Donna Deyhle - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Donna Deyhle
Race Is … Race Isn’t, 2019
2 Critical Race Theory and Praxis: Chicano (a)/Latino (a) and Navajo Struggles for Dignity, Educa... more 2 Critical Race Theory and Praxis: Chicano (a)/Latino (a) and Navajo Struggles for Dignity, Educational Equity, and Social Justice SOFIA VILLENAS, DONNA DEYHLE, AND LAURENCE PARKER During the 1980s and 1990s, race-based scholarship generally was view- ed as a form of ...
Review of Research in Education, 1997
Those who have been involved in the formal education of Indians have assumed that the main purpos... more Those who have been involved in the formal education of Indians have assumed that the main purpose of the school is assimilation. The Indian would be better off, it was believed, if he could be induced, or forced, to adpot [sic] the white man's habits, skills, knowledge, language, ...
Reports an ethnographic study of testing as seen by Navajo students and their teachers
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 1986
This study presents an analysis of one event-break dancing-in an ongoing three-year study of soci... more This study presents an analysis of one event-break dancing-in an ongoing three-year study of social identification and interactions between Ute, Navajo, and Anglo students, their communities, and their high school. It presents one social group or clique, break dancers, in a larger, intertwined set of social interactions in the school and community. ln response to continual academic failure and social isolation, these Indian students turn to break dancing to express their uniqueness, facilitate intrayroup communication, create group identity, and achieve a kind of success in an otherwise indifferent or ne'qative school and community environment. SOClAL INTERACTION
Harvard Educational Review, 1995
In this article, Donna Deyhle presents the results of a decade-long ethnographic study of the liv... more In this article, Donna Deyhle presents the results of a decade-long ethnographic study of the lives, both in and out of school, of Navajo youth in a border reservation community. She describes the racial and cultural struggle between Navajos and Anglos and the manifestation of that struggle in schools and the workplace. While utilizing these theories' central insights, but then moves beyond them. While differences in culture play a role in the divisions between Anglos and Navajos, Deyhle asserts that these differences intertwine with power relations in the larger community, and that Navajo school success and failure are best understood as part of this process of racial conflict. Navajos, subjected to discrimination in the workplace and a vocationally centered assimilationist curriculum in schools, are more academically successful when they are more secure in their traditional culture. This study demonstrates that those students who embrace this life-affirming vision both gain a ...
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1987
... Karen Swisher ... Researchers such as Ramirez & Castañeda (1974) and Philips (1983) s... more ... Karen Swisher ... Researchers such as Ramirez & Castañeda (1974) and Philips (1983) suggested that the school culture was alien and often in conflict with the home culture, and that by creating a congruence between the school culture and the home culture, ethnic minority ...
Choice Reviews Online
Woven together in Donna Deyhle's ethnohistory are three generations and twenty-five years of ... more Woven together in Donna Deyhle's ethnohistory are three generations and twenty-five years of friendship, interviews, and rich experience with Navajo women. Through a skillful blending of sources, Deyhle illuminates the devastating cultural consequences of racial stereotyping in the context of education. Longstanding racial tension in southeastern Utah frames this cross-generational set of portraits that together depict all aspects of this specifically American Indian struggle. Deyhle cites the lefthanded compliment, Navajos work well with their hands, which she indicates represents the limiting and all-too-common appraisal of American Indian learning potential that she vehemently disputes and seeks to disprove. As a recognized authority on the subject, qualified by multiple degrees in racial and American Indian studies, Deyhle is able to chronicle the lives and 'survivance? of three Navajo women in a way that is simultaneously ethnographic and moving. Her critique of the U.S. education system's underlying yet very real tendency toward structural discrimination takes shape in elegant prose that moves freely into and out of time and place. The combination of substantive sources and touching personal experience forms a profound and enduring narrative of critical and current importance. While this book stands as a powerful contribution to American Indian studies, its compelling human elements will extend its appeal to anyone concerned with the ongoing plight of American Indians in the education system.
Journal of Anthropological Research
Journal of Educational Equity and Leadership, 1985
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, No part of this publication may be ... more All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in- cluding photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission ...
In this article, Villenas and Deyhle use the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine Latino... more In this article, Villenas and Deyhle use the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine Latino schooling and family education as portrayed in seven recent ethnographic studies. They argue that CRT provides a powerful tool to understand how the subordination and marginalization of people of color is created and maintained in the United States. The ethnographic studies of Latino education are filled with the stories and voices of Latino parents and youth. These stories and voices are the rich data by which a CRT lens can unveil and explain how and why "raced" children are overwhelmingly the recipients of low teacher expectations and are consequently tracked, placed in low-level classes and receive "dull and boring" curriculum. The voices of Latino parents reveal how despite the school rhetoric of parent involvement, parents are really "kept out" of schools by the negative ways in which they are treated, by insensitive bureaucratic requirements, and by the ways in which school-conceived parent involvement programs disregard Latino knowledge and cultural bases. Together these studies offer an insight into the schooling success and failure of Latino/a students within the context of the social construction of Latino/Mexicano as Other, played out in the anti-immigrant, xenophobic ambience of this country. Yet these studies also give powerful testimony to the cultural strengths and assets of Latino family education as a base by which new ways of schooling can be conceived. It is in fact when communities act as a collective, firmly rooted in their own language and culture, and gain economic and political power that families are able to make concrete changes. INTRODUCTION: THE LENS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY A child born in this country to Mexican parents, who have clawed their way out of abject poverty; whose native language is Spanish; who, despite textual illiteracy and
Qualitative or observational anaa'ysis was used in an all-Navajo Bureau of Indian Affairs day sch... more Qualitative or observational anaa'ysis was used in an all-Navajo Bureau of Indian Affairs day school of approximately 210 students, grades kindergarten thropgh eighth, to generate a descri'ption of the attitudes and peeptions surrounding tests and the process of learning about testinrgicamong tiavajo children. Primary
Narrative & Experience in Multicultural Education, 2005
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, 2008
Youth & Society, 1998
This article is about a small group of Navajo youth and the messages they expressed through both ... more This article is about a small group of Navajo youth and the messages they expressed through both break dancing and heavy metal. Their break-dancing performances spoke loudly against racial discrimination in their community and echoed the hope of achieving equity. Over their years in high school, they traded the optimistically rebellious music of break dancing for the somewhat fatalistic complaint music of heavy metal. The construction of these youth's identities is framed within a critique of the “living between two worlds” metaphor—the Indian world and the Anglo world—as a deficit model. The traditional world of their grandparents no longer exists, and, due to racism in the community, the Anglo world is not available to them. Instead, we need to look at the complex, conflictual world in which these youth live to make sense of their performances of resistance as expressed in their music choices.
Review of Research in Education, 1997
Race Is … Race Isn’t, 2019
2 Critical Race Theory and Praxis: Chicano (a)/Latino (a) and Navajo Struggles for Dignity, Educa... more 2 Critical Race Theory and Praxis: Chicano (a)/Latino (a) and Navajo Struggles for Dignity, Educational Equity, and Social Justice SOFIA VILLENAS, DONNA DEYHLE, AND LAURENCE PARKER During the 1980s and 1990s, race-based scholarship generally was view- ed as a form of ...
Review of Research in Education, 1997
Those who have been involved in the formal education of Indians have assumed that the main purpos... more Those who have been involved in the formal education of Indians have assumed that the main purpose of the school is assimilation. The Indian would be better off, it was believed, if he could be induced, or forced, to adpot [sic] the white man's habits, skills, knowledge, language, ...
Reports an ethnographic study of testing as seen by Navajo students and their teachers
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 1986
This study presents an analysis of one event-break dancing-in an ongoing three-year study of soci... more This study presents an analysis of one event-break dancing-in an ongoing three-year study of social identification and interactions between Ute, Navajo, and Anglo students, their communities, and their high school. It presents one social group or clique, break dancers, in a larger, intertwined set of social interactions in the school and community. ln response to continual academic failure and social isolation, these Indian students turn to break dancing to express their uniqueness, facilitate intrayroup communication, create group identity, and achieve a kind of success in an otherwise indifferent or ne'qative school and community environment. SOClAL INTERACTION
Harvard Educational Review, 1995
In this article, Donna Deyhle presents the results of a decade-long ethnographic study of the liv... more In this article, Donna Deyhle presents the results of a decade-long ethnographic study of the lives, both in and out of school, of Navajo youth in a border reservation community. She describes the racial and cultural struggle between Navajos and Anglos and the manifestation of that struggle in schools and the workplace. While utilizing these theories' central insights, but then moves beyond them. While differences in culture play a role in the divisions between Anglos and Navajos, Deyhle asserts that these differences intertwine with power relations in the larger community, and that Navajo school success and failure are best understood as part of this process of racial conflict. Navajos, subjected to discrimination in the workplace and a vocationally centered assimilationist curriculum in schools, are more academically successful when they are more secure in their traditional culture. This study demonstrates that those students who embrace this life-affirming vision both gain a ...
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1987
... Karen Swisher ... Researchers such as Ramirez & Castañeda (1974) and Philips (1983) s... more ... Karen Swisher ... Researchers such as Ramirez & Castañeda (1974) and Philips (1983) suggested that the school culture was alien and often in conflict with the home culture, and that by creating a congruence between the school culture and the home culture, ethnic minority ...
Choice Reviews Online
Woven together in Donna Deyhle's ethnohistory are three generations and twenty-five years of ... more Woven together in Donna Deyhle's ethnohistory are three generations and twenty-five years of friendship, interviews, and rich experience with Navajo women. Through a skillful blending of sources, Deyhle illuminates the devastating cultural consequences of racial stereotyping in the context of education. Longstanding racial tension in southeastern Utah frames this cross-generational set of portraits that together depict all aspects of this specifically American Indian struggle. Deyhle cites the lefthanded compliment, Navajos work well with their hands, which she indicates represents the limiting and all-too-common appraisal of American Indian learning potential that she vehemently disputes and seeks to disprove. As a recognized authority on the subject, qualified by multiple degrees in racial and American Indian studies, Deyhle is able to chronicle the lives and 'survivance? of three Navajo women in a way that is simultaneously ethnographic and moving. Her critique of the U.S. education system's underlying yet very real tendency toward structural discrimination takes shape in elegant prose that moves freely into and out of time and place. The combination of substantive sources and touching personal experience forms a profound and enduring narrative of critical and current importance. While this book stands as a powerful contribution to American Indian studies, its compelling human elements will extend its appeal to anyone concerned with the ongoing plight of American Indians in the education system.
Journal of Anthropological Research
Journal of Educational Equity and Leadership, 1985
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, No part of this publication may be ... more All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in- cluding photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission ...
In this article, Villenas and Deyhle use the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine Latino... more In this article, Villenas and Deyhle use the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine Latino schooling and family education as portrayed in seven recent ethnographic studies. They argue that CRT provides a powerful tool to understand how the subordination and marginalization of people of color is created and maintained in the United States. The ethnographic studies of Latino education are filled with the stories and voices of Latino parents and youth. These stories and voices are the rich data by which a CRT lens can unveil and explain how and why "raced" children are overwhelmingly the recipients of low teacher expectations and are consequently tracked, placed in low-level classes and receive "dull and boring" curriculum. The voices of Latino parents reveal how despite the school rhetoric of parent involvement, parents are really "kept out" of schools by the negative ways in which they are treated, by insensitive bureaucratic requirements, and by the ways in which school-conceived parent involvement programs disregard Latino knowledge and cultural bases. Together these studies offer an insight into the schooling success and failure of Latino/a students within the context of the social construction of Latino/Mexicano as Other, played out in the anti-immigrant, xenophobic ambience of this country. Yet these studies also give powerful testimony to the cultural strengths and assets of Latino family education as a base by which new ways of schooling can be conceived. It is in fact when communities act as a collective, firmly rooted in their own language and culture, and gain economic and political power that families are able to make concrete changes. INTRODUCTION: THE LENS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY A child born in this country to Mexican parents, who have clawed their way out of abject poverty; whose native language is Spanish; who, despite textual illiteracy and
Qualitative or observational anaa'ysis was used in an all-Navajo Bureau of Indian Affairs day sch... more Qualitative or observational anaa'ysis was used in an all-Navajo Bureau of Indian Affairs day school of approximately 210 students, grades kindergarten thropgh eighth, to generate a descri'ption of the attitudes and peeptions surrounding tests and the process of learning about testinrgicamong tiavajo children. Primary
Narrative & Experience in Multicultural Education, 2005
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, 2008
Youth & Society, 1998
This article is about a small group of Navajo youth and the messages they expressed through both ... more This article is about a small group of Navajo youth and the messages they expressed through both break dancing and heavy metal. Their break-dancing performances spoke loudly against racial discrimination in their community and echoed the hope of achieving equity. Over their years in high school, they traded the optimistically rebellious music of break dancing for the somewhat fatalistic complaint music of heavy metal. The construction of these youth's identities is framed within a critique of the “living between two worlds” metaphor—the Indian world and the Anglo world—as a deficit model. The traditional world of their grandparents no longer exists, and, due to racism in the community, the Anglo world is not available to them. Instead, we need to look at the complex, conflictual world in which these youth live to make sense of their performances of resistance as expressed in their music choices.
Review of Research in Education, 1997