Made in America Discussion

After reading only two chapters of Laurie Olsen's Made in America, I can already tell that I'm going to love this book! Althought it is structured and written as an ethnography, I still found it very interesting due to all of the rich stories and interviews she includes. Olsen defines her study as an anthropological study on the design and set-up of ELL culture in the classroom. So, she is studying the behaviors and customs of the classroom as an outside observer just as an anthropologist would in the field.

Olsen brings an interesting theoretical background to the study. As the head of CA Tomorrow, she works with educational policy and defines schooling as a system of inquality--it is often a struggle between class relations, capitalist division of labor and race/language relations--again, a very anthropological theme. Olsen utilizes standard ethnographic research methods of developing social maps, engaging with teachers and students to get specific quotations and insights, and engaging teachers and students to make their own social maps that discuss cultural, racial, and language divisions. The participants in Olsen's research are "fifteen faculty members and administrators at Madison High and seven at the Newcomer School" (Olsen 19). Forty-seven students took part in Olsen's research. Additionally, she selected ten female students and five teachers to focus on in more depth.

The research questions and central questions explored by Olsen included:
-How did they understand "America"? What does it mean to be "American"?
-What borders and boundaries did they create or detect in social relations? What language did they use to articulate and create those borders and boundaries?
-How did they experience and view their encounters with each other across languages, cultures, and national identities?

The resources that Olsen used to collect data were her three journals: one story, one field, and one personal. She collected data through observation. Her role as a researcher was mainly to sit back and observe, but at times she was drawn in or jumped into the experience. The demographic of Madison High School is a very diverse one: in the 1990s, 2/5 students were language minority students and 1 out of every 4 students spoke no English at all. 53 different languages were spoken between all students in the school. As far as individual percentages, 26.1% were Hispanic, 13.5% African American, 13.3% Asian, 11.1% Filipino, and 2.4% Pacific Islander.

Finally, getting specifically into the students' experiences in chapter 2, something that struck me as interesting in immigrants' attitudes towards their clothing was that although one ESL student stated that the American students wear whatever they want and make fun of the native clothing, they also made fun of a Brazilian student for wearing a dress. I would think that the students would be used to wearing dresses or do that more commonly instead of often wearing pants and shirts like is mentioned. It is awful how the ESL students thinks that they will call her a slut for wearing a dress and walking while shaking her hips.

The ESL students' notions of what it means to be American are interesting to the American but also very understandable. Being American represents a lot of freedom to the foreign students: in their cultures, maybe they are not allowed as much freedom of interest or dress, as is one student whose uncles forbids her to wear jeans. They enjoy having fun, playing loud music, and "like to be in the middle of things." An interesting observation that one student makes is that "Americans have very good conditions about education but they don't want it" (Olsen 49).