11 results on '"Varghese, Manka"'
Search Results
2. College Capital and Constraint Agency: First-Generation Immigrant Emergent-Bilingual Students' College Success
- Author
-
Varghese, Manka and Fuentes, Ronald
- Abstract
Background/Context: Language-minoritized and emergent-bilingual (EB) students have historically and frequently been underexamined in the context of research on minoritized students' pathways in higher education. Understanding the school to college pipeline for emergent bilinguals (EBs) is becoming a critical area of study to help identify and address the barriers that they experience as they attempt to transition to and navigate postsecondary education. Despite there being a greater knowledge of the barriers experienced by EBs in getting to college, less is known about the resources they bring and their agency, the way they actually mobilize the resources that they possess in negotiating their success to get to and complete college. Purpose/Research Question: This study examines why and how some EB students can successfully navigate their environments in order to apply for, get into and complete a selective four-year college. It is guided by two overarching questions: (1) What forms of capital do first generation immigrant EBs draw on to apply for and navigate selective four-year college? (2) How do first generation immigrant EBs navigate and complete selective four-year college? Research Design: We examined the pathways of EBs through a conceptual framework which frames their college success as being a result of the relationship between what we refer to as their college capital which they have access to and that they draw on, and their constraint agency. Through interviews, this study analyzes 33 first generation undergraduate immigrant EBs' transition to and completion of tertiary education, with further analysis being supplemented with in-depth case studies of five out of the 33 EBs. Additionally, we interviewed 14 university administrators and instructors involved in the admission and instruction of EB students on campus. Conclusions/Recommendations: EB immigrant students drew on different forms of college capital, which included traditional and non-traditional. Students who drew more on traditional kinds of capital participated more in high participatory agentive ways while students who drew more on nontraditional forms of college capital participated more in low participatory agentive ways. Both forms of participating (low and high) lead to students navigating and completing four-year college. We suggest that more differential forms of help, resources and EB-student-focused partnerships between high school, community colleges, and four-year college which include working on their agentive selves are needed as well as challenging the racism and linguicism that holds White monolingual students as the norm to configure policies and services that will help EBs' postsecondary pathways.
- Published
- 2020
3. Exploring TESOL Teacher Educators as Learners and Reflective Scholars: A Shared Narrative Inquiry
- Author
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Peercy, Megan Madigan, Sharkey, Judy, Baecher, Laura, Motha, Suhanthie, and Varghese, Manka
- Abstract
Recent scholarship examining how teachers and teacher educators learn to teach has advocated for a more critically oriented and better developed pedagogy of teacher education, in which teacher educator as practitioner is both in evidence and examined. Yet we currently know little about teacher educators as learners and reflective scholars open to examining their practice and research, and such inquiry is particularly limited within the scholarship in English language teacher education. This article brings together the narratives of the five co-authors, all TESOL teacher educators based in U.S. universities who examine questions about the intersections of their identities and pedagogies. They do so as a first step toward addressing the gap in the literature regarding the self-reflexivity of teacher educators. Identifying themes related to the intertwining of their social and professional identities and their pedagogies, their perceived legitimacy as teacher educators, and the impact of multiple contexts on their identities and pedagogies, the five co-authors consider how they are both domesticating and domesticated by teacher education (Morgan, 2016) and argue that when teacher educators engage in shared and transparent exploration of their identities and pedagogies they are better able to identify their pedagogical blind spots and opportunities to agentively leverage their identities to challenge dominant discourses.
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
4. Rewriting Dominant Narratives of the Academy: Women Faculty of Color and Identity Management
- Author
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Motha, Suhanthie and Varghese, Manka M.
- Abstract
Drawing on Delgado and Yosso's "counterstory," Yosso's "community cultural wealth," and Alsup's "borderland discourses," the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Critically Examining the Agency and Professional Identity Development of Novice Dual Language Teachers through Figured Worlds
- Author
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Varghese, Manka M. and Snyder, Rachel
- Abstract
Drawing on the concept of figured worlds, we examined how four preservice teachers in a monoglossically oriented teacher preparation program developed their professional identities and sense of agency as dual language teachers. Figured worlds are socially constructed and culturally recognized realms with a story line and actors who also actively change these story lines in the course of narrating them and participating in them. Drawing on interviews and observations, we showed how four teachers' personal linguistic, racial, and cultural backgrounds interacted with external affordances, including their own language ideologies and those present in their contexts, leading to the (re)construction of their figured worlds of dual language teaching. These figured worlds were mainly reshaped to include family connections and student empowerment and made salient the limitations of the teachers' engagement with the centrality of race, power, and immigrant rights in their language ideologies.
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
6. Structuring Disruption within University-Based Teacher Education Programs: Possibilities and Challenges of Race-Based Caucuses
- Author
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Varghese, Manka, Daniels, Julia R., and Park, Caryn C.
- Abstract
Background: Teacher education candidates are in different places in terms of developing their identities and relationships to equity and social justice. Various approaches have been taken within university-based teacher education programs to engage with candidates, wherever they are in this development. One such approach has been engaging or drawing on teachers' own lenses, especially through challenging and understanding their racialized selves. Purpose: This conceptual article examines how race-based caucuses (RBCs) in one teacher education program attempted to shift candidates' understandings of their racialized selves as related to their teacher identities. Context: RBCs were instituted in one elementary teacher education program to help White teacher candidates and candidates of Color construct critical teacher identities. Candidates were asked to participate in caucuses according to the ways they had been racialized within schools. Facilitators who demonstrated a willingness to sit with the work of engaging race and racialization led the caucuses. Observances: For the candidates of Color, the "overwhelming presence of Whiteness" in the teacher education program and in the schools required the RBCs to focus on reframing deficit narratives of teachers of Color to an asset-based view of their value and contribution to the teaching profession. The RBC provided space for White teacher candidates to explore the consequences of Whiteness for their future identities as teachers and for the kinds of communities that they could and wanted to cultivate with students. Messiness and challenges abounded in both RBCs. Discussion and Reflections: Emotions--and especially emotion labor--were central to RBCs. For teacher candidates of Color, facing one's own oppression was painful but also presented opportunities for them to articulate emotions and experiences in relatively safe spaces. In a different way, the RBCs resulted in significant emotional upheaval for White teacher candidates that shifted into deeper self-reflection and sense of awareness and allyship (for some)--although in a few cases, RBCs led to even deeper resistance. Conclusions: Race-based caucusing is a messy and challenging practice that can provide opportunities to reflect constructively on emotions and produce emotional upheaval for teacher candidates. Teacher educators and programs must approach RBCs with an orientation toward hyperreflexivity.
- Published
- 2019
7. Immigrant and Refugee ESL Students' Challenges to Accessing Four-Year College Education: From Language Policy to Educational Policy
- Author
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Kanno, Yasuko and Varghese, Manka M.
- Abstract
Research on English as a second language (ESL) students in higher education has traditionally focused on their academic writing, leaving larger issues of their college access and success unexplored. This article examines the challenges that first-generation immigrant and refugee ESL students face in accessing four-year college education through a qualitative interview study at a U.S. public university. Drawing on Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory, we argue that what inhibits ESL students' access to and participation in four-year college education is not simply their limited English proficiency but also the structural constraints unique to this population, their limited financial resources, and the students' own tendency to self-eliminate. Based on our results, we call for a shift in higher education policy from one focusing narrowly on remediating ESL students' limited English proficiency to a more comprehensive set of policies that address the structural and economic, as well as linguistic, factors that together inhibit ESL students' college access and participation. (Contains 4 tables and 8 footnotes.)
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
8. Linguistic Minority Students in Higher Education: Using, Resisting, and Negotiating Multiple Labels
- Author
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Oropeza, Maria Veronica, Varghese, Manka M., and Kanno, Yasuko
- Abstract
Linguistic minority students have been both under-researched and underserved in the context of research on minority students' access to and retention in higher education. The labels ascribed to them have typically failed to capture the complexity of their identities. Additionally, much of the literature in higher education on minority students' access and retention has focused on structural barriers rather than on how students negotiate these barriers. By bringing linguistic minority students into the forefront of this conversation, we show how four linguistic minority female students draw on their community cultural wealth and different forms of capital (Yosso, 2005) to access and navigate college while experiencing differing advantages and disadvantages based on institutional labeling. By employing critical race theory and its conceptualization of capital, we illustrate how students use, resist, and negotiate labels in attempts to access resources and services at a four-year institution. We conclude by calling for more research on this population as well as additive university practices and policies that reflect the richness of linguistic minority student identities. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. Evangelical Christians and English Language Teaching
- Author
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Varghese, Manka M. and Johnston, Bill
- Abstract
Evangelical Christians are an enduring and growing presence in the field of English language teaching worldwide and in the TESOL organization in particular. Yet to date, hardly any empirical research has been done on this population of teachers or on the links between English teaching, religious beliefs, and missionary work. This article reports on a qualitative study of ten English language teachers-in-training at two evangelical Christian colleges in the United States. Using interview data, the study explores the religious beliefs of the participants and the complex, varied, and often still developing ways in which these beliefs relate to their perspectives on missionary work and on the relationship between religious faith and English language teaching (ELT). We conclude by identifying a key moral dilemma raised by the participants' values as related to several of the dominant discourses present in ELT. (Contains 5 footnotes.)
- Published
- 2007
10. College Capital and Constraint Agency: First-Generation Immigrant Emergent-Bilingual Students' College Success.
- Author
-
Varghese, Manka and Fuentes, Ronald
- Subjects
- *
MINORITY college students , *BILINGUAL students , *STUDENT participation , *HIGHER education , *CONSTRAINTS (Linguistics) , *RACISM in education , *POSTSECONDARY education - Abstract
Background/Context: Language-minoritized and emergent-bilingual (EB) students have historically and frequently been underexamined in the context of research on minoritized students' pathways in higher education. Understanding the school to college pipeline for emergent bilinguals (EBs) is becoming a critical area of study to help identify and address the barriers that they experience as they attempt to transition to and navigate postsecondary education. Despite there being a greater knowledge of the barriers experienced by EBs in getting to college, less is known about the resources they bring and their agency, the way they actually mobilize the resources that they possess in negotiating their success to get to and complete college. Purpose/Research Question: This study examines why and how some EB students can successfully navigate their environments in order to apply for, get into and complete a selective four-year college. It is guided by two overarching questions: (1) What forms of capital do first generation immigrant EBs draw on to apply for and navigate selective four-year college? (2) How do first generation immigrant EBs navigate and complete selective four-year college? Research Design: We examined the pathways of EBs through a conceptual framework which frames their college success as being a result of the relationship between what we refer to as their college capital which they have access to and that they draw on, and their constraint agency. Through interviews, this study analyzes 33 first generation undergraduate immigrant EBs' transition to and completion of tertiary education, with further analysis being supplemented with in-depth case studies of five out of the 33 EBs. Additionally, we interviewed 14 university administrators and instructors involved in the admission and instruction of EB students on campus. Conclusions/Recommendations: EB immigrant students drew on different forms of college capital, which included traditional and nontraditional. Students who drew more on traditional kinds of capital participated more in high participatory agentive ways while students who drew more on non-traditional forms of college capital participated more in low participatory agentive ways. Both forms of participating (low and high) lead to students navigating and completing four-year college. We suggest that more differential forms of help, resources and EB-student-focused partnerships between high school, community colleges, and four-year college which include working on their agentive selves are needed as well as challenging the racism and linguicism that holds White monolingual students as the norm to configure policies and services that will help EBs' postsecondary pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
11. Rewriting dominant narratives of the academy: women faculty of color and identity management.
- Author
-
Motha, Suhanthie and Varghese, Manka M.
- Subjects
- *
AFRICAN American women teachers , *RACE discrimination in education , *DISCRIMINATION in education , *TEACHING & society , *COLLEGE students , *HIGHER education , *PREVENTION - Abstract
Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s
counterstory , Yosso’scommunity cultural wealth , and Alsup’sborderland discourses , the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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