Researching the learning experiences of postgraduate students requires a different type of qualitative research to enable access to areas of their lives which may well remain hidden with more conventional methods of research. Narrative inquiry as both method and methodology allows such access. In this article, I focus on the use, appropriateness,…

This article draws upon three years of interviews and participant observation research in the Chelsea Public Schools, to discuss the impact of the Chelsea Family Literacy Program on promoting Latin American immigrant mothers' involvement in their children's education. The authors present the voices of Latin American immigrant mothers who describe…

An ethnographic study on a Japanese language tutoring programme for foreign children was conducted from 2003 to 2006. The investigation attempted to shed light on issues of language acquisition among Latin American children who attended three public primary schools in Japan. This article combines extensive participant observation and in-depth…

Practices and policies of Japanese schooling for immigrant and marginalised students are examined through the lens of a primary school which serves one of the largest foreign student populations in Japan. Student families include Southeast Asian refugees, South American immigrants of Japanese descent, recent and longstanding Chinese and Koreans,…

This article explores the informal learning processes and the changes in the values of a group of 200 Latin American immigrants to Canada. Results show that the majority of the respondents underwent at least one political or civic learning process, like increasing tolerance or environmental responsibility. The findings also suggest a number of…

This article, part of a larger study, examines three middle-class, Hispanic Canadian families' conceptualizations of language, culture, and identity. Via an analysis of interview data, the findings indicate that the parents assigned diverse meanings to heritage language development (HLD) and held high expectations for their children's formation of…

In this article I compare and contrast curricular, ceremonial and pedagogical practices with how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination at the Jaime Hurtado Academy in the city and province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, which is the only region of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorian people comprise a majority of the…

This article describes the language skills and factors that predict English-language proficiency for a sample of 209 students ages 10 to 16 from three immigrant groups--Chinese, Dominican, and Haitian. Sources of data included structured student interviews, parent interviews, and individual language assessments. On average, students'…

This study examined how Dominican English-language learners at Bronx Community College achieved academic resiliency despite facing personal, academic, and environmental adversities. Using individual interviews, data were analyzed from the perception of students. A resilient-based model emerged that sheds light on the personal barriers experienced…

The lives and places in society of urban youth at risk of dropping out of the Los Angeles (California) Unified School District schools are explored through interviews of adolescents whom the author met when doing field work in Los Angeles County. Data come from interviews conducted in the course of the 1991 Drug Use Forecasting Study (DUF) and the…