In this “ethnographically-oriented” study, authors Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Lu Liu, and Sophia L. Ángeles examine the learning experiences expressed in the diaries of thirty-five families from diverse ethnicities/races, cultures, national origins, and social classes living in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring participants’ reflections on the learning they engaged in during this time and attending to what families prioritized as they reorganized their daily lives, the authors identify several common themes that emerged as participants figured out new ways of “reinventing themselves” during this unprecedented time by centering their cultural heritage, creativity, health, well-being, and connections to nature and to others and by using technology in creative and innovative ways. In offering the life lessons and richness of learning the families experienced as a counter to the current focus on pandemic learning loss, this study has implications for reimagining education in culturally sustaining ways.
Click here to access this article.
Marjorie Faulstich Orellana (
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2921-5892) is Professor in the School of Education and Information Studies and Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute at UCLA, where she teaches courses on language, sociocultural learning theory, and immigration. She is the author of
Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2009),
Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love (Routledge, 2016),
Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart, and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2019), and a co-edited volume (with Inmaculada García-Sánchez):
Language and Cultural Processes in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (Routledge, 2019). She has also published in an interdisciplinary array of journals including
American Anthropologist,
Harvard Educational Review,
Social Problems,
Anthropology and Education Quarterly,
Reading Research Quarterly, and
Linguistics in Education. She is a past president of the Council of Anthropology and Education and was a bilingual classroom teacher in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993.
Lu Liu (
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2101-4586) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on language policy and planning, language socialization, and the ethnographic study of education, with a geographical focus on the US and China. She is particularly interested in family language policy and heritage language maintenance. She is the author of
“It’s Just Natural”: a Critical Case Study of Family Language Policy in a 1.5 Generation Chinese Immigrant Family on the West Coast of the United States (Springer, 2018), and co-author of
Ethnography of Language Policy (Springer, 2017), and
Ethnography in Research on Language Contact (De Gruyter, 2019). Before immigrating to the US, she was an English teacher in Beijing, China.
Sophia L. Ángeles (
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1407-2753) is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centers on how immigration and language policies shape the educational trajectories of high school immigrant youth. Before beginning her doctoral work, Sophia worked as a K-12 school counselor in North Carolina and California.