My advisee Sirad Shirdon has been awarded a scholarship from the Dr. Charles R. Hancock Graduate Scholarship Fund in Urban Education. She will use the scholarship for her research on Kindergarten readiness among Somali children in Central Ohio. Sirad plans to take an ethnographically informed approach to the study of parent, school, and community understandings of Kindergarten readiness and how these understandings are enacted in practice. This study will build on Sirad’s work on my longitudinal study of language and literacy socialization and development among Somali immigrant-refugee children in the early elementary grades.
schooling
AAA Panel on Language and the Immigrant Experience of Children and Youth
I just participated in a double panel, ‘Language and the Immigrant Experience of Children and Youth’ at the 2013 Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Organized by Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez (Temple University) and sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the panel brought together language ethnographers to examine the experiences of immigrant children and youth (Somali, North African, Vietnamese, indigenous Mayans, Romanians, Turkish, Iranian, Mexican) in an integrated fashion and in a number of cross-cultural settings. My paper “Making African storybooks culturally relevant and culturally marked in a Kindergarten classroom in a Somali-centric school” examines the use in read alouds of storybooks that depict Africa and Africans in Kindergarten in a charter school that serves primarily the children of Somali refugees who have resettled in a large US midwestern city.
Language socialization and the future of Anthropology of Education
Teachers College Columbia is hosting a conference On the Future of Anthropology in Schools of Education this coming weekend, October 18 and 19. With Patricia Baquedano-López (UC Berkeley), Inmaculada García Sanchez (Temple), Kathryn Howard (California State University, San Bernardino), and Laura Sterponi (UC Berkeley), I have co-authored a paper, “Exploring the intersection of language socialization research and the anthropology of education”. Our paper is part of the session ‘Open Roads: Renewed Possibilities‘ (beginning at 0:36:40).
Keynote at OSU Mansfield Diversity Conference
On Saturday, April 13, 2013, The Ohio State University at Mansfield and the Office of Multicultural Affairs hosts its one-day conference “Empowering and Engaging Diverse Perspectives: A P-16 Approach” to encourage discussion and critical thinking on issues of diversity and inclusion in the P-16 educational pipeline. The morning keynote speaker is Dr. Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project. I am the afternoon keynote speaker, and my talk is ‘Expanding repertoires of practice: Educational experiences of children in the Somali Diaspora’.
Work-in-progress session at NCTEAR 2013
OSU hosts NCTEAR this year. My Second Language and Literacy Lab (SL3) group have a work-in-progress session on Saturday, February 16, 1:45-3:15 in Arps 100. In our session, ‘Multiple Perspectives on Talk around Storybook Read-alouds in a Kindergarten Classroom’, we discuss our collaborative work on 23 read alouds 
recorded in a Kindergarten classroom in a charter school that serves primarily the children of Somali refugees who have resettled in Central Ohio. Sirad Shirdon, Se Jeong Yang, Tanti Sari, and Ani Pujiastuti will present their analyses, each having taken a different analytic approach to the read aloud data. We will then discuss our efforts to integrate these different insights into read alouds as key sites for constructing meaning and developing cultural/linguistic minority children’s familiarity and facility with English language and literacy practices.
OSU minor in Somali language & culture
OSU offers an undergraduate minor in Somali language and culture. For more information about the Somali language program at OSU, please contact Jibril Mohamed or Mohammed Omer at (614)292-0758 or by e-mail at Mohamed.196@osu.edu.
Somali heritage language classes in Minneapolis public school
A high school in the Minneapolis public school system has begun offering Somali heritage language classes, likely the first public school in the U.S. to do so. At South High School, where the Somali classes are offered, nearly 60 students are registered in two class periods, one that focuses on Somali language and another on culture. Check out the story on CBS and Hiraan.
Somali Studies for Educators at SSIA 2012
The Somali Studies for Educators project (teacher workshop, DVDs, website) was presented on October 11th at the Somali Studies International Association Congress 2012 in Lillehammer, Norway. The presentation ‘The Somali Studies for Educators Project at the Ohio State University’ was made by Sirad Shirdon on behalf of Laura Joseph and me. Sirad also presented her own paper, ‘The Educational Experiences of Urban Somali Refugee Children in Kenya’, as part of the same panel, Education: Who? How? Where?’
Learning In and Out of School: Education across the Globe
May 22 and 23 I will be at the University of Notre Dame for a working conference, Learning In and Out of School: Education across the Globe, organized by Professor Susan Blum. The conference centers on one question: what can we learn about the range of human learning, in schools and out of schools, at various ages, that has significant effects on individual and social well-being? We will address both theory – exploring what educational practices reveal about the nature of humankind – and practice – identifying applications that may improve the everyday learning of children and adults. Participants include scholars and practitioners who focus on societies around the world. We will look at the issues of schooling – or not schooling – from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. My working paper is ‘Double schooling in northern Cameroon and Central Ohio’.
Somali Studies for Educators website is live!
At long last, the Somali Studies for Educators website went live in late February. The site grew out of a 2009 teachers’ workshop held in Columbus, Ohio, which was initiated by The Ohio State University. Somali Studies for Educators offers many resources, including workshop syllabi, a growing list of online resources, and selected video clips from the 2009 workshop. These clips are organized into themes: identity, arts, family, education, language, and global cross-currents. We are still cleaning up a bit after the site’s migration from the development server, so please forgive any glitches.