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This chapter explains why college-educated Latinas, the daughters of working-class Latino immigrant parents, are disproportionately entering the teaching profession in the United States.

This qualitative study relies on secondary statistical data, an analysis of regional trends and 40 in-depth face-to-face interviews with Latina teachers that work in Southern California elementary schools.

Teaching has traditionally been a white woman’s occupation, but it is now the number one career drawing college-educated Latina women, who are entering the teaching profession at greater rates than African Americans or Asian Americans. Current scholarship posits that teaching is a career that resonates with Latina women’s racial-ethnic solidarity and feminine sense of duty to help others. In this chapter, we show how class background is also a key in understanding why the teaching profession has emerged as the top occupational niche for college-educated Latina women. While racial uplift, gender ideals, and family socialization help explain why college-educated Latinas are going into teaching, we add an emphasis on socio-economic class, demographic and structural context, and collectively informed agency.

This study sheds light on the factors that shape upward mobility and career outcomes in white-collar jobs for minority students and second generation Latinas, the children of immigrants.

This chapter offers a sociological analysis that suggests Latina teachers navigate their educational and career choices with collective-informed agency and strong obligations to family members. To best understand why Latina/Chicana college graduates are increasingly concentrated in the teaching profession, we advocate an intersectionalities approach that takes class seriously.

This chapter illuminates the impact of providing informal learning experiences for students pursuing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teaching careers at a time when there is a considerable shortage of qualified teachers in America's urban centers. Preservice STEM teachers were provided with the opportunity to participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant funded Noyce Internship Program prior to serving as counselors and teaching assistants in a STEM camp for underrepresented middle school students. Through the Noyce Internship Institute, participants were introduced to interactive sessions that model promising teaching practices including inquiry-based and project-based learning. This narrative inquiry examines the impact of these experiences on preservice STEM teachers' self-efficacy and highlights outcomes in three areas: increase of preservice teachers' confidence, classroom management, and strengthening their desire to teach STEM.

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

It was a typical Wednesday in Room 4. Wednesday mornings meant time for Invitations. A time cherished and enjoyed by the intermediate students in Ruth’s elementary classroom. Invitations were a time for small groups of students to work together across disciplines on self-selected topics offered by the teacher but grown from student interests. On a weekly basis students signed up for Invitations – sometimes sticking with a topic for several weeks and sometimes attending to a new topic each week. Topics ranged anywhere from using technology, taking apart CD players to discover how they work, exploring media coverage of current events, debating social issues, dissecting plants, to making maps. Students then worked cooperatively in student-facilitated groups to use multiple ways of knowing, and available resources and materials to ask important questions, to investigate issues of significance, to pursue possibilities, and to inquire with others.

Witchcraft in Honduras is an unprotected marginalized woman’s efforts to gain social, economic, and political power through an informal economy by utilizing the cultural belief in the witches’ supernatural power. The Honduran post-colonial Latin American culture allows for a persistent informal economy, in part, based on the commoditization of witchcraft and exorcism. The case study provides a specific example through ethnographic interviews of this under-researched informal economy driven by fear and economic desperation. Further research and analysis of these poorly understood and rarely recorded modern phenomena and the associated informal economy is needed.