The U.S. South, in spite of its racist Jim Crow era laws and political history, has the fastest growing Latine immigrant population in the country. In North Carolina alone, the Latine population is responsible for over one-third of the state's growth exceeding all other population groups. Despite this rapid-growing change, the state is third to…

This article details the process of recruiting and starting a cohort to prepare Latinx school administrators to fill impending positions in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district. The authors provide the context and steps of establishing the administrator preparation program.

In this article, we share insights from Raíces y Rutas, a digital storytelling workshop series which brought together Latinx immigrant families to share stories, make connections and build agency. Using popular education methods, we created a space for participants to engage in deep, communal thinking and theorizing. Participants developed the…

Students who experience teacher caring and high expectations (i.e., warm demand) are typically more engaged and successful at school. Yet, relative to White students, students of color tend to report lower levels of school social belonging and more distant relationships with their White teachers. Leveraging data from 179 6th-9th grade Measures of…

This dissertation is a longitudinal descriptive study of the dynamics of community and discipleship and their relationship to technology adoption among Southern Baptist Hispanic pastors in North Carolina. The perusal of the unique forces of these dynamics and their correlational tensions set the stage for understanding the perceptions and use of…

This autoethnographic paper discusses the complex methodological issues of a Latina scholar activist conducting research about the undocumented in a law enforcement context in the presence of power elites. She navigates her purpose and perceived identities in withholding some identities for the purpose of accessing data. She chronicles her…

The US teaching force remains disproportionately white while the student body grows more diverse. It is therefore important to understand how and under what conditions white teachers learn racial competency. This study applies a mixed-methods approach to investigate the hypothesis that Black peers improve white teachers' effectiveness when…

The significance of this study was its ability to further inform district and state level leaders and policy makers on the supports of the advancement and service of North Carolina's Latinx educators in school leadership roles. More specifically, this study shed light on the barriers and supports faced by Latinx public school administrators in…

Nationwide, Latinx students access dual enrollment (completing college coursework while still enrolled in high school) at lower rates than their white peers. Research on dual enrollment programs is limited and what does exist does not account for rural Latinx students' experiences. The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to…

Access to high-quality teachers in K-12 schools differs systematically by racial group. This policy brief reviews the academic research documenting these differences and the labor market forces and segregation patterns that solidify them. It also presents new analysis of differential exposure in North Carolina of white, black, and Hispanic…

In response to concerns regarding school quality, state policy-makers reformed their charter school authorization processes to impose greater regulatory barriers to chartering. These barriers to market entry could impose substantial burdens for Black and Latino would-be charter operators, as well as independent operators, who may lack access to…

Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first-generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual…

The aims of this mixed-methods study were (a) to explore quantitatively the fit of the COPE inventory (Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced) for Latinx youth from immigrant families, and (b) to explore qualitatively aspects of coping in this population. Participants were 175 Latinx adolescents (51% female), most of whom were U.S.-born with…

Western Carolina University (WCU) enrolls students from many different backgrounds and demographic categories. While access to the institution has expanded over the years, equity gaps still exist relative to retention and graduation outcomes for students in different demographic groups. Several offices at the University offer programing and…

The authors argue that attending to the affective dimensions of everyday life for Latino immigrant youth offers a disorientation away from the circulation of fear around immigration in the United States, and a new orientation that links together the intimate affective images and narratives of the everyday that are less oppressive and rooted in and…