory lens, I found that indigenous Mexican languages (e.g., Náhuatl) that students and parents reported speaking were often changed to ‘Spanish’ on forms during observations of school registration. My language survey of 1,300 local elementary and middle school students and secondary analysis of school records showed that such multi-causal ‘linguistic re-formation’ occurred at a rate of 19 times--only one student was recorded in official school records for every 19 who had a parent who spoke an indigenous language. Second, a departure from racial formation (Omi and Winant 1986), ‘racial re-formation’ occurred when racial and ethnic student categorizations were changed during school decision-making and state reporting. Differential questioning practices during school registration also influenced misrepresentation in language, race, and ethnicity recording. Parent and school employee interviews and informal conversations offer emic perspectives at play. This illustration of macro-linked interactional processes informs on social reproduction by dominant blocs and institutions. Suggestions for improved registration practices, school data usage, and state reporting are offered.

Structural vulnerability illuminates how social positionings shape outcomes for marginalized individuals, like migrant farmworkers, who are often Latino, indigenous, and/or undocumented. Furthering scholarship on negotiating constraints, we explore how school employees (here, Migrant Advocates) broker health care access for migrant farmworker families. Ethnographic research in central Florida showed that Advocates perform similar functions as community health workers while experiencing similar dilemmas. We propose combining medical anthropological insights with the CDC’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model, conceptualizing schools as an important site for families’ wellbeing, recognizing brokerage roles of staff, and offering new directions for migrant health scholars.

I interrogate how consequential representations of student characteristics are fashioned by analyzing identification, recording, and reporting of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity in K-12 school registration, school records, and state reporting. In the Florida Heartland, analysis of ethnographic school observations, school electronic records, a language inventory (survey), interviews, and official state data show that language, race, and ethnicity information for some K-12 students and parents (especially indigenous Mexicans) collected during enrollment are not recorded accurately and undergo transformation from collection to reporting. According to my language inventory, students' parents were indigenous language speakers 19 times more often than reflected in raw school records. In records from the local middle school, 10 percent of students were American Indian, though the state reported this as 0 percent. This linguistic and racial reformation resulted from several factors, including registrars recording languages as others (i.e. Spanish instead of Náhuatl), differential questioning practices, and state reporting policy. As discussed, enhanced procedures and updated policy should improve areas affected by inaccurate data. 1. Introduction. Student demographic information, such as language, race, and ethnicity, is consistently quantified in US educational institutions after it is gathered during school registration. Representations of this demographic information are then used in a myriad of consequential ways, including during making decisions on affirmative action programs, investigations into school segregation (NCES 1996; Renn 2009), balancing classrooms, investigations of discrimination in ability grouping (Lopez 2003a; Vizcarra 2017), federal and state reporting of student progress by aggregated subgroups , screening children for language services, informing culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014), and accessibility in school-home communication. Prior research has examined issues surrounding school registration interactions and the subsequent quantification of student characteristics (e.g., Baquedano-López. Yet none highlight the important site of the on-the-ground micro processes that occur during school registration, tracing it all the way to codified reporting at the state level, as the present study does. In investigating how representations of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity are constructed by schools and the state, I introduce the terms 'linguistic re-formation' and 'racial re-formation' as theorization tools. With roots in Omi and Winant's (1986) 'racial formation', the terms respectively describe the processes of transformation that characteristics (i.e. language, race, and ethnicity) reported by students and parents may undergo by the time the information is used at school or in state reports. With this in mind, this study showed:

In medical anthropology literature, structural vulnerability illuminates how social positionings shape outcomes for marginalized individuals, like migrant farmworkers, who are often Latino, indigenous, and/or undocumented (Quesada, Hart, and Bourgeois 2011). We explore how U.S. school employees (here, Migrant Advocates) broker health care access for migrant farmworker families experiencing structural vulnerability, but encounter obstacles related to language in their brokerage work (Campbell-Montalvo and Castañeda 2020).

Ethnographic research in central Florida showed that Advocates perform similar functions as community health workers or promotoras de salud and experience similar dilemmas. In addition to school-related information, Advocates provide linkages to health care services, transportation, translation during medical visits, assistance with filling out forms, and general health-related information in addressing the needs of these multiply-marginalized communities.

An important factor in the formation and function of relationships between Advocates and families as they broker access to health care and other resources is shared ethnicity and language (López-Sanders 2014). While six of the eight Advocates were bilingual in English and Spanish, none spoke an indigenous language. This created limitations, since parents reported speaking Mixtec, Zapotec, Nahuatl, Triqui, Otomi, and Tarascan languages (Campbell 2016).

Latinos make up 43% of the population in the study county. While some are U.S.-born, others are indigenous Mexican nationals. The percentage of children in the county living in a home where a language other than English is used is 38%. The school district’s student population is 61% Latino, a much larger proportion than white (30%) and African American students (6%). However, indigenous Mexicans are vastly underreported in these statistics (Campbell 2016).

Part of the disconnect in understanding families’ language repertoires stemmed from school employees not realizing that indigenous Mexican languages were, in fact, separate non-Spanish languages altogether. Advocates, like others in local school and health care institutions, frequently referred to indigenous Mexican languages as “dialects.” However, indigenous languages are entirely unrelated to Spanish, and “instead of understanding them as languages that were spoken in the area long before the Spanish conquest, calling them dialects implies that they developed as derivatives of the real language, Spanish” (Holmes 2013:189). Indeed, language ideologies in Mexico frequently construct the language of indigenous people as a lower status dialect, a term erroneously used to distinguish them from Spanish as an idioma (language) (Meek and Messing 2007).

In highlighting the health implications of language documentation in schools, this research underscores the importance of understanding family language repertoires, correctly measuring languages during school registration where demographic information is collected, and using that data to inform actions to meet the needs of these populations. While the language barrier was considered the biggest obstacle for Advocates, they were optimistic about being able to work around it. Neighbors or older siblings were often drawn on by parents to facilitate communication. Nonetheless, linguistic differences between Advocates and those they serve can result in cleavages in brokerage. While advocates may be best suited to reach out to indigenous populations, additional training and linguistic matching would improve their ability to do so.

In the U.S., students’ characteristics are quantified into statistics—the state’s products in the modern world (Koyama and Menken 2013). I interrogate how such representations are fashioned by analyzing the measurement and recording of student and parent languages during school registration. Among its numerous uses, student data informs culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014), screening for language issues, and accessibility in school-home communication.

Data on U.S. students’ languages typically come from Home Language Surveys (HLSs). By law, schools must measure home languages and identify students who need language services (ECS 2014). Similar to how they are used at schools in the present research site, California (CA) HLSs ask about students’ first language, the language the child most often uses at home, the language parents use most often in talking with the child, and the language most often spoken at home (Mendoza-Denton 2008). Per official policies, only students who answer English to all items should be coded as ‘English’, while other answers result in evaluation and a ‘non-English’ coding. HLSs vary and have questionable reliability in detecting English learners (Bailey and Kelly 2011).

This 2014-2015 ethnographic research is set in public K-12 schools in an agricultural, conservative central Florida (FL) county, anonymized as ‘Central County’. Due to migration, the 5,300 children in public K-12 schools are 61 percent Latinx, 30 percent white, 6 percent African American, 1 percent Asian, and less than 1 percent American Indian. However, it should be noted that these state-sanctioned ethno-racial demographic figures underreport American Indian and other minority groups (Campbell 2016). As the U.S. experiences more demographic change and in the current political landscape, examining how language information is recorded and codified becomes more pressing.
School office observations, records, a language inventory, and interviews and casual conversations with parents, school employees, and community members offer multiple perspectives. Triangulated analyses show that language repertories of students and families sometimes became misrepresented in school records due to ‘linguistic re-formation’, occurring when registrars changed languages reported by families (e.g., Náhuatl) into others (e.g., Spanish) on the school registration form and electronic records system. Analyses of 1,000+ student electronic school records and responses to a researcher-conducted language inventory show that languages of some students and parents (especially Indigenous Mexicans) measured during school enrollment are not recorded accurately. Specifically, indigenous Mexican languages were under-recorded at a rate of 19x—for every 19 students with an indigenous language-speaking parent, only the records of one student showed they had a parent who spoke an indigenous language. Analyses of observations and interviews showed that this linguistic re-formation was also caused by differential questioning practices by registrars, raciolinguistic ideologies, employee training, the design of the electronic records system, and policy.

Applied efforts may resolve this issue through experimentation with improved language documentation practices and understanding the multiple effects that such practices have on various stakeholders. Doing so is critical, given the use of such data in potentially opening gates in student and parent access to school resources (Campbell 2016; Campbell-Montalvo and Castañeda 2019).

In this study on K-12 schools in the U.S. Florida Heartland, I take a
QuantCrit approach to uncover how processes of data transformation,
which I call ‘racial re-formation’, shape the utilization and reporting of
racial and ethnic representations of students. To understand actual
data use at schools, I apply QuantCrit’s principles on hownumbers are
not neutral and how categories/groups are neither ‘natural’ nor given. I
introduce ‘racial re-formation’ to identify the mechanisms behind
expression of the QuantCrit principles in the data. Analyses of observations
demonstrate that definitions of race/ethnicity are malleable, as
personnel changed reported definitions of students as they used data
in school decisions. Contrast of school records with teacher-created
grade-level cards shows mismatch in student race/ethnicity between
multiple school measures, while comparison of state vs. school records
illustrates how policy affects demographic portraits. These practices
led to varying representations, especially for American Indians and
other groups, though ways to improve data collection, utilization,
and reporting are offered.

By law, language information of students in U.S. schools must be identified during enrollment. This information affects language screening, federal reporting, provision of services, and so on. In the Florida Heartland, analyses of observations, records, a language inventory (survey), and interviews show that some students and parents’ languages identified during registration are not recorded accurately. Raciolinguistic enregisterment played a role in registrars recording languages as others and in their differential questioning practices; employee training, policy, and the records system design also affected this linguistic re-formation. In the end, Indigenous Mexican languages were under measured by a factor of 19—for every 19 students whose parent spoke an Indigenous language, only one was recorded. Suggestions for improvement are provided.

For the last 50 years, researchers have explored differential STEM major declaration and persistence rates among groups in college. Little is known about the specific mechanisms through which social networks affect persistence in STEM majors. Based on surveys with 2,000+ engineering and nearly 500 LGBTQIA+ STEM undergraduates, as well as 80+ interviews, we found that students' social networks were key in their declaration and persistence in STEM by helping students feel they fit in STEM. Specifically, parents provided emotional support wherein their children felt encouraged that they would be able to succeed in their difficult majors. Parents and teachers provided advice to women and underrepresented students in which they warned students that they would experience discrimination in their programs, and when they did experience this, the advice students received helped them cope. Underrepresented students who participated in race/ethnicity-focused professional engineering organizations (e.g. National Society of Black Engineers) saw engineers like themselves and were more likely to persist in their engineering degree programs than underrepresented students who did not participate in these organizations. Looking across their undergraduate career, the effects of social networks were most profound on the persistence of Black students in engineering. In addition, LGBTQIA+ students actively carved out social networks that would be affirming of their identities, particularly their gender minority identities (i.e. transgender), which helped them persist. In sum, this research highlights how the advice from individuals in their social networks helps students persist, specifically by improving their feelings of belonging in STEM. Implications for research and structural practice at K-16 are shared.

Women and underrepresented minority (URM) undergraduates declare and complete science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors at different rates in comparison to majority groups. Explanations of these differences have long been deficit oriented, focusing on aptitude or similar characteristics, but more recent work focuses on institutional contexts, such as academic climate and feelings of belonging (fit). This study examines the experiences of women and URM students in engineering undergraduate programs, focusing on how they fit, experiential factors affecting fit, and how fit is mitigated by social relationships from their networks and organizations in which they participate (i.e., social capital). Thematic analysis of 55 women
and URM interviewee responses shows that students who fit well were those with majority characteristics, including race (i.e., White, White-passing) and gender (i.e., men, masculine appearance), and those in groups well represented in their programs numerically (i.e., men, Asian). In contrast, women and Black students encountered threats to their fit due to stereotyping from bias and differential treatment from others (i.e., being excluded from group work). However, students received advice from their social networks (i.e., family, professors) in which they were warned to expect discrimination, or through organizations in which they participated (i.e., National Association of Black Engineers) where their sense of community was expanded. The advice and resources provided through this network-based and participatory social capital mitigated fit for women and Black students, albeit in different ways, helping to preserve their feelings of belonging and promote their persistence in engineering. We offer suggestions to enact university policies to increase access to social capital with homophilious alters and educational opportunities for majority
groups.

Background: Social capital, defined as the people one knows and the resources available through that network of people, has been a key variable in research examining the participation of women and underrepresented minority students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This study focuses on two types of social capital: instrumental (concrete advice and resources) and expressive (emotional support and encouragement). The analysis of interviews with 55 White women and women and men underrepresented minority engineering undergraduate students shows how the instrumental and expressive social capital received from parents influenced their students' declaration of and persistence in the engineering major. Within this analysis, we considered students' transition to adulthood and the corresponding expectation that parents would still provide support but allow their children to independently determine their own paths. Results: Participants shared the advice they received from people in their social networks, with the majority of participants highlighting parents as a major contributor of instrumental and expressive social capital. Instrumental social capital was helpful in students' major declarations and offered them an opportunity to further develop their interests and aptitude in STEM as well as a pathway for obtaining an engineering degree. During the first year of their engineering major, students relied heavily on the expressive social capital of parents when considering whether to stay in engineering; parental encouragement of "you can do it" became a common resource. Conclusions: These findings offer nuance to explanations of social capital's influence on STEM degree major declaration and persistence, which often use deficit approaches. In highlighting the resources of social capital, especially expressive support, this work offers educators a new frame of reference for building upon the valuable advice offered by parents to their children completing engineering majors.

Professional societies (ProSs) are instrumental in shaping science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) cultural norms. Existing legacy structures designed to serve majority groups and constructed in service of dominant norms and values present a clear obstacle to attracting, retaining, and serving minoritized STEM professionals, such as women, particularly women with additional intersecting marginalized statuses (Solebello et al., 2016). In this perspective article, we in the Amplifying the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success project, known as ACCESS+, explain our development of an adapted diversity, equity, and inclusion assessment tool. ACCESS+ is an NSF ADVANCE Partnership that is adapting a pre-existing tool known as the Diversity and Inclusion Progression Framework, which was developed in the United Kingdom jointly by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Science Council (2021). As with the original version, the purpose of the U.S. adaptation-the Equity Environmental Scanning Tool, or EEST-is to provide STEM ProSs with a way to benchmark their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, discern areas of organizational strength, and identify foci for organizational remediation. In this piece, we share background information for EEST refinement, including content adaptations and structural changes.

It is known that Florida school employees known as Migrant Advocates facilitate or broker MSF health care access for migrant and seasonal farmworker (MSF) families, but it is not known how states without a Migrant Education Program might also broker MSF health care access. To address this, present study examines the role of school employees in brokering health care access to immigrant Mexican and Indigenous Guatemalan MSF families in Connecticut. Informed by prior work, interviews (n = 12) with parents and elementary school employees showed that (1) a vast array of non-Migrant Advocate school employees, mostly Latinx women, directly brokered physical and psychosocial MSF health care access, often through developing deep social relationships and (2) barriers to brokerage included language inaccessibility, school employee gaps in knowledge of MSF health care needs, and transportation and related structural issues. Importantly, the school’s location near MSF homes is an important contributor to the success of the school’s brokerage efforts. Findings offer insight into how a school health broker model might be implemented, and advance understandings of MSF health and health care access.