Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D.

teacher, researcher, life-long learner

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How can we get out of our bubbles?

June 8, 2017 By Lisa Dorner

This morning, I was listening to NPR, and I heard a story about how one young man decided to get out of his same old bubble. He built an app that used publicly-listed Facebook events to randomly choose new places for him to go — to get him out of that bubble. Attending random events, he made new friends and had various opportunities to view the world from new perspectives.

So how might we help develop similar bubble-popping experiences for young people? I believe that schools like the St. Louis Language Immersion School (SLLIS) can and do help children view the world in new ways. SLLIS has integration as one of its core values: integration across race, income level, language background, immigrant status, and more. The school immerses children in new perspectives, quite literally, by teaching students all of the typical subject areas using a language other than English. For most students at the school, English is their first and only language, but the school also attracts many children from multilingual households.

How else might schools pop bubbles? We cannot just put people together in the same room to explore new perspectives; we have to talk, think, and write about such experiences. In the spring of 2017, the Quality Teachers for English Learners project led by Dr. Kim Song supported a series of family literacy events at SLLIS. I participated in these events as both a leader and a participant with my daughter. Our goal was to work with families to support them sharing their stories, as one more way to “pop some bubbles” and learn from others. I’m thrilled to share the pre-press version of my daughter’s book, in which she documents how her school has opened her eyes to an Outside World.

Filed Under: Immersion Education, Research - Publications

Research Team Studies Policymaking Across Missouri

December 7, 2016 By Lisa Dorner

teamphoto-2016

Hello from my friends and research team! From 2015-2016, this dedicated group of scholars at the University of Missouri, Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis, has worked on a project called: “School Board Members and Policymaking in Changing Communities.” Despite all the talk about federal education programs and state-mandated tests in the news, education in the U.S. is still largely locally determined, with school boards serving as the principal policymaking bodies (Hess, 2002). While recent research suggests that school boards may help to establish policies that attend to diverse communities, we know little about how board members come to understand demographic change and make policies that respond to it (Turner, 2015). What ideas, conversations, and processes lead up to their decision-making? As the U.S. experiences its greatest immigration since the turn of the 20th century (Massey, 2008), we asked: (1) What do board members in rural, suburban, and urban Missouri know about immigration, English Learners (ELs), and EL program options? (2) What are their beliefs about immigrants, ELs, and language learning? (3) How do their contexts shape their knowledge, beliefs, and decision-making? These questions seem ever more important, as schools struggle to address concerns facing immigrant communities in our current, uncertain times. 

To date, we have developed a brief overview of findings that may be helpful for our local organizations that provide training to school boards (School Board Members and Policymaking). In addition, we are preparing multiple papers from this work and will present them at this year’s AERA conference in San Antonio — see you there! 

Filed Under: Educational Policy, Research - Publications

MODLAN Website is Live

December 20, 2015 By Lisa Dorner

modlan.org

The Missouri Dual Language Network is proud to announce its new website: www.modlan.org! Check back often to find resources for (and about) the growing number of dual language, bilingual schools, training, and opportunities across our state. We are also proud to be partnering with the Cambio Center at the University of Missouri to write a series of “e-briefs” about dual language education. Here’s to supporting the development of a multilingual, integrated citizenry in 2016!

Filed Under: Immersion Education, Research - Publications

Research with Children

March 20, 2015 By Lisa Dorner

Madison01

“The more one is in a position to make decisions for children, to speak on their behalf, the more one is able to silence their voices.” (Lee, 2001, p. 10)

For 18 months in the early 2000s, I ‘hung out’ with elementary-aged children from six Mexican immigrant families; we did homework together, played with younger siblings, drew pictures, and created imaginary games. (In formal research terms, I designed an ethnography and used participant observation techniques informed by the social science of childhoods and scholars like Allison James, Alan Prout, and Marjorie Faulstich Orellana.) I wanted to explore how young kids understood a new language education program being developed and implemented in their school district. I believed that children served as cultural brokers for their families, possibly shaping how their parents understood and made choices about the new program.

As I published the results of the study, however, I found that I relied heavily upon my conversations with adults, field notes from adult-centric interactions and meetings, and interview transcripts. I generally neglected most of the data that I collected with youth, and thus, inadvertently silenced their voices. I reflect upon the entire process and re-analyze data from youth to explore questions of ethics in doing research with children and young people. The results of my reflections are in this newly published piece, “From Relating to (Re)Presenting: Challenges and Lessons Learned from an Ethnographic Study with Young Children,” qix.sagepub.com/content/21/4/354.abstract. I welcome your ideas and feedback on this!

Filed Under: Childhoods Research, language policy, Research - Publications

Blurring Boundaries

October 19, 2014 By Lisa Dorner

Screen Shot 2014-10-18 at 9.06.39 PMIn 2009 and 2010, colleagues from St. Louis University and I worked with the Missouri Immigrant and Refugee Advocates (MIRA) to collect data that would help them develop a “Welcoming Initiative.” They wanted to understand what U.S.-born individuals thought about immigration and immigrants, so they could do outreach that would really reach people, and ultimately, develop neighborhoods and communities that were welcoming to all residents. As I contemplate the recent protests in St. Louis (where I live), I think about what I personally learned from that research project. In this extended piece, I share some thoughts about the importance of blurring boundaries and setting up situations that are designed for us to do so.

In our work with MIRA, I was responsible for interviewing U.S.-born adults from all walks of life: individuals that identified as younger, older, upper-middle-class, working-class, high-school drop-out, college graduate, African-American, Black, White, Republican, Independent, Democrat, and everything in between. We interviewed 27 people about their everyday contact with immigrants, what they thought about current policy proposals, and what they knew about the process of gaining citizenship. We asked for their opinions on keeping the borders “opened” or “closed” and on immigrants’ contributions to society.

As I analyzed our interview transcripts, I became less interested in what people believed or said about immigrants and more interested in how they answered our questions. In the space of one interview, which usually lasted between 20 and 60 minutes, I read answers that suggested people very much respected (and liked!) their friend or colleague who was an immigrant, but they supported policies that might profile or negatively impact the life of that very same friend. Others did not even realize that they regularly interacted with people who weren’t born in the United States. For example, in an interview that I completed with someone that I knew, I asked: “What’s your contact with immigrants, monthly, weekly, daily?” He replied something like: “Not much, maybe monthly,” at which point I said: “But, wait, doesn’t your daughter go to a preschool where the director is from Mexico?” “Oh, right,” he acknowledged, “so the answer is almost daily.” In another interview, a respondent described his Chinese friends who owned a restaurant as very “hard workers.” Later in the interview, when asked to compare prior generations of immigrants with current-day migrants, he stated that the ones from the early 20th century were much more hard-working than the lazier immigrants of today.

So, what do such responses tell us, and what does this have to do with the idea of blurring boundaries?

Sociologists, such as Michèle Lamont, have long been interested in the ways that individuals create and define groups, or how we envision the boundaries between ourselves and others. Drawing from research in cognitive science, scholars like Douglas Massey (2007) have explained that our memories are incomplete, so we unconsciously rely upon short-cuts or “schemas.” Drawing on these schemas, then, which may be shaped by negative images from the media or family stories, we often assess people outside of our own group in negative terms. Some have suggested that “contact” among people who view themselves as different will improve these negative opinions we have of “different” people. (Oft-cited for this perspective is Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 1954). But the results from our interviews suggest otherwise. Individuals who had daily or regular contact with single individuals that they respected did not immediately report more positive thinking or welcoming attitudes toward the group they thought of as “immigrants.” Instead, it appeared that when a particular immigrant became known to one of our respondents, he or she wasn’t in the perceiver’s category of “immigrant” any more. In other words, the individual moved from the immigrant schema to the friend or colleague category. This suggests that contact alone cannot improve perceptions of an ‘out-group.’

What was most striking to me was that these disjointed perspectives were expressed within a short 20-60 minute conversation! This underscores the range of unconscious biases that guide our daily choices and interactions. The question for me is: how can we blur the boundaries that we often draw to recognize and acknowledge both the differences as well as the shared experiences and identities?

I think that we must start by acknowledging that we make snap judgments about “groups” of people that are not accurate. In any group, there are a wide variety of beliefs, experiences, histories, and identities. Thinking about the recent protests that occurred after the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager in St. Louis, this means that each group under intense scrutiny here—from young Black men, to protestors, to the police—is made of individuals who have various perspectives, goals, and motivations. When we read a news story or catch a video clip online, we must remember those reports and pictures are but one slice of a situation. Whatever we are watching or reading must not define all police officers or an entire generation of young people for us. It is far more likely that within that group, around which we have drawn an unconscious ‘boundary’ because we see ‘them’ as different from ‘us,’ there is someone who thinks like us, has a mom like ours, and has similar hopes for his/her children.

Perhaps most important, we must recognize that contact with others is helpful, certainly, but not sufficient to blur these boundaries. Individuals in our study seemed to separate their immigrant friend or teacher from a more nebulous, symbolic group; they did not seem to consider that their friend or teacher was (or may have been) part of the group that they sometimes discussed as illegal, unethical, and/or undeserving of U.S. freedoms. What might this mean for the recent police shootings and protests in St. Louis? Well, if the Ferguson police department has a few Black police officers, it doesn’t mean that each member of the force then understands the Black community members that they serve. In some ways, those Black police officers may be assessed through a “friend” or “colleague” category/schema, rather than one that links them to the community being served. Likewise, if a few of the protestors have a family member in law enforcement, it doesn’t mean that they assess the local police in the same way that they assess their family; it doesn’t mean that they understand the complex task of protecting one’s right to peaceful assembly at the same time as protecting others’ property.

And, I think it means this: Because contact alone doesn’t lead to understanding, we must find additional ways to build bridges and blur boundaries. Continued conversations with people that we view as ‘different’ is one step in the right direction. Let’s challenge our own notions; every time we hear ourselves think, but “X group of people did Y,” let’s consider if we know anyone in that X group, and what would s/he think if we made some claim about that group? Let’s get off of the internet and go out into our community to meet and talk directly with others. Let’s advocate for integrated public education that not only integrates, but also challenges students to think about and with others. Rather than sharpening the (symbolic) boundaries that divide us, I challenge us all to recognize the diversity within groups, and then find ways to blur our boundaries and find common ground.

Filed Under: Immigration - Immigrants, Research - Publications

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Research Areas

  • Language Policy & Planning
  • Educational Policy Implementation
  • Immigrant Integration
  • Program Evaluation

Research Projects

  • Families & Two-Way Immersion
  • Creating One-Way Immersion
  • Language Brokering

Partners

  • Organizations
  • Research Teams