Explore the vast range of titles available.

The untold stories of resilience in Hmong American education Re-membering Culture is a deep exploration of the intricate dynamics of cultural memory and education, centering the experiences of Hmong American students and educators. Arguing that the school, as a product of coloniality, perpetuates the marginalization and erasure of non-Western epistemologies, author Bic Ngo sheds light on the subtle yet impactful process of structured forgetting within the American education system. This politics of forgetting, in turn, contributes to the fragmentation of Hmong cultural heritage, identity, and community. Based on a high school in an urban center with a considerable Hmong immigrant community, Ngo's work draws on extensive ethnographic research with Hmong American community leaders, school administrators, parents, teachers, staff, and high school students to understand how they navigate the terrain of Western pedagogy while attempting to retain and preserve Hmong knowledge systems. Exploring a range of school experiences, Ngo traverses students' challenges in balancing school with family life and the everyday cultural racism encountered in the classroom as well as grassroots efforts to preserve culture, including the establishment of a Hmong Cultural Club. Highlighting these experiences and voices, Ngo provides a nuanced understanding of the challenges Hmong Americans face within an assimilationist society while contesting the dominant anti-immigrant narratives of refugee suffering and poverty. Through these practices of (re)storytelling, resurgence, and refusal, she underscores the agency of the Hmong American community, illuminating how the critical consciousness fostered by re-membering serves as a powerful tool in confronting white hegemonic ideologies in education. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

In her ethnographic study of Lao American students at an urban, public high school, Bic Ngo shows how simplistic accounts of these students smooth over unfinished, precarious identities and contested social relations. Exploring the ways that immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses that simplify and confine their experiences within binary categories of good/bad, traditional/modern and success/failure, she unmasks and examines the stories we tell about them, and unsettles the hegemony of discourses that frame identities within discrete dualisms. Rather than cohesive, the identity negotiations of Lao American students are responses that modify, resist, or echo these discourses. Ngo argues that while Lao American students are changing what it means to be \"urban\" and \"immigrant\" youth, most people are unable to read them as doing so, and instead see the youth as confused, backward, and problematic. By illuminating the discursive practices of identity, this study underscores the need to conceptualize urban, immigrant identities as contradictory, fractured and unresolved.

This article draws on research with a gay Hmong young man to illustrate the ways in which coming out discourses fail to take into account the central importance of family and kinship for gay Hmong Americans. It draws on the narratives of a gay Hmong man that emphasizes the importance of family reputation and family bonds to offer an alternative discourse to coming out narratives. It advances understandings of gay identity and experiences by explicating the ways in which family and community are important for a gay Hmong American man. This research significantly contributes to the dearth of research on Asian American LGBT experiences in general and those of LGBT Hmong Americans in particular. Keywords: Hmong, gay, coming out, family

This article illustrates the culture consciousness of Hmong immigrant community leaders as they made sense of the educational experiences of Hmong American children and families. It draws on the work of scholars who have theorized \"critical\" essentialism to suggest that Hmong leaders are critically aware of the role and import of dominant culture in shaping the contours of Hmong children's education. The analysis brings attention to \"culture consciousness\"—a lens for analyzing immigrant education that highlights the deployment of culture as social critique and political strategy. This research complicates the essentialist versus anti-essentialist binary for analyzing culture and disrupts the tendency to portray immigrant parents and adults as entrenched in a reified culture.

Similar to other Asian American students, Southeast Asian American students are often stereotyped by the popular press as hardworking and high-achieving model minorities. On the other hand, Southeast Asian American youth are also depicted as low-achieving high school dropouts involved in gangs. The realities of academic performance and persistence among Southeast Asian American students are far more complex than either image suggests. This article explores the various explanations for the struggles, successes, and educational experiences of Southeast Asian students. To highlight differences across ethnic groups, we review the literature on each Southeast Asian ethnic group separately and examine the successes and continuing struggles facing first- and second-generation Vietnamese American, Cambodian American, Hmong American, and Lao American students in the United States.

This article complicates the meanings of early marriage among Hmong American female students. It moves beyond explanations of cultural difference in the examination and explication of the discourse and practice of early marriage among female adolescents in the Hmong community. Drawing on the perspectives and experiences of Hmong American female students, this article reveals that early marriage may be an expression of students' opposition to the structures of and experiences with school and family. The significance of this analysis is its recognition and illumination of the fluidity of cultural and social practices, and the tensions between and within ethnic groups.

This article addresses the ways in which the experiences of immigrant youth and families in U.S. schools and society have been conceptualized primarily as conflicts between immigrant cultures and dominant U.S. culture. Exemplified by the discourse of culture clash or of immigrants being torn between two worlds, this prevalent understanding structures the experiences, cultures, and identities of immigrants as unchanging and fixed in time. This article illustrates the ways that culture and identity are constructed within the double movement of discourse and representation. It offers examples of how dominant representations create simplistic understandings of the identities of immigrant youth, as well as the ways youth are constructing new identities.

In this chapter, we review the literature on community-based arts programs serving minoritized youth to identify the conditions and practices for fostering sociopolitical consciousness. Community-based arts programs have the capacity to promote teaching and learning practices in ways that engage youth in the use of academic skilh to pursue inquiry, cultural critique, and social action. In this review, we pay particular attention to literary arts, theatre arts, and digital media arts to identify three dimensions of sociopolitical consciousness: identification, mobilization, andcosmopolitanism. By advancing the principle of sociopolitical consciousness within the theory and practice of critical and cultural relevan pedagogies, our review provides ways toward mitigating social and educational dispanties.

In her ethnographic study of Lao American students at an urban, public high school, Bic Ngo shows how simplistic accounts of these students smooth over unfinished, precarious identities and contested social relations. Exploring the ways that immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses that simplify and confine their experiences within binary categories of good/bad, traditional/modern, and success/failure, she unmasks and examines the stories we tell about them, and unsettles the hegemony of discourses that frame identities within discrete dualisms. Rather than cohesive, the identity negotiations of Lao American students are responses that modify, resist, or echo these discourses. Ngo argues that while Lao American students are changing what it means to be \"urban\" and \"immigrant\" youth, most people are unable to read them as doing so, and instead see the youth as confused, backward, and problematic. By illuminating the discursive practices of identity, this study underscores the need to conceptualize urban, immigrant identities as contradictory, fractured, and unresolved. Following a forward, this book contains: (1) Introduction; (2) Urban Schools as War Zones; (3) War Babies and Comeback Kids; (4) Confining Immigrant Identities; (5) Unresolved Identities; and (6) Resisting Resolution. Appended are: (1) Undercutting the Inside/Outside Opposition; and (2) A Note on Methodology. Notes, references and an index are also included.

In 2004, with the closing of the last Hmong refugee camp, Wat Tham Krabok, the latest group of Hmong refugees resettled to the US. To facilitate the language transition of approximately 1,000 school-aged newcomer Hmong children, the Saint Paul Public Schools, developed and established Transitional Language Centers. In this article, we examine the experiences and perspectives of principals, teachers and educational assistants who worked with newcomer Hmong children in the newly-established Transitional Language Centers and well-established Language Academy programs. We also elucidate the experiences of Hmong parents with the schools that served their children. Our research offers insights into the important work of the Transitional Language Centers as well as the need to better support newcomer Hmong parents.