Search results

Purpose – Prior research suggests that high school experiences shape young adult political behaviors, particularly among immigrant youth. The U.S. social studies classroom, focused on democratic citizenship education, proves an interesting socializing institution.Methods – Through qualitative inquiry, we interviewed Latino immigrant young adults and their former teachers regarding their high school social studies experiences and evolving political and civic engagement.Findings – Armed with experience bridging the worlds of the school and home, immigrant students respond and relate to the content and pedagogy of the social studies classroom in such a way that they (1) participate in civic discourse and (2) nurture a disposition toward leadership through teachers’ civic expectations of them and instructional emphasis on critical thinking skills.Social implications – The ability to engage in civic discourse and a disposition toward leadership are both necessary to foster America's democratic ideals, and to take on leadership roles during adulthood. With focused effort on the unique perspective of immigrant youth, high school social studies teachers can nurture in these students the ability to become leaders in young adulthood, broadening the potential leadership pool.Originality – This study highlights how the social studies curriculum may be particularly salient to Latino immigrant youth as they transition from adolescence to young adulthood and develop their political and civic identities.

Since we began work on this volume in 2011, images of youth who are politically and civically engaged have populated news stories. Youth activists played key roles in the social movements that sparked and spread through Africa and the Middle East in the “Arab Spring” of 2011 and 2012. In Norway, politically engaged youth attending a summer camp run by the ruling Labour Party became the victims of a mass shooting in July of 2011. Students in Chile, Mexico City, and Quebec took to the streets in order to challenge the rising costs of education and to organize for improvements to their colleges and universities. Undocumented youth in the United States publicly shared their stories and lobbied for passage of the DREAM Act. And local newspapers throughout the United States continued to celebrate youth who were honored for their volunteer service with awards and scholarships.

Loretta E. Bass is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and completed a two-year appointment within the Fertility and Family Branch of the Population Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. Dr. Bass focuses her research on children and stratification issues, and has published her research in Population Research and Policy Review, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Focus, Political Behavior, Anthropology of Work Review, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Journal of Reproductive Medicine, Journal of Sociology and Social Work, International Journal of Sexual Health, and Current Sociology. Prior to becoming the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth Series Editor, she served as co-editor for two years and as a guest-editor for a special international volume in 2005. She has also published a book, Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), which offers a window on the lives of child workers in 43 African countries. She currently serves as Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Children and Youth Section and as the President of Research Committee 53 on the Sociology of Childhood within the International Sociological Association (ISA).

The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to identify the aspects that faculty, student affairs educators and students indicate as salient for effective mentoring relationships that enhance ethical leadership development.

This exploratory qualitative inquiry used the Relational-Ethical-Affective-Dialogic (READ) mentoring model as a framework to examine the experiences of 13 undergraduate mentees and faculty/staff mentors in a formal mentoring program. Each study participant engaged in one semi-structured interview. Researchers coded and analyzed data using the sort and sift, think and shift process identifying power quotes to guide the thematic analysis.

The data collected in this study revealed insights into the aspects of mentor relationships that both undergraduate mentees and their mentors perceived as contributing to students' ethical leadership development. Salient elements included: (1) relational features of the mentee-mentor dynamic including trust and reciprocity; (2) structural features of the mentoring program including its focus on ethics; and (3) mentoring approaches that were attentive to power and positionality within the mentoring relationship and involved professional judgment about self-disclosure.

This study adds to the literature by exploring effective mentoring for ethical leadership development across disciplines. With colleges and universities serving a vital role in preparing the next generation of leaders for ethical engagement in their democratic and professional roles after graduation, it is imperative to broaden our understanding of how faculty and staff can support students' ethical leadership development.

The disproportionate identification of learning disabilities among certain sociodemographic subgroups, typically groups who are already disadvantaged, is perceived as a persistent problem within the education system. The academic and social experiences of students who are misidentified with a learning disability may be severely restricted, while students with a learning disability who are never identified are less likely to receive the accommodations and modifications necessary to learn at their maximum potential. In addition to inconsistent definitions of and criteria for diagnosing students with learning disabilities that may result in misdiagnoses, it is feared that discrimination also plays a role. We use the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002 to describe national patterns in learning disability identification by individual- and school-level characteristics. Our results indicate that sociodemographic characteristics are predictive of being identified with a learning disability. Whereas some conventional areas of disproportionality are confirmed (males and language minorities are more likely to be identified), differences in social class entirely account for black and Hispanic disproportionality. Discrepancy between the results of bivariate and multivariate analyses reaffirms the importance of employing sophisticated methodology in explorations of disproportionality.

In this chapter, we examine how the schooling experiences of disabled children have changed during COVID-19, how families' engagement, advocacy and support of their children have shifted during the pandemic, and how race, class, and other axes of inequality shape these processes.

We used a semi-structured interview protocol with families of disabled children, asking them about their experiences with their children's schools before and during the pandemic. We analyzed the interview data using “flexible coding” and the constant comparative method.

COVID-19 has had wide-reaching effects on disabled children's schooling experiences, yet these effects varied, particularly at the intersections of disability with race, class, linguistic status, and gender. Remote learning and other pandemic-related changes to schools exacerbated extant inequalities in children's educational experiences, as well as in families' ability to effectively advocate for their children in school.

This research provides important information about how the pandemic has exacerbated inequality at the intersection of disability, race, and other axes of inequality. Moreover, it provides a lens to examine ableism and other systems of oppression in schools. The findings have crucial policy implications, pointing to the necessity of equitably allocated, high quality, inclusive educational services for disabled students, as well as to the need for special education policy that does not rely on individual family advocacy to allocate appropriate services.

As environmental health scientists increasingly take up genetic/genomic modes of knowledge production and translate their work for applications in biomedicine, risk assessment, and regulation, they “bring the human in” to environmental health issues in novel ways. This paper describes the efforts of environmental health scientists to use molecular technologies to focus their research inside the human body, ascertain human genetic variations in susceptibility to adverse outcomes following environmental exposures, and identify individuals who have sustained DNA damage as a consequence of exposure to chemicals in the environment. In addition to transforming laboratory research, they see in these such practices the opportunity to advance public health, through innovations in biomedical practice and refinement of environmental health risk assessment and regulation. As environmental health scientists produce and translate these new forms of knowledge, they simultaneously assume and instantiate specific notions of the human subject and its agency, possibilities, and responsibilities vis-à-vis health and illness. Because dimensions of human subjectivity remain under-theorized in bioethics, sociological approaches to understanding and situating the human subject offer an important means of elucidating the consequences of genetics/genomics in the environmental health sciences and highlighting the social structures and processes through which they are produced.We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping. –Barad, 1998