CLAS Summer Institute 2011
Latin America Comes to Ohio: Implications of Migration for Education
Westland Area Library
4740 W. Broad St.
Columbus, OH 43228
June 27-July 1; July 15
This weeklong intensive graduate course is a professional development course for in-service teachers in Columbus City Schools. The main purpose of this course is to give P-12 teachers opportunities to develop new knowledge and understanding of Latin America in the context of migration, and of the historical, sociocultural, and economic forces that cause Latin Americans to leave home for the United States. Participants will develop strategies to enhance the educational experience of their students by incorporating content and new insights on Latin America into their teaching.
Topics included: a brief overview of Latin American geography, history, customs, and cultures; using technology in teaching; causes and effects of migration within Latin America, from Latin America to the U.S., from Latin America to central Ohio; U.S. immigration policy and its effect on immigrants; Latino demographics of Ohio and central Ohio; Latin American cultures in the U.S.; education in Latin America; challenges migrant children and adolescents face in U.S. schools; using the Latino community as a resource in teaching.
Presenter Videos/Presentations
Jeff Cohen - Contemporary Latin American Migration
(Jeff Cohen Video)
Joanna Dreby - Tensions and Accommodations in Mexican Immigrant Households
(Joanna Dreby printable copy [pdf]) (Joanna Dreby Video)
Marcia Farr - Language and Literacy Issues: Multilingualism and Education
(Marcia Farr printable copy [pdf]) (Marcia Farr Video)
Marcia Farr - Transnational Chicago
(Marcia Farr 2nd presentation printable copy [pdf]) (Marcia Farr 2nd Presentation Video)
Lilia Fernandez - Immigration Policies and Latin American Immigrants Today
(Lilia Fernandez printable copy [pdf]) (Lilia Fernandez Video)
Reanne Frank - Migration and Health
(Raeanne Frank printable copy [pdf]) (Reanne Frank Video)
Terrell Morgan - Ohio's Latino Communities as a Teaching and Learning Resource
(Terrell Morgan printable copy [pdf]) (Terrell Morgan Video)
Adam Sawyer - Going to School, Going to the U.S.A.: Migration and Schooling in a Southern Mexican Migrant-Sending Community
(Adam Sawyer printable copy [pdf]) (Adam Sawyer Video)
Presenter Biographies
Jeff Cohen
Jeffrey H. Cohen is an associate professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University. He received his PhD in 1994 in anthropology from Indiana University. He is co-editor of the journal Migration Letters, an officer for the Society of Anthropological Sciences, and former president of the Society for Economic Anthropology. His research focuses on migration, economic development, and food safety/nutrition. He has worked in Oaxaca, Mexico, for many years with support from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, and the Fulbright program. He has also conducted comparative migration research and research with Dominican migrants in the United States with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. His articles have appeared in American Anthropologist; International Migration; Population, Space and Place; and Gastronomica. His books include Cooperation and Community: Economy and Society in Oaxaca (1999), The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (2004) and Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Movement (2011) by the University of Texas Press; and Economic Development: An Anthropological Approach (2002) co-edited with Norbert Dannhaeuser by Alta Mira Press. He has served on the ASC senate and CCI committee for the Department of Anthropology and the steering committee of IPR and was a member of the IRB working group.
Theresa Delgadillo
Theresa Delgadillo’s work is devoted to three areas: spirituality and religion, African Diaspora and Latinidad, and Latino/as in the Midwest. Her objects of study have included novels, autobiographies, memoirs, photographic collections, feature and documentary films, poetry, and music. In research and teaching, she explores the intersections among gender, sexuality, race, and nation as well as critiques these categories; engages with comparative, transnational, and migratory paradigms and movements; pursues transdisciplinary knowledge; and desires to make socially transformative knowledge possible. Future projects will focus on 20th- and 21st-century comparative ethnic, multiethnic, postcolonial, and women's texts in the Americas. She is interested in exploring topics such as spirituality, religion, nationalism, transnationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, cultural and social change, history, memory, remembrance, diaspora, exile, identity, community, interpretation, networks, cross-cultural exchange, justice, intersectionality, hybridity, immigration and war in literature, visual culture, and music.
Joanna Dreby
Joanna Dreby is assistant professor of sociology at Kent State University and received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2007. She is the author of Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children (University of California Press, 2010), which is based on her four-year ethnographic study of migrant families in central New Jersey and in Mexico. Her research focuses the ways migratory patterns and families’ decisions about work and child care affect children. Her current research project, funded by the Foundation for Child Development, explores the experiences of young children growing up in Mexican immigrant households in Ohio and New Jersey.
Marcia Farr
Marcia Farr's long-term interest in language, literacy, and ethnicity has been nurtured in various contexts: she taught English at an "urban-suburban" high school in Prince George's County, Maryland; she lived, studied, and worked in Washington, D.C., for 17 years; she lived in, taught in, and studied the "urban ethnic mosaic" of Chicago for 20 years; and she lived in Michoacán, Mexico, for a year while on a Fulbright research fellowship and doing fieldwork. Her initial sociolinguistic interest in the relationship between oral dialect variation and literacy expanded to include a broader ethnographic focus on cultural variation in language and literacy. Several recent publications represent this broader ethnographic study of language use: a long-term ethnographic study of language and culture among transnational Mexican families in both Chicago and Mexico (Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Mexican Community, University of Texas Press, 2006); and three edited books on ethnolinguistic diversity: Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City's Neighborhoods (Erlbaum, 2004), Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago (Erlbaum, 2005), and (with Lisya Seloni and Juyoung Song), Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Education: Language, Literacy, and Culture (Routledge, 2010). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (Linguistics Program), the Spencer Foundation, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Lilia Fernandez
Professor Lilia Fernandez is assistant professor in the history department at Ohio State. She teaches courses on 20th-century U.S. history, Latino/a history, and immigration history. She is the recipient of the university’s 2011 Distinguished Alumni Teaching Award. Professor Fernandez has published several journal articles on Latino labor migration and Latino education, and book chapters on Mexican American community formation and urban renewal. Her book Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago is forthcoming in 2012 with the University of Chicago Press.
Reanne Frank
Reanne Frank is an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State. Her research to date has focused on examining how demographic outcomes are influenced by the migration process, with specific attention to the case of the U.S.-Mexico migration flow. Her work on the Latino health paradox has been primarily concerned with the “other side of the paradox,” namely the effects of the international migration process on birth outcomes in Mexican migrant households and communities.
Victor J. Mora
As associate director of research and analysis in the Office of Enrollment Services at Ohio State, Victor Mora directs a student market analysis and research operation to support planning, implementation, and evaluation of undergraduate student recruitment strategies. This operation uses geographic information systems (GIS) to integrate internal and external data with digital mapping. Victor has presented papers at national and international forums on the subjects of the use of GIS in higher education market analysis and the use of predictive modeling in enrollment and admission management. Victor also has served in various capacities to support the advancement of Hispanic/Latinos outside and within Ohio State. He served as a commissioner in the Ohio Commission on Hispanic/Latino Affairs and chaired its Strategic Planning Committee. He also served Hispanic students, faculty, and staff at Ohio State as a member of the provost’s Hispanic Oversight Committee, as advisor of student organizations, and as the executive officer of ¿Qué Pasa, OSU? magazine. Victor has an MBA, with emphasis in marketing management, from the University of Toledo.
Adam Sawyer
Adam Sawyer is an assistant professor of education for the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He teaches courses that explore the intersection of migration, social context, identity, and schooling at the college’s San Joaquín Valley campus in Delano, CA. Adam’s research and writing has focused on innovative practices of preparation for teachers serving immigrant and minority populations in the United States—especially those of Latin American origin—as well as the education of youth in the migrant-sending regions of Mexico. He is especially interested in how the dynamics of out-migration and transnationalism impact the schooling of those who “remain behind” in rural Mexico. His current research explores teacher and Mexican immigrant youth identity in the United States and the meanings each ascribe to education in rural California communities undergoing dramatic demographic shift. His work has been published by Migration Policy Institute, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, and Views Journal of International Education (Harvard Graduate School of Education). He is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Regarding Educación: Mexican American Schooling in the 21st Century to be published by Teachers College Press. Previous to his graduate studies, Adam worked as a Spanish bilingual teacher in East Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, CA, and as an academic consultant to the Mexican Secretariat of Education. He is a former visiting research fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at University of California, San Diego, and holds a doctorate from Harvard University in international education.
Course archive
Syllabus [pdf]
CLAS, Westland Area Library, OSU Introductions & Programs [pdf]
Resources on Latin America & Migration [pdf]
Restaurant List [pdf]
Taco Truck Map [pdf]
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