Category: Blog

Commentary on Cristian Aquino-Sterling’s “Developing Spanish Competencies in Bilingual Teacher Education: Current Approaches and Future Directions” by ARC Student Fellow Gregory Gagnon.

In his talk, “Developing and Assessing Spanish Competencies in Bilingual Teacher Education: Current Approaches & Future Directions,” Cristian Aquino-Sterling presents preliminary results of a study showing marked heterogeneity in approaches to teacher selection, training, assessment, and certification among dual-language teacher preparation programs in California and New York. Citing literature that demonstrates teachers in bilingual education programs have historically shown low levels of language competence, he argues that in order to improve bilingual education in the US, a model must be established describing the core competencies required of bilingual teachers so that effective approaches to training teachers in these competencies may be developed.

Aquino-Sterling proposes such a model, which he calls Pedagogical Spanish (Aquino-Sterling, 2016). In its present version, Pedagogical Spanish is composed of four areas: (1) procedural tasks and functions of teaching and learning in the classroom context, (2) procedural tasks and functions of communication with parents, colleagues, and administrators, (3) disciplinary literacies (i.e., the specialized language and discourse of particular content areas) and (4) metalinguistic knowledge. The model highlights areas of competency that may not be present in an individual who otherwise may have developed a superior level of conversational Spanish—areas which are not assessed by standardized language tests. For example, an individual may not have the vocabulary or discursive knowledge to teach a course in ethics or biology, or may have insufficient metalinguistic knowledge to work with students flexibly across languages to enhance their understanding of a particular concept. By describing the multiple domains in which bilingual teachers must function, the Pedagogical Spanish model thus begins to suggest potential areas for future development in dual-language teacher preparation programs.

Aquino-Sterling identifies a significant flaw in the present model, however, stemming from its strongly normative structure, and its tendency to frame language development in terms of deficit and deficiency—what teachers do not have, and what they must be given to become good. He argues that with further development this flaw can be overcome, and Pedagogical Spanish can come to serve as “a contrapeso to the persistent cultural logics of linguistic normativity.” In order to be relevant to real-life needs of teachers and students, he says, Pedagogical Spanish must develop into a “linguistically, culturally, and professionally relevant—non-deficit—additive approach that affirms and validates the hybrid language identities and practices” of bilingual teachers and students in the US.

This future version of the Pedagogical Spanish model will combine the present model’s ability to inform policies and curricula in teacher training with a sensibility shaped by the many voices that echo throughout the talk—Bourdieu and Fanon, Anzaldúa and Chomsky, Del Valle and García, to name a few. Educational policies that insist upon the use of just one language—English—while rejecting all else should not be supplanted by policies that insist upon just two. Instead, we must develop bilingual education models that accept and celebrate the diversity of linguistic repertoires teachers and students bring to school, that engage these repertoires in order to expand what is possible for individual students, and that welcome the participation of all students in the production and circulation of knowledge. With his research, Aquino-Sterling has taken a notable step toward this eventual goal.

References

Aquino-Sterling, C. R. (2016). Responding to the call: Developing and assessing pedagogical Spanish competencies in bilingual teacher education. Bilingual Research Journal, 39(1): 50-68.

 

 

Mary Gibson, “Is Punishment Gendered? The Case of Modern Italy”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow, Emily Brooks

“Is Punishment Gendered? The Case of Modern Italy,” Dr. Mary Gibson, Department of History, John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Much of the field of prison history has been dominated by a chronological trajectory proposed by Michel Foucault in his seminal work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault argued that between 1760 and 1840 new punishment regimes developed across the Western world.  These new systems moved away from public violence as the central form of punishment, focusing instead on depriving prisoners of liberty, and targeting the spirit rather than the body as the site of transformation.  Foucault noted that in many nations this shift in punishment was tied to a move into modernity. Political figures and public commentators touted their prisons as architectural examples of the power and order of the state. Foucault and scholars who accept his chronological framework have argued that the development of modern prisons in the Western world was influenced by Enlightenment thinking and correlated with the rise of industrial capitalism and liberal government.  They have also focused almost exclusively on men’s prisons. Dr. Mary Gibson, Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, complicates this narrative by examining the emergence of modern prisons in Italy and comparing the development of both men’s and women’s prisons. Gibson considers, in a field dominated by the study of male prisoners, what examining women’s prisons can tell historians about the development of modern punishment systems. And more broadly, are different types of punishment gendered?

Gibson uses Rome as a case study since it was both the capital of the Papal States, and subsequently united Italy, as well as a site where many penal institutions were situated.  In examining changes in punishment practices in Rome, she finds that women were the first beneficiaries of a switch from corporal punishment to imprisonment. This switch, which can be first seen at San Michele prison in 1735, predated the unification of Italy by over one hundred years. Women in San Michele prison lived in separate cells, in which they were overseen by a single guard who could monitor all inmates, and worked in a wool factory for half the wages paid to female workers outside of prison walls. Thus, many of the hallmarks of the modern penitentiary; isolation, supervision, and manufacturing work, all appeared in Italy earlier than would be expected according to Foucault’s chronology, but can only be seen when examining women’s prisons as well as men’s.  Gibson argues that the San Michele women’s prison was part of a web of religious authorities and philanthropic efforts used to control people who existed outside of family units. Women, who were considered both weak and dangerous, were the objects of much of this charity.

Gibson notes that over the course of the 19th century the conditions of incarcerated women deteriorated. In San Michele, women were paired together in cells, and in some newer institutions, like the Diocleziane Baths, which housed men and women in separate areas, prisoners lived in dormitories.  This crowding together of prisoners was a move away from the isolation seen as central to modern prison architecture and a regression toward pre-modern organization of space. The work experience also changed as women were now trained, not for manufacturing work, but rather for handwork and other gendered labor that was intended to prepare them to serve within a family.  Although women in San Michele had been paid less than non-incarcerated female workers, they had learned a skill, which could then serve them on the labor market outside of prison walls. The transition in the treatment of imprisoned women was overseen by an order of nuns who ran San Michele starting in 1854.  Even after the emergence of the new Italian secular state, the religious control over women’s prisons was not challenged. Gibson notes that the conditions of women’s prisons did not fundamentally change until right before WWI when a series of articles appeared in print that exposed the treatment of women’s prisoners and the rule of nuns over incarcerated women.

The story of the development of men’s prisons in Rome, Gibson finds, was quite different. In contrast to the creation of institutions like San Michele, modern prisons were not established for men until a century later. Male prisoners served sentences of hard labor, chained to their fellow prisoners, until the late 19th century.  After Italian unification municipal authorities replaced the male section of Diocleziane Baths, with a hard labor camp called Tre Fontane. Supporters of Tre Fontane celebrated outdoor work as well suited to the rural men who comprised the majority of prisoners in the camp, and claimed that this work turned prisoners from brutes into men. This penal camp was closed in 1895 after it was criticized in Parliament, partly due to the extremely high rates of malaria contracted among the prisoners. It was replaced with a cellular prison called Regina Coeli, which was hailed as one of the new institutions that marked the modernization of the city.  Coeli was built by prisoners themselves, suggesting comparisons with the way that convict labor was used in the project of modernizing the American South in the late 19th century.  Eventually campaigns launched by construction workers against prison labor, again a trend with similarities in the American context, succeeded and prison workers moved out of the construction industry and into the business of printing.  Printers were less organized and the printing press in Regnia Coeli became one of the longest running prison industries. As the debate over Tre Fontane and the building of Regina Coeli suggest, by the late 19th century men’s prisons were already sites of reform. The development of men’s prisons, therefore, Gibson argues, followed a different path from that of women’s prisons,

Gibson’s work shows the utility of considering gender in connection with punishment. Through detailed research that included prison statistics such as the numbers of letters prisoners received, and information about work hours and penalties for disobedience, as well as the architectural plans of prisons, Gibson tracks changes in the development and functioning of prisons. By comparing the different trajectories of male and female punishment in Italy, Gibson challenges the revisionist model of prison historiography, which has generally accepted a conception of prison as a masculine space. Her work suggests that punishment can be gendered, and that considering how and why can reveal much about the development and functioning of punishment regimes.

~ Emily Brooks.

Juliet Hooker, “Black Lives Matter and The Paradoxes Of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice To Democratic Repair”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow, Jennifer Chmielewski.

What are the costs of enacting “appropriate” democratic politics in the face of systematic racial violence? When white citizens and state institutions betray a pervasive lack of concern for black suffering, is it fair to ask black citizens to make further sacrifices so that white citizens can be comfortable? In her powerful talk on the complex responses to the current Black Lives Matter movement, Juliet Hooker explores the forms of politics that Black citizens can and should pursue.

Hooker explores these questions through meditations on the problem of democratic loss. She begins with Danielle Allen, who argues democratic politics is characterized by loss and that we must manage this loss as citizens. There are always situations in which one must be a loser in democracy so democracies have to conceive of how this plays out. Losses are theoretically justified because they happen “arbitrarily” but in actuality, some groups, like African Americans, disproportionately bear this burden of loss. As a result, Allen turns her analysis to holding up citizens who sacrifice as key to democratic stability. She discusses African Americans who responded to racial terror in the 1960’s through non-violence as exemplary citizens making these necessary sacrifices on behalf of the rest of the population. As you might imagine, Hooker argues that this notion of Black sacrifice is problematic and an unfair burden on Black citizens to make others comfortable at the expense of their own wellbeing and freedom. Furthermore, she argues that the underlying historical and theoretical assumptions on which this notion of black politics as democratic sacrifice is based, does not actually hold up.

Hooker notes that the most popular critique of the current Black Lives Matter protests is that protesters have not always engaged in strict standards of non-violence (as compared to memories of the 1960’s protest movements) as they speak out against police brutality, murder and the racism of the criminal justice system. Yet she discusses how this critique is based on three key problematic assumptions. The first is the reduction of a long history of black activism and black political thought to a very sanitized version of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In this romantic narrative of the civil rights movement, the U.S. is seen as a forward-moving democracy where political relations are always moving towards racial equality. This narrative serves to shift attention away from Black loss and long struggles of racial justice toward the idea that black politics should be about peaceful repair within the same democratic system. In fact, the reason Martin Luther King and non-violence movements made an impact is because they were set up in contrast to Malcolm X and movements like the Black Panthers. Both types of movements were necessary to move towards racial equality but we only remember and honor a romanticized version of non-violence and the people that made up these movements.

The second assumption is a mistaken theoretical account of white moral psychology that assumes that whites experience positive ethical transformations as a result of exemplary forms of political activism (i.e. nonviolence) by racialized minorities as they respond to racist violence. But Hooker discusses the fact that there is no evidence that this is true, particularly in our current “post-racial” society with a high degree of white resentment against Blacks and Latino/as. Even in the case of Black unarmed children being murdered by police officers, there is a need to portray each victim of brutality as innocent and deserving of care and citizenship rather than focusing on these deaths as part of a racially unjust system.

Finally, Hooker discusses the third assumption as a characterization of non-violent protest as sacrifice, which she points out, does not necessarily correspond with the way participants in black protest movements actually frame their own actions as defiance or resistance. She uses interpretations of an iconic photograph of Dorothy Counts, one of the first Black students involved in desegregation, as an example. In the photo Hooker references, Dorothy is walking to the school, followed by a mob of white protesters. Many readings of this photograph have centered on Black sacrifice, assuming Dorothy is afraid as she engages in this peaceful protest by going to school and refusing to engage with the mob. In fact, however, Hooker shares that Dorothy’s own reading of her actions are those of defiance, not acquiescence: “if you look at the picture the right way, you see what I see. What I see is that all of those people are behind me. They did not have the courage to get up in my face.”

At the end of her talk, Hooker connects these problematic assumptions to the real world consequences that Black Lives Matters protesters today face as (too many) whites call them criminals and consider them unjustified in their deployment of violence (and nonviolence). There is no room for Black anger and outrage. Thus Hooker asserts that, in this context, peaceful acquiescence will not in fact do the job of creating racial justice. Instead, riots (she uses the term purposefully to leverage its discomfort), or “fugitive black politics” might be a better form of democratic repair for African Americans. They may not always be a solution to structural problems and institutionalized injustices, but they do allow black citizens to express their pain and make their losses visible, and Hooker argues they can help us to theorize how engaging in a politics of active resistance might be crucial to achieving racial justice. Responsibility for racial justice does not lie with those who suffer from racism and so we must stop expecting sacrifice to be enough.

Commentary on Kim Potowski’s Talk, “Maximizing Latino Spanish Proficiency Through Dual Language Education”, by ARC Student Fellow Michelle Johnson-McSweeney

In her talk, “Maximizing Latino Spanish proficiency though dual language education,” Kim Potowski  identifies two major problems with how the United States education system treats language education. The first is that the United States does a terrible job of maintaining non-English languages, and the second is that second language education is our schools (also called “foreign” language education) starts too late and is largely ineffective. Her research is focused on one educational solution that addresses both problems: Dual language education.

There are three types of educational programs that serve English Language Learning (ELL) students. The first is English-only with English as a Second Language (ESL) support. The second is Transitional Language Education (TLE) where students use their first language as a support until they have English language proficiency. The goal of both ESL and TLE is English proficiency, not dual language proficiency. They are subtractive in the sense that students often lose their first language in order to acquire their second. The goal of Dual Language programs, the third program model and unfortunately by far the least common, is dual language proficiency, meaning that students add to their skills without losing any others. All too often, however, assessment is only conducted in English. Potowski’s study seeks to address this issue by assessing the Spanish language skills of students in Spanish/English Dual Language Education programs.

The results from Potowski’s research show that among students who have some level of Spanish proficiency (i.e., they speak Spanish at home, in the classroom, or are otherwise exposed to Spanish in their lives) and are enrolled in Dual Language programs performed better than students enrolled in English-only programs on tests of academic literacy. This, in and of itself, should not be surprising and it is what Potowski predicted. Yet, sometimes the expected findings are the most important because they had never been stated before. This, in effect, was the biggest take-away from Potowski’s research at this stage, that students develop proficiency in written Spanish as well as English.

I am looking forward to the future of this research as she moves in to analyzing the spoken communication as well. It is nearly taken for granted among linguists that spoken and written language are different language forms, and that a person can be completely fluent in a language yet not know how to write it. I expect that the analysis of students’ spoken language skills will only serve to further reinforce the need for Dual Language Education in the United States. Not only is it an additive approach to education, but students who emerge from these programs are bilingual in a country experiencing a serious lack of bilingual adults.

~ Michelle Johnson-McSweeney

 

 

Commentary on Veronica Benet-Martinez’s “The Psychology of Multicultural Experiences and Identities: Social, Personality, and Cultural Perspectives” by ARC Student Fellow Eduardo Ho

The complex and intertwined world of “multicultural identit(ies)” was presented from a psychological social psychology perspective (as opposed to a sociological social psychology view), that is, from the perspective that zooms-in to the individual level, by psychologist and faculty member at the University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) Verónica Benet-Martínez (BM).  The connotations of the multiplicity of roles that people possess and enact nowadays are far more complex than they have ever been, as presently, people can take on roles that they did not traditionally take on before (e.g. the stay-at-home dad, the woman CEO, etc.)  People may be comfortable with the multiplicity of roles they play in their daily lives, however, they are not comfortable with their own multicultural identities – as it is “like having multiple husbands”, stated BM.  To which culture do I belong the most?  “When I am in one environment I feel X but people consider me Y and the reverse is also true.”  These are some of the ruminating thoughts that go through the multicultural citizen’s mind.  (Surprisingly, BM made no reference to postmodern theories of self-identity, which would have provided material for an excellent discussion.)  But, what exactly is a multicultural identity?  How does culture and ethnicity shape our identity and personality?  How have individuals who have internalized more than one culture develop a cohesive multicultural identity?  These are some of the questions that BM seeks to address in her research.

BM made the choice in the talk to use the terms bicultural and multicultural interchangeably.  This, perhaps, was an unfortunate choice.  Regardless, her definition of the bi(multi)-cultural individual is actually an anthropological / semiotic one: it is an individual with exposure to two (or more) cultures that has come to possess the systems of meanings and practices associated with these cultures (e.g. beliefs, values, language, etc.)  Thus, there are three domains of acculturation (i.e. practices, values, identifications), but these domains do not change all at the same time, as there are differences in the level of displayed acculturation, like for example behavior observed in the private domain versus the public domain.

BM rejects the model of Culture A vs. Culture B as indicative of anyone’s cultural affiliation, given that for her, individual relationships to cultures are not categorical, but rather partial and plural.  Instead of the Culture A vs. Culture B model, BM’s revised view falls within that of Cultural Frame Switching: there is a switch between different cultural interpretative frames or meaning systems in response to cultural cues.  During this part of the discussion BM interjected with a comparison between this framework and one which recently began to gain traction in Linguistics, namely translanguaging.  The comparison, even though interesting, raises some questions of substance.  Under the translanguaging view of language, the grammar of the speaker only contains features of what society has come to know [and label] as “languages”, and the translanguag-er deploys these resources freely, “transcending” the two or three (or more) languages that he or she manages.  It is true, there is no division between Language A or Language B in the mind of the translanguager, but the meaning and grammatical systems remain the same (i.e. for the most part static) for each feature of each language.  These meaning and grammatical systems are part of the “system” of the language shared by and with other speakers (similar to what Saussure defined as langue), and these are not necessarily permeable to the influence of cultural pressures.

The discussion about Cultural Frame Switching included a description of a series of experiments with Chinese Americans subjects, and how priming would help predict certain behaviors in the US Anglo subjects vis-a-vis the Chinese subjects, according to their culture.  When speaking about priming, BM returned to the issue of language, as she defined it as the most important primer of all, since you “effectively activate everything that is associated with that language”.  Even though this strikes me as an overarching generalization regarding the relationship of any language with a ‘specific’ culture, the point still stands.  In addition, it might be worth mentioning that the juncture at which BM’s work and linguistic theory cross each other would probably be a fascinating area of discussion and research.

The talk included a vast array of indexes and graphs.  The most salient measuring index was the BII: Bicultural Identity Integration.  The limited understanding that I was able to gain of this index is that BII measures how an individual bridges or blends different cultures.  BM made it clear that bicultural integration is not a trait, but rather it’s malleable.  An interesting fact was that BII increases when individuals recall positive bicultural experiences and it decreases when recalling negative bicultural experiences.  Biculturals, however, are more creative and innovative when compared to their monocultural cohorts in professional environments and in school settings (e.g. MBA programs).

The most powerful point of the presentation, for me personally, was the insight BM shared about how when one individual only operates within one culture, the perspective that individual has on that particular culture is less profound than the perspective another individual has on that same culture, if instead, he or she operates in a space that exchanges or constantly negotiates between two or more cultures.  That is, the bicultural owns a comparative perspective that the monocultural cannot possess.  Questions from the audience ranged from the historicity of biculturalism to the teaching and learning implications of biculturalism.  Age was a factor that was never mentioned in the talk or the Q&A: for example, is there an age range for the bicultural individual to gain a greater or lesser sense of belonging into a second culture?  That would be an interesting piece of information to have.  In sum, the talk was thought-provoking and very informative, with ideas that people may take all too for granted, and it managed to show the impressive body of research and researchers working on this very important topic.

~ Eduardo Ho-Fernández

 

Marcella Bencivenni, “US communism, anticommunism and espionage: The Case of Carl Marzani, 1947-1953”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Daniel Vallee

The story of Carl Marzani (1912 – 1994) does not fail to disappoint.  Hostos College Historian Marcella Bencivenni presents the highly politicized life of Marzani—a charismatic and important figure of the Left—as the first victim of McCarthyism, the US national witch-hunt for communist spies and sympathizers during the Cold War.  Bencivenni’s narrative of Marzani serves as a timely (the 2016 US presidential nominations are a spectacle to behold) microcosm illustrating the oftentimes frustrating clash of political leaders, discourses of national security, public intellectuals, media narratives, and public opinion.  Bencivenni’s research, in preparation for her forthcoming book on Marzani, takes what one audience member called a “moderate stance” to the accusations of espionage hurled at Marzani, who served in the United States Government department of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS): the first intelligence office of government, predating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As members of the Marzani family looked on, Bencivenni described the impressive figure of Carl Marzani.  Marzani, migrating at the age of 12 from fascist Italy, was the son of a socialist postal worker father who refused to sign Mussolini’s loyalty pledge.  Subsequently they were forced to flee Rome for the mining community of Scranton, NY.  Marzani was a successful student, receiving scholarships to both Williams College and Oxford.  In Britain he joined the British communist party, and upon return to the US, joined the US communist party.

Marzani was a Marxist intellectual and excellent speaker and debater who would “talk at you” rather than with you.  A prolific writer, Marzani translated the Marxist theories of Gramsci, and wrote the first revisionist history of the cold war.   Notably, a young Bernie Sanders wrote an endorsement of Marzani’s memoir The Education of a Reluctant Radical.  Demonstrating a jack-of-all-trades flexibility, Marzani also directed Deadline for Action (Union Films, 1946).

Marzani’s intelligence and skills would be recognized by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) director William Donovan, who recruited Marzani.  Marzani’s tenure with the OSS, which according to one audience member “wouldn’t even be running if not for all the communists who worked there,” came to a grinding halt on March 17, 1947, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury—not for treason under the Smith Act, which might be expected —but rather under the False Claims Act, for defrauding the government.  What was the nature of the fraud?  Marzani’s denial of his membership with the communist party at his time of hiring at the OSS

The trial of Marzani was complicated from a legal perspective, but after a series of two split Supreme Court juries, on May 22, 1947, Carl Marzani was found guilty on all 11 counts and was sentenced to 1-3 years of jail time.  Most relevant to the case were the competing discourses from the Right and Left news media.  The Right’s narrative was epitomized in headlines such as “How the Reds do Business” by J. Parnell Thomas, who would ironically, become a civil servant himself and be slapped with the same charge as Marzani.  Thomas would only serve 6 months of his term, unlike Marzani.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the Leftist discourse of the Marzani trial pointed to a pervading anti-intellectualism, decline of freedom, and the rise of fear within a police-state.  An audience member who worked as a professor at the time of the trial told the audience about a deep fear among her academic community of being identified as a communist or sympathizer.  Eleanor Roosevelt herself was outspoken about the attacks on freedom and the rise of fear.

In addition to describing the two prevailing narratives of the Marzani case, Bencivenni detailed a number of inconsistencies in the trial itself: the conditions of Marzani’s hiring, supporting documents such as the Venona Files, and the race/ethnicity of the nearly all-Black jury, which was nearly unheard of at the time.  For the sake of brevity, I will write here about only one particular aspect of the case.  Those interested in learning more must wait for Bencivenni’s book.

In the trial, the question of Marzani’s communist party membership and his hiring by the OSS is of import.  Bencivenni notes that despite perjuring himself (by the way, with the blessing of his Catholic mother) by denying his membership in the communist party, a closer look shows that Marzani was really rather open about his radical past.  Actual spies never had records of openness such as Marzani’s.  For example, Director William Donovan, a smart, conservative Republican general was not averse to hiring radicals to win his competition with rival Edgar Hoover, head of FBI.  In fact, after Marzani’s initial screening by the OSS the FBI informs the agency that he was a member of the communist party, after which Marzani is cleared of wrongdoing by the OSS.  If this is the case, asks Bencivenni, then why deny membership in the communist party in the trial?  Bencivenni states that the answer to Marzani’s denial of membership is that he’d have to name names, which is the ultimate objective of Hoover and the US government; moreover, Marzani underestimated his potential prison term, which he anticipated would only last a few months.

Bencivenni closes by reminding us that archival data doesn’t provide enough evidence to prove that Carl Marzani was a spy; moreover, the element of espionage is not the most important part of the story.  The heart of the Marzani narrative is the struggle with notions of freedom, such as intellectual freedom.  Marzani was a vocal and public voice of dissent to the cold war consensus.  Bencivenni goes as far as describing this message as prophetic, and as far as prophetic voices are fiercely suppressed and attacked this much appears true.  The result of the Marzani trial was that that communism as an intellectual and political project—irrespective of its intrinsic qualities—was suppressed.  The account is a scathing critique of an ideology of freedom, supposedly a guiding US national ideology.  According to Bencivenni, the result was a diminishment of America as an idea, supporting an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism.  As a result communism is deprived of its legitimacy in the US, in contrast to European states.  In the US, the academy is one of the only places remaining in which one may engage with ideas and projects typically labelled “radical.”

And so we return to the characteristic timeliness of the Bencivenni’s interpretation of the life of Carl Marzani.  Judging from the political rise of an extremist Right and a far-left presidential nominees (Trump, Sanders), it is apparent that the electorate resonates with the complex mixture of stump-speeches that contain messages fear, xenophobia, economic insecurity, as well as a growing repudiation of social and economic inequality, and a desire for political reform.  As in the historical period of Marzani, we are witness to both a discourse of anti-intellectualism, and systemic political change.  We would do well to be reminded by the tendency for some political leaders to lead humanity towards the former rather than the latter.

–Daniel Vallee

 

 

Claudia Diehl, “Between Ethnic Options and Ethnic Boundaries – Recent Polish and Turkish Migrants’ Identification with Germany”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Eric Ketcham.

In the academic literature, there is much discussion on how and whether experiences and perceptions of discrimination lead to negative assimilation outcomes. However there is a lack of empirical evidence exploring this link. Claudia Diehl, Professor of Sociology at the University of Konstanz, Germany, examines the available data, and presents results from a recently collected mini-panel study of new immigrants to compare Turkish and Polish immigrants in Germany.

There are two paths by which discrimination may affect assimilation. In the first path, xenophobic attitudes in the receiving country lead to discriminatory behavior, which in turn leads to limited opportunities for migrants, maintaining ethnic boundaries and reducing assimilation into the host society. In the second path, xenophobic attitudes in the receiving country lead to discriminatory behavior, migrants’ perceptions of which limit their motivation to assimilate, again maintaining ethnic boundaries and reducing assimilation into the host society. While these two paths are by no means mutually exclusive, they must be considered as separate paths, since limited opportunities affect the ability to assimilate, even if migrants do not perceive the discrimination, and perceived discrimination may limit motivation to assimilate, even if all opportunities are equal.

While levels of discriminatory behavior are lower in Germany than in other contexts such as the United States, and according to the German Socioeconomic Panel many migrants state they have not personally experienced discrimination, many migrants do report perceived group discrimination. However these perceptions of discrimination are linked to life situation, personality, public opinion, and assimilation itself, so it is unclear what perceptions of discrimination actually measure. In addition, despite relatively low, and declining, xenophobic attitudes in Germany, it is not clear how these attitudes translate into discriminatory behavior. Despite the relatively lower levels of discrimination, it is unclear how this discrimination is perceived by migrants, as well as how these perceptions affect assimilation outcomes. Several studies have suggested that there is no link between reduced availability of opportunity and assimilation outcomes in education and the labor market – ethnic penalties can be explained by socioeconomic status rather than ethnicity itself with ethnic residuals remaining only for the upper limits of discrimination, however even these residuals could be explained by limited cultural and social resources. Perceived discrimination, as well, has been found to have no link to assimilation outcomes such as remigration intentions, religiosity, and the labor market. However it is difficult to establish causation because perceptions of discrimination and outcomes may fall outside of a given observation period, and perceived discrimination against the self does not include perceived group discrimination, which may also play a role in assimilation outcomes.

Diehl’s current work, from the SCIP project at the Norface Research Programme on Migration, seeks to correct for some of these uncertainties by using mini-panel data from newly arrived immigrants, collecting information on identification with the receiving country, experiences and perceptions of discrimination, and assimilation outcomes. Her results show that, upon migrating to Germany, Turks and Poles start off with similar levels of identification that rise over the first year or so, however Turks’ level of identification flattens and then declines, while Poles’ level of identification continues to rise over time. Moreover, Poles show increasing levels of social assimilation, low levels of perceived discrimination and low levels of perceived value incompatibility over time, while Turks show just the opposite – stagnating levels of social assimilation, increasing perceptions of discrimination, and high levels of value incompatibility. Both groups, perhaps not surprisingly, show increased language skills over time. Overall, social assimilation enhances identification with Germany, however perceived discrimination hinders this process for Turks. In short, Turks and Poles enter Germany with similar levels of identification, however higher levels of perceived discrimination among Turks leads to lower levels of identification with Germany over time compared to Poles.

Establishing a link between perceived discrimination and assimilation among new migrants opens up the question of how this link changes across generations. Will these differences between groups persist into the second or third generation in Germany? Do perceptions of discrimination affect the second generation in the same way as the first? Separately, given the current Syrian refugee crisis, and Germany as an important receiving country for refugees, it would be telling to extend this research to refugees, and Syrians in particular. How does the highly politicized and mixed context of reception affect Syrians’ assimilation in both the short and long term? Do Syrians tend not to have perceived discrimination personally, but perceive discrimination against the group, as many migrants report in the German Socioeconomic Panel? And, does the public discussion of Syrian migrants change the context of reception for Turks, Poles, and migrants from other countries, and potentially change perceptions of discrimination among all migrant groups? Diehl’s work is important in understanding the timely topic of processes of assimilation, as the public and political discourse on immigration becomes increasingly prominent in Western Europe and the United States.

-Eric Ketcham

Leslie McCall, “How Americans Think Politically about Economic Inequality”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Helen Panagiotopoulos

U.S. commentators on inequality have historically inhabited elite positions in American society. Given their postionality—as academics, journalists, pollsters, and politicians—it is not surprising that political and policy responses to inequality in the U.S. are comprised of three main discourses: (1) the tolerance perspective, which draws on the “American dream” ideology, where hard work will result in “fair” outcomes, (2) the ignorance view, which explains that, even though Americans generally desire less inequality, they are largely unaware of how much it has risen, and (3) the ambivalence approach—adopted by experts in the field that are ambivalent because they are uncertain in how to address it, particularly in regards to racial inequality. Leslie McCall takes up a fourth approach—the opportunity model—in her talk on How Americans Think Politically about Economic Inequality. This perspective arises from the desire for equal opportunity and widespread access to employment and education.

McCall’s discussion of the opportunity model focuses on popular American beliefs about inequality and their political implications. Americans generally believe that income differences are too large, inequality continues to exist to benefit the rich and powerful, and large income differences are unnecessary for prosperity. On the issue of “hard work” and its role in “getting ahead,” the American public continues to buy into this ideology, yet there is broad recognition that there are barriers to opportunity such as parental education, coming from a wealthy family, and knowing the right people. The political implications of these views result in emphasizing the limitations of redistributive models—models that largely rest on elite partisan approaches, such as the conservative tendency to equalize opportunities like economic growth rather than outcomes. Democrats, on the other hand, have focused on “equalizing outcomes” through taxing and social spending, while other alternatives like the Civil Rights model advocate for racial and gender equity by aiming to equalize outcomes. While the Civil Rights model developed approaches to expand education and economic opportunities for groups discriminated against by virtue of their race, ethnicity, or gender, McCall underscores that the anti-discrimination strategy has proven insufficient on its own. Equal opportunities in the workplace and in universities through antidiscrimination policies remain within the opportunity paradigm by equalizing outcomes (through affirmative action) to equalize opportunities.

Responses to inequality have, therefore, focused on opportunities rather than outcomes or government intervention. Tailored to appeal to the American majority, who care more about opportunity than equality, Democrats, too, respond to growing inequality through the opportunity model. Given the political implications of American beliefs about inequality, several questions emerge from McCall’s discussion. How does, for example, the American public define the poor? What populations are left out in this model? What types of employment and opportunities in education exist, for instance, for immigrants in the U.S.? Do antidiscrimination laws protect migrant workers? What are the limitations in opportunities for these groups? Can inequality be addressed without engaging in policy, such as immigration reform? These questions foreground whether there can ever be equality of opportunity for all, an assumption the opportunity model appears to rely on.

Patricia J. Brooks, “Individual Differences in Statistical Learning: Implications for Language Development”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Ian Phillips

In her recent talk at ARC titled Individual Differences in Statistical Learning: Implications for Language Development, Dr. Patricia J. Brooks presented ongoing research examining the relationship between individual differences in statistical learning ability and language development. In this talk, Brooks, Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and ARC Distinguished Fellow, explored the relationship between statistical learning ability and both child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition. The takeaway message is that statistical learning ability appears to influence the outcomes of both types of language acquisition, though this effect may be modulated by the quality and timing of feedback provided to the learner during language development.

Brooks started off by exploring how individual differences in statistical learning ability might underlie individual differences in linguistic skills. Statistical learning—aka procedural learning or implicit learning—is an inductive process in which the learner becomes sensitive to probabilistic patterns in the input. As Brooks pointed out, statistical learning is operative in infants and research suggests that it may facilitate acquisition of vocabulary, phonemic categories (language-specific sounds), and grammatical dependencies (e.g., subject-verb agreement). In further developing the relationship between statistical learning ability and language acquisition, Brooks presented her results from a meta-analysis of recent studies that show evidence that individuals with a language disorder known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) also have a statistical learning deficit (Obeid, Brooks, Powers, Gillespie-Lynch, & Lum, 2015).

Brooks’s main argument is that immediate positive feedback is crucial to language development and this kind of feedback interacts with the statistical learning mechanisms that underlie language development. To illustrate how this interaction affects language development, Brooks weaved together evidence from three of her recent studies utilizing a variety of data collection and analysis techniques. Brooks first presented her research examining how environmental factors impact language outcomes in infants enrolled in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSRE) to show that positive feedback from the caregiver is the biggest predictor of child language development (Poulakos, Brooks, & Jewkes, 2015). This study focused on investigating how the characteristics of mother, child, home, and social interaction when the infants were 14 months old affected language outcomes at 14 and 36 months, with the goal of determining whether the quality of social interaction with the caretaker impacts language development. In this research, Brooks analyzed data for 791 infants from low income families where English was the only language spoken at home and used a cumulative risk model to analyze the interactive effects that multiple factors—including maternal mental distress, negative interaction, maternal education, gestational age, child cognition, and child gender—had on language outcomes at 14 and 36 months. The analysis showed not only that a large percentage of the infants in the study were significantly delayed in language development at 36 months compared to all children in the EHSRE data but importantly at both 14 months and 36 months, joint attention—the factor indexing positive caretaker-child social interaction—was the biggest predictor of child language development.

After establishing the link between social interaction and language development, Brooks presented a second study in which she analyzes child-caretaker interactions in the CHILDES Clinical English Weismer SLI Corpus to determine which specific aspects of social interactions affect language development in late talking children (children using no words at 18 months, and fewer than 50 words and no word combinations at 24 months) (Che, Alarcon, Yannaco, & Brooks, 2015). This analysis shows two important findings: first, for late talkers at ages 30, 42, and 54 months, mothers and children show close to 20% overlap in each other’s speech, where overlap is defined as an imitation that may be either expanded or reduced; second, maternal overlap of child speech at 30 months is the single best predictor of a child’s mean length utterance (MLU; a standard measure of language proficiency) at 54 months of age—this factor is more predictive of language development at 54 months than child overlap, child MLU at 30 months, or the amount of mother speech. Brooks noted that this overlap is the critical just-in-time feedback needed for language development and cites research suggesting that this type of feedback provided by caretakers during social interaction facilitates language pattern extraction or rule learning.

After detailing how child language learning is affected by social interaction, Brooks shifted her focus to adult second language learning and presented a final experiment showing how individual differences in statistical learning ability predict language learning outcomes in adults (Brooks, Kwoka & Kempe, submitted). In this experiment, English-speaking college students completed three two-hour language learning sessions over 2-3 week period where they were exposed to spoken Russian phrases in a question-answer dialog using a computer program. Importantly, during the training phase of the language learning experiment, participants were provided with the type of immediate feedback that Brooks argues is crucial to language learning—they heard the correct phrases repeated immediately after answering each question. The results show that performance on both language comprehension and production tasks during each of the three language learning sessions is predicted by individual differences in statistical learning ability, as measured by two separate statistical learning tests.

There is much debate about the mechanisms that underlie both child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition. In this talk, Brooks presented new evidence suggesting that general statistical learning ability plays an important role in language development in both children and adults. Brooks complemented research showing the importance of social interaction for child language learning with new evidence that suggests that what’s important about social interaction is the just-in-time positive feedback. While this work is important for language acquisition research, it also has implications for developing interventions to close reported gaps in child first language acquisition and applications for adult second language learning.

Patrik Svensson, “From Lab to Lounge: Liminal Spaces for Learning”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Hamadi Henderson

Access to information has changed drastically in the information age. Originally, knowledge and access to higher learning was limited to a select few; confined to ornate halls and ivory towers. However, it is now freely available to the public. Where, in the past money and prestige were the only keys that granted access, today all that is needed is a low-end tablet and a Wi-Fi connection. The change in the accessibility of knowledge does not only impact who has access but also where there is access. In formal learning environments, learning is typically viewed as occurring in designated spaces with formal structures and floor plans. However, this ignores the learning that occurs in between these formal spaces. For example, in grade schools it is typical for teachers to display student work on boards outside of the classroom. While students may not actually read the displayed student work, the intent behind the display highlights the concept of learning in liminal spaces. Students in transition from one formal learning environment to another have the opportunity to learn. But is this more effective? What does it mean for the learner to learn in between these formal environments?

One of the key aspects of liminal spaces is the diminished formality. The relationship between the student and teacher in the classroom is very clear. The teacher is placed in a position of power either standing tall among seated students or seated among the students in an authoritative position. However, this dynamic changes in liminal spaces like the halls between classes, in study lounges, or even teacher offices. The question arises: what is the pedagogical value of this diminished formality? To answer this question we must first address what primarily drives learning in formal learning environments? Is it the instruction of the teacher or the motivation of the student? If the latter, liminal spaces offer students the opportunity to learn in accordance to their motivations. This would mean that liminal spaces are learner-focused, driven primarily by the learner’s educational needs. But if this conjecture is accepted as truth, the subsequent question that arises is can this effect be replicated in a non-liminal space? In academic setting there is a tendency to create a physical space with a fixed purpose. There is a computer lab and a biology lab. There is a classroom, a study room, and a thesis room. Would it work to create a “liminal room” where one does all the things one does in a liminal space? To dissect this question we have to think about what are the physical elements of a liminal space. This is a difficult concept to discuss simply because the very existence of liminal spaces is predicated on the existence of formal learning environments. But this is an issue addressed, to some degree, by the configuration of the space. If there is a desired set of behaviors for a space, the configuration of the space can elicit the desired behaviors without overtly specifying them. Additionally, it can simply be a matter of allowing formal spaces the flexibility to be used outside of their designated purpose.

In conclusion, the physical layout of a learning environment can greatly impact the how learners engage with the space and learn within it. The questions that remain are what are the elements of the space that are most conducive to learning and how do we promote their existence in to current learning environments? I find this to be a very interesting and important direction for educational research. Answering these questions can have great implications for the use of technology and the increase in equity of education.