This scholarly personal narrative offers insight into the everyday lived experience of a white international student from Germany living and studying in the United States. In this narrative, she explores her life between discrimination in the form of anti-German sentiment and white privilege. The narrative focuses on discrimination from a systemic…

In the United States and around the world, refugees are frequently portrayed as helpless victims, burdens of the host society, and potential criminals. Similarly, in schools even well-intentioned educators focus on what they lack, rather than the various stories, experiences, and perspectives they have to offer. To provide another perspective, we…

Social movements are pedagogical spaces for collective learning across difference. Divergent worldviews, interest and identity, historical legacies and relations of power complicate notions of allyship and solidarity for common cause. In this article, we draw on social movement and transformative learning to reflect on our experiences of learning…

In the context of a global pandemic, techniques for remote instruction have become increasingly vital to undergraduate instruction. This essay discusses how synchronous virtual encounters can have a similar pedagogical impact as in-person encounters by outlining specific methods of intercultural learning via Virtual Exchange Pedagogy (VEP), in…

This article outlines the impact of cultural shock and my way of overcoming it as I migrated to the U.S. as an international student. Often-times, even in academia, where we learn to question and look at things from multiple angles, we essentialize subject positions and as a result silence, alienate, and erase many people. Through the use of…

In many of the world's countries, being gay is punishable by death (Bearak and Cameron, June 16, 2016). And in the United States, there has been recent political opposition to gay marriage and gay rights. It is no wonder that, in today's world, a small but important percentage of our young people grow up confused, scared, and unsupported. A CDC…

In this plática, we share how we have deployed the methodologies of critical reflexión and plática~testimonio/haki~shahadat, which helped us enact a decolonial praxis of solidarity with intentional acts that grounded us in border thinking and opened the possibilities of creating an otherwise of love and harmony. We illustrate a praxis of…

This oral history describes the memories of a young German girl growing up during the Nazi Era and the end of World War II in a village in the Bavarian Alps of southern Germany. The narrative is based on her lived experiences and stories shared by her father about the horrors of the Nazi regime. Her memories include shrieking bells and imminent…

The following reflective essay describes the literal journey of an undocumented immigrant who left his family in Jalisco, Mexico, as a teenager and eventually became a bilingual educator who earned two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in the United States. Within this narrative, the author not only describes the challenges in crossing into the U.S.…

In this literacy narrative, the author reflects on how an assignment in graduate school changed from a confusing task to an exciting window through which he began to look into the intellectual and epistemological bases of education in the United States. While doing so, the author also briefly discusses the pedagogical implications of using…

Noting the need for richer theories of identity and identity formation in education, the author describes aspects of D. P. McAdams' psychosocial constructivist framework enriched by select concepts drawn from Life Course research for conceptualizing and analyzing identity development within audit-driven societies and educational systems. Drawing…

The author, as a retired high school teacher, has some bad news for college professors. In case, they do not already see what is happening. The author wants to warn them of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in one's classroom even if they teach in a highly selective institution. No Child Left Behind went into effect for the…

This narrative describes how my educational journey led me to become a Latina feminist community psychologist. My experiences as a Central American woman living in the United States has made me deeply committed to feminist community values and the importance of social justice. Throughout the journey, I connect how immigration status, culture, and…

The author founded Greater Newark Charter School in 2000 at a time when charter schools were little more than a nuisance to the traditional public school establishment. Just two years earlier, when first learning about charter schools, he recalls questioning the necessity for "new" schools when so many operational public schools were in…

People immigrate to other countries for various reasons. Whereas some voluntarily move to a foreign land, others are forced to do so as a result of socioeconomic, racial, political, sexual, and religious oppressions. In light of these various factors causing the voluntary or forcible exodus of people, this article traces back the author's journey…