The Forum article accompanying the Feature Focus article for Volume 2 Issue 1 is entitled Forum: Pigs and Packers. In this Forum, Katherine Richardson Bruna is joined by scholars Angela Calabrese Barton and Jaime Grinberg to discuss a number of issues that add complexity to the taken-forgranted practices of teaching immigrant children in the US.

Angela Calabrese Barton is an associate professor of science education at Michigan State University. Drawing from critical and feminist theories, her research focuses on high poverty urban middle school youths’ scientific literacies in and out of school and on the preparation of teachers to teach science in high poverty urban communities. Jaime Grinberg is a professor of educational foundations at Montclair State University in New Jersey, USA. He obtained his doctorate from Michigan State University and has taught and lectured at numerous institutions in the USA, Mexico, Argentina, and Israel among other places. He teaches undergraduate classes on global issues and on the history and philosophy of eEducation, as well as teaches masters and doctoral classes on issues of language, culture and power, and on the history and politics of curriculum and teaching.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-006-9042-9-x
Online Date: 12/22/2006
View article on SpringerLink

The first Feature Focus article to be selected from Volume 2 Issue 1 is On pigs and packers: Radically contextualizing a practice of science with Mexican immigrant students.

This paper reports on instructional practices observed in a high school English Learner (EL) Science course serving newcomer Mexican immigrant youth. The school is located in a rural Midwestern meatpacking community in which labor at the hog plant is economically- and racially-segmented; it is the town’s Mexican residents, many of them undocumented, who comprise most of the unskilled labor force. The general purpose of the paper is to document how the economic and racial context of this community influences science instruction in the EL Science course and to describe how this presents particular challenges in achieving equitable science instruction for Mexican immigrant youth in these rural, globalizing places.

The authors of this feature article are Katherine Richardson Bruna and Roberta Vann. Katherine Richardson Bruna is an Assistant Professor of Multicultural and International Curriculum Studies at Iowa State University. She is a former bilingual instructional aide and ESL teacher. She has a long-standing interest in issues related to the education of Mexican immigrant children in U.S. schools. Her most recent research on the science-learning experiences of these youth has taken her into schools, communities, and households of rural central Mexico. Roberta Vann is a Professor in the Program of Teaching English as a Second Language and Applied Linguistics at Iowa State University where she teaches sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and methods. Prior to her current position, she taught in Ethiopia and was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland. She later served as a consultant on second language learning in Syria, Slovakia, Peru, and Thailand. Her most recent research combines her interests in discourse analysis and pedagogy.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-006-9041-x
Online Date: 01/12/2007
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