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Marjorie Elaine

UCLA Graduate School of Education, Education Urban Schooling, Faculty Member

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Marjorie Elaine (formerly Marjorie Faulstich Orellana) is Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute at UCLA. Her research centers on the experiences of immigrant youth in urban schools and communities, including as language and cultural brokers for their families. 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, 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 was a bilingual classroom teacher in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993.
Address: Box 951521 Moore Hall
UCLA
LA CA 90095-1521

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Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

The University of Texas at Austin

Marlen Harrison

University of Jyväskylä

Michel Alhadeff-Jones

Columbia University

Kansas State University

Donna Alvermann

The University of Georgia

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

University of British Columbia

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Papers by Marjorie Elaine

Connecting mind, heart, culture and activity in an undergraduate service-learning course Angeles et al

Mind, Culture and Activity, 2023

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice - or mind, heart, culture and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction, about undergraduates' experiences in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. We draw implications for how undergraduate education can better foster students' ability to engage with theory in support of transformative educational practice

RTE On Epistemology Elaine

Negotiating Power Through Language in Classroom Meetings

Linguistics and Education, 1996

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of two problem-posing meetings in an urban, b... more This article presents a critical discourse analysis of two problem-posing meetings in an urban, bilingual, elementary school classroom. Part of a larger ethnography exploring language and literacy practices across a range of activity settings, this study centers on ways in which power is manifested, shaped, contested and negotiated by students and their teacher in a setting that was designed to transform traditional classroom relations. In the first meeting, power struggles between students are probed (the teacher did not participate in the meeting); in the second meeting, contradictory tensions that shape the teacher's participation are explored as part of the group dynamics. Implications for theory as well as for critical practice are considered.

New Immigrant Youth Interpreting in Whit

Bilingual children are frequently called on to use their linguistic and communicative virtuosity ... more Bilingual children are frequently called on to use their linguistic and communicative virtuosity to interpret for monolingual speakers. In this article, we theorize child interpreters' positionalities within the interstices of several borderlands: as children; as interpreters and translators interpreting different languages, registers, and discourses; and as immigrants seeking services within white public space. We analyze how youths are positioned to provide service and surveillance within overdetermined interpreter-mediated practices. In examining these practices, we raise to consciousness some of the social and ideological conditions that circumscribe working-class Latino/a and new Mexican immigrant children within inherently unequal subject positions.

A day in the life of a language broker

What Mexican Teachers Need to Know about 'Educación Básica' in the United States, 2022

In this chapter, intended for an audience of teachers, we tell the story of a day in the life of ... more In this chapter, intended for an audience of teachers, we tell the story of a day in the life of a child of immigrants in Los Angeles, as she moves through her day and brokers between Spanish and English for others. This is a composite portrait based on ethnographic research with immigrant child language brokers in many different contexts.

Connecting mind, heart, culture and activity in an undergraduate service-learning course

Mind, Culture, and Activity

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice – or mind, heart, culture, and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. Students attended seminars at the university where they read and engaged with theory together, and then worked and played with youth in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. They wrote field notes about their experiences, to which the instructional team read and responded. Building on prior work by García-Romero and Martínez-Lozano (2022), we show how these field notes functioned as mediational devices to connect theory and practice and to deepen students’ reflective stances. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction. Moreover, we draw implications for undergraduate education that seeks to bridge the theory-practice divide and to better integrate mind, heart, culture, and activity for transformative educational practice. We suggest how students’ animated, relational, connected, heart-felt, embodied engagement with children at the club and with each other was important for their willingness to engage with theory as well as to their ways of understanding it, with the aim of contributing to debates about the role of theory in transformative action in the world (e.g., Somekh &amp; Nissen, 2011).

Solidarity, Transculturality, Educational Anthropology, and (the Modest Goal of) Transforming the World

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2017

This essay originated as the Council of Anthropology and Education presidential address, delivere... more This essay originated as the Council of Anthropology and Education presidential address, delivered at the CAE Business meeting in the fall of 2015. I found myself completing revisions of it in fall 2016, in the days following the U.S. presidential election. The essay explores two constructs that I have pondered in different ways, both in my current work as an applied educational anthropologist (of sorts), and some thirty years ago, when I identified principally as an activist and a teacher. These twin constructs-transculturality and solidarity-take on new urgency in the current polarized political climate. I am honored to have six esteemed colleagues as respondents who will extend the conversation. Transculturality First, let me unpack the notion of transculturality. As anthropologists who take a processual view of culture (González, 2005), some might wonder at the idea of putting "trans" in front of the word that is at the heart of our field. There are similar debates among sociolinguists about the notion of "translanguaging." (See for example Garcia & Wei, 2013.) Isn't it just the nature of culture, and language, to change over time-to ignore the borders that people construct and defend? Aren't we just talking about culture, and language?

Re-interpreting: Narratives of childhood language brokering over time

Childhood (Copenhagen, Denmark), 2017

This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challe... more This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challenges the unwitting and unintentional reproduction of an adult-child binary in childhood studies. We do this by analyzing interviews with one adult daughter of immigrants from Mexico to the United States at four points in time (ages 19, 26, 27, and 33). Using narrative analysis to examine the mutability of memory, we consider how Eva oriented herself to her childhood story, what was salient and invisible in each recount, the values she associated with the practice, and the meanings she took from her experiences. We show how Eva re-interpreted her experiences as an immigrant child language broker in relation to unfolding life events, showing her childhood to be very much alive in her adult life. Language brokering serves as one way in which to examine the interpenetration of childhood into adulthood, rather than being the focus per se.

Cultivating linguistic flexibility in contexts of super-diversity

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2016

In this article we embrace the call that Flores and Lewis (this issue) put forth for situating re... more In this article we embrace the call that Flores and Lewis (this issue) put forth for situating research on linguistic “super-diversity” within particular historical, cultural and social contexts, challenging monolingual norms, and acknowledging ideological forces that drive the “sociopolitical emergence” of particular language practices. Using ethnographic and audiotaped data, we explore emergent linguistic practices in an after-school program in Los Angeles that in important ways both mimics and amplifies the diverse migration flows that characterize super-diversity. Focusing on linguistic interactions in this site, we question the tendency in research on super-diversity to celebrate translingual practices without consideration of power relations, including locally specific ideologies of language as manifested in both explicit and implicit forms. We examine linguistic practices that emerged and took shape as new members entered our space, identifying translingual and transcultural ...

Adult narratives of childhood language brokering: Learning what it means to be bilingual

Children & Society, 2021

This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering ... more This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering involved not only learning how to translate/interpret language for others, but also understanding the meaning that Spanish and English assumed in society and the ways in which she and her parents were socially positioned. Language brokering was both psychosocial and agentic. The participant had to align her respect for, and protectiveness of, her parents with the disrespect and harsh judgement she sensed from those with whom they sought to communicate in various sites. The paper illuminates the complexity of the processes of developing multilingual practices and identities in their intersectional and relational multisitedness.

Introduction to Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research

Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research, Nov 5, 2019

This is the introduction to the book.

Being there Again, Now

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Mindful Ethnography

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Getting in and Along

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Conceptual Framings

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Re-presentations

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Letting Go

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Entering the Field with Open Hearts and Minds

Mindful Ethnography, 2019

With love and respect for young people: Learning with and from Barrie Thorne in the ethnography of childhoods In Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism (2023) Edited by Freeden Blume Oer and

Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism , 2023

Connecting Mind, Heart, Culture and Activity in an Undergraduate Service-Learning

Mind, Culture and Activity, 2023

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice – or mind, heart, culture, and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. Students attended seminars at the university where they read and engaged with theory together, and then worked and played with youth in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. They wrote field notes about their experiences, to which the instructional team read and responded. Building on prior work by García-Romero and Martínez-Lozano (2022), we show how these field notes functioned as mediational devices to connect theory and practice and to deepen students’ reflective stances. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction. Moreover, we draw implications for undergraduate education that seeks to bridge the theory-practice divide and to better integrate mind, heart, culture, and activity for transformative educational practice. We suggest how students’ animated, relational, connected, heart-felt, embodied engagement with children at the club and with each other was important for their willingness to engage with theory as well as to their ways of understanding it, with the aim of contributing to debates about the role of theory in transformative action in the world (e.g., Somekh & Nissen, 2011).

Connecting mind, heart, culture and activity in an undergraduate service-learning course Angeles et al

Mind, Culture and Activity, 2023

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice - or mind, heart, culture and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction, about undergraduates' experiences in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. We draw implications for how undergraduate education can better foster students' ability to engage with theory in support of transformative educational practice

RTE On Epistemology Elaine

Negotiating Power Through Language in Classroom Meetings

Linguistics and Education, 1996

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of two problem-posing meetings in an urban, b... more This article presents a critical discourse analysis of two problem-posing meetings in an urban, bilingual, elementary school classroom. Part of a larger ethnography exploring language and literacy practices across a range of activity settings, this study centers on ways in which power is manifested, shaped, contested and negotiated by students and their teacher in a setting that was designed to transform traditional classroom relations. In the first meeting, power struggles between students are probed (the teacher did not participate in the meeting); in the second meeting, contradictory tensions that shape the teacher's participation are explored as part of the group dynamics. Implications for theory as well as for critical practice are considered.

New Immigrant Youth Interpreting in Whit

Bilingual children are frequently called on to use their linguistic and communicative virtuosity ... more Bilingual children are frequently called on to use their linguistic and communicative virtuosity to interpret for monolingual speakers. In this article, we theorize child interpreters' positionalities within the interstices of several borderlands: as children; as interpreters and translators interpreting different languages, registers, and discourses; and as immigrants seeking services within white public space. We analyze how youths are positioned to provide service and surveillance within overdetermined interpreter-mediated practices. In examining these practices, we raise to consciousness some of the social and ideological conditions that circumscribe working-class Latino/a and new Mexican immigrant children within inherently unequal subject positions.

A day in the life of a language broker

What Mexican Teachers Need to Know about 'Educación Básica' in the United States, 2022

In this chapter, intended for an audience of teachers, we tell the story of a day in the life of ... more In this chapter, intended for an audience of teachers, we tell the story of a day in the life of a child of immigrants in Los Angeles, as she moves through her day and brokers between Spanish and English for others. This is a composite portrait based on ethnographic research with immigrant child language brokers in many different contexts.

Connecting mind, heart, culture and activity in an undergraduate service-learning course

Mind, Culture, and Activity

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice – or mind, heart, culture, and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. Students attended seminars at the university where they read and engaged with theory together, and then worked and played with youth in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. They wrote field notes about their experiences, to which the instructional team read and responded. Building on prior work by García-Romero and Martínez-Lozano (2022), we show how these field notes functioned as mediational devices to connect theory and practice and to deepen students’ reflective stances. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction. Moreover, we draw implications for undergraduate education that seeks to bridge the theory-practice divide and to better integrate mind, heart, culture, and activity for transformative educational practice. We suggest how students’ animated, relational, connected, heart-felt, embodied engagement with children at the club and with each other was important for their willingness to engage with theory as well as to their ways of understanding it, with the aim of contributing to debates about the role of theory in transformative action in the world (e.g., Somekh &amp; Nissen, 2011).

Solidarity, Transculturality, Educational Anthropology, and (the Modest Goal of) Transforming the World

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2017

This essay originated as the Council of Anthropology and Education presidential address, delivere... more This essay originated as the Council of Anthropology and Education presidential address, delivered at the CAE Business meeting in the fall of 2015. I found myself completing revisions of it in fall 2016, in the days following the U.S. presidential election. The essay explores two constructs that I have pondered in different ways, both in my current work as an applied educational anthropologist (of sorts), and some thirty years ago, when I identified principally as an activist and a teacher. These twin constructs-transculturality and solidarity-take on new urgency in the current polarized political climate. I am honored to have six esteemed colleagues as respondents who will extend the conversation. Transculturality First, let me unpack the notion of transculturality. As anthropologists who take a processual view of culture (González, 2005), some might wonder at the idea of putting "trans" in front of the word that is at the heart of our field. There are similar debates among sociolinguists about the notion of "translanguaging." (See for example Garcia & Wei, 2013.) Isn't it just the nature of culture, and language, to change over time-to ignore the borders that people construct and defend? Aren't we just talking about culture, and language?

Re-interpreting: Narratives of childhood language brokering over time

Childhood (Copenhagen, Denmark), 2017

This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challe... more This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challenges the unwitting and unintentional reproduction of an adult-child binary in childhood studies. We do this by analyzing interviews with one adult daughter of immigrants from Mexico to the United States at four points in time (ages 19, 26, 27, and 33). Using narrative analysis to examine the mutability of memory, we consider how Eva oriented herself to her childhood story, what was salient and invisible in each recount, the values she associated with the practice, and the meanings she took from her experiences. We show how Eva re-interpreted her experiences as an immigrant child language broker in relation to unfolding life events, showing her childhood to be very much alive in her adult life. Language brokering serves as one way in which to examine the interpenetration of childhood into adulthood, rather than being the focus per se.

Cultivating linguistic flexibility in contexts of super-diversity

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2016

In this article we embrace the call that Flores and Lewis (this issue) put forth for situating re... more In this article we embrace the call that Flores and Lewis (this issue) put forth for situating research on linguistic “super-diversity” within particular historical, cultural and social contexts, challenging monolingual norms, and acknowledging ideological forces that drive the “sociopolitical emergence” of particular language practices. Using ethnographic and audiotaped data, we explore emergent linguistic practices in an after-school program in Los Angeles that in important ways both mimics and amplifies the diverse migration flows that characterize super-diversity. Focusing on linguistic interactions in this site, we question the tendency in research on super-diversity to celebrate translingual practices without consideration of power relations, including locally specific ideologies of language as manifested in both explicit and implicit forms. We examine linguistic practices that emerged and took shape as new members entered our space, identifying translingual and transcultural ...

Adult narratives of childhood language brokering: Learning what it means to be bilingual

Children & Society, 2021

This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering ... more This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering involved not only learning how to translate/interpret language for others, but also understanding the meaning that Spanish and English assumed in society and the ways in which she and her parents were socially positioned. Language brokering was both psychosocial and agentic. The participant had to align her respect for, and protectiveness of, her parents with the disrespect and harsh judgement she sensed from those with whom they sought to communicate in various sites. The paper illuminates the complexity of the processes of developing multilingual practices and identities in their intersectional and relational multisitedness.

Introduction to Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research

Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research, Nov 5, 2019

This is the introduction to the book.

Being there Again, Now

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Mindful Ethnography

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Getting in and Along

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Conceptual Framings

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Re-presentations

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Letting Go

Routledge eBooks, Nov 5, 2019

Entering the Field with Open Hearts and Minds

Mindful Ethnography, 2019

With love and respect for young people: Learning with and from Barrie Thorne in the ethnography of childhoods In Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism (2023) Edited by Freeden Blume Oer and

Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism , 2023

Connecting Mind, Heart, Culture and Activity in an Undergraduate Service-Learning

Mind, Culture and Activity, 2023

This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational t... more This manuscript reports on an educational project that was designed to closely link educational theory and practice – or mind, heart, culture, and activity - in a community-engagement course on sociocultural learning theory and ethnographic research. Students attended seminars at the university where they read and engaged with theory together, and then worked and played with youth in an after-school program at an urban elementary school. They wrote field notes about their experiences, to which the instructional team read and responded. Building on prior work by García-Romero and Martínez-Lozano (2022), we show how these field notes functioned as mediational devices to connect theory and practice and to deepen students’ reflective stances. We identify patterned ways in how students connected theory and practice as revealed through an analysis of field notes written across three quarters of instruction. Moreover, we draw implications for undergraduate education that seeks to bridge the theory-practice divide and to better integrate mind, heart, culture, and activity for transformative educational practice. We suggest how students’ animated, relational, connected, heart-felt, embodied engagement with children at the club and with each other was important for their willingness to engage with theory as well as to their ways of understanding it, with the aim of contributing to debates about the role of theory in transformative action in the world (e.g., Somekh & Nissen, 2011).

With love and respect for young people: Learning with and from Barrie Thorne in the ethnography of childhoods In Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism (2023) Edited by Freeden Blume Oer and

Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism , 2023

In the spring of 1993, around the time when Gender Play was published, I was the mother of a five... more In the spring of 1993, around the time when Gender Play was published, I was the mother of a five-year-old, a teacher by day, and a doctoral student in education at the University of Southern California at night. Required to take cognate courses outside my department, I stumbled onto a class, The Sociology of Sex and Gender, taught by Barrie Thorne. I remember walking across campus into a classroom that looked and felt different than any I had ever learned in. There was food to share, a circle of chairs to sit in, and a stack of books (not just a reader) that we would devour that semester. One was Gender Play. Meeting Barrie changed my life. So, too, did reading her book. I was introduced to the idea that both gender and childhood were social constructs. I learned grounded ethnographic approaches to study how they are constructed, and how those constructions matter in the social world. And I was mentored into a way of doing/being academia that was profoundly humanizing: for myself and for the young "subjects" of our research. In this essay, I discuss Barrie's influence on how I came to study aspects of social life that are so often hidden from view by the "adult ideological viewpoint" (Speier 1976) that prevails in the research world, and of conducting research with young people. I show Barrie's influence on my own pathway into and through academia, and on future generations, as I, like many others, have tried to "pay forward" the support and guidance we received from her. Barrie's influence has been broad and generative, both through her scholarship and through the hearts and minds she touched as a teacher, mentor, feminist, scholar and human being. Conceptualizing gender, children and childhoods Beyond binaries Barrie's ways of conceptualizing gender and educational research with young people profoundly shaped my dissertation research. As a classroom teacher and doctoral student in education, I had been planning to study literacy practices in two primary-grade bilingual publicschool classrooms. I was interested in how young children become bilingual and biliterate, and how teachers and schools could support them. When I initially proposed to include attention to gender within this inquiry-as required by the certificate program I decided to complete, offered by the Center for the Study of Women and Men in Society (a program that Barrie helped forge)-faculty in the school of education suggested a kind of chi-square analysis. Put the two classrooms on one side of the square; boys and girls on the other, and analyze the "results" inside each box: a neat double binary leading to some kind proof of differences within and across the cells. Under Barrie's tutelage, I took a different approach. Eschewing gender as a duality, a variable, or a trait, located only in the bodies of readers and writers, I didn't ask about differences between girls and boys on literacy performance measures. Instead I asked how gender mattered in relation to young people's literacy learning. Connecting Barrie's work and other germinal texts in the sociology of gender that Barrie introduced to me (including, especially, Gender and Power by R. W. Connell, author of another chapter in this volume) with the ideas of feminist literacy researchers (e.g. Davies 1997; Walkerdine 1990), I asked how literacy shaped children's ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl. And how did the ideas about gender

Conceptual framings: Ethnography, epistemology, mindfulness and non-duality

Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research, 2017

Pre-press version of Chapter One of a now-published book

Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research

Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research, 2019

This is the pre-press version of the introduction to a book that has now been published.

Language and Cultural processes

Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-dominant Groups, 2019

This book examines how the everyday language practices and cultural funds of knowledge of youth f... more This book examines how the everyday language practices and cultural funds of knowledge of youth from non-dominant or minoritized groups can be used as center points for classroom learning in ways that help all students both to sustain and expand their cultural and linguistic repertoires while developing skills that are valued in formal schooling. Ideal for students and researchers in language education, literacy, and multicultural education, this book offers new, nuanced connections between culturally sustaining research and linguistic diversity and provides original teaching methods and practices to apply cultural practices as assets to learning in the disciplines.

In Other words: Learning from Bilingual Kids' Translating and Interpreting Experiences Aprendiendo de las Experiencias de Traducción e Interpretación de los Niños Bilingües

El traducir es "probablemente el tipo más complejo de acontecimiento que se haya producido en la ... more El traducir es "probablemente el tipo más complejo de acontecimiento que se haya producido en la evolución del cosmos." (Richards, 1953 Note: In this brochure we use the terms "translating" and "interpreting" to refer to the many ways in which bilingual children use their knowledge of two languages to read, write, listen, and speak for other people. Some researchers refer to this as "language brokering" or "natural translation." In some of our work, we use the term "para-phrasing" because we want to show how the skills that children use to move between two different languages can be used to support school literacy activities (for example, when teachers ask students to take something they have read and summarize it or "put it in their own words").