Harvard Educational Review
  1. Fall 2022 Issue »

    “Reinventing Ourselves” and Reimagining Education

    Everyday Learning and Life Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Lu Liu, and Sophia L. Ángeles
    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.

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    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.
  2. Fall 2022 Issue

    Abstracts

    A Face for My Autobiography
    Lucy Grealy and Embodied Vulnerability
    Andrea Avery

    Book Notes

    The Doctoral Journey as an Emotional, Embodied, Political Experience
    Edited by Rebecca (Bex) Twinley and Gayle Letherby

    Memory in the Mekong
    Edited by Will Brehm and Yuto Kitamura

    Willful Defiance
    Mark R. Warren

    Queer Data
    Kevin Guyan

    All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep
    Andre Henry