Translating Childhoods

Price: $22.95  

Subtitle: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture
Author: Marjorie Faulstich Orellana
Subject: Sociology, Anthropology
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4523-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4522-6
Pages: 224 pages
Publication Date: March 2008
Series: Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

Praise for Translating Childhoods

"This is one of the most important works on learning and development among immigrant children in the last decade. Orellana integrates a cognitive and developmental focus with deeply personal portraits that expand fundamentally our understanding of what counts as generative knowledge for academic learning."—Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University, author of Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind

"Translating Childhoods should be required reading for educators and future teachers. It provides a refreshing and important view of children as active contributors to communities and society."—Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Translating Childhoods, an important and pathbreaking contribution to the new sociology of childhood, provides lucid analysis and vivid ethnographic portraits of children as powerful social actors engaged in the invisible work of language brokering at home, in schools and in public spaces across an array of institutional domains where their skills matter."—Marjorie Harness Goodwin, UCLA

"Translating Childhoods is a deeply insightful analysis of the  daily 'work' of immigrant children and its implications for their development--a  superb
contribution to the field!"
—Carola Suárez-Orozco, author of Children of Immigration and Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society

"Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little isknown about the younger generation, often considered “invisible.” Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the “work” they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution.

Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children’s own words, what it means be “in the middle” or the “keys to communication” that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children’s roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children’s contributions as translators.

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA.