¹ There are at this time an array of thoughtful historiographical essays that suggest new approaches to the history of education, children, and youth, and call attention to the importance of recent migrations, immigrations, and globalization processes as transformative and relatively unexplored contexts for the evolution of education history over the last half-century. See, for example, Eileen Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001): 58–72; Gary McCulloch and Roy Lowe, “Introduction: Centre and Periphery—Networks, Space and Geography in the History of Education,” History of Education 32 (September 2003): 457–61; Paula Fass, “The World Is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open Up,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1 (Winter 2008): 11–31; Paula Fass, “Children in Global Migrations,” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): 937–53. Peter Stearns, “Preface to ‘Globalization and Childhood’,” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): 845–48. See, for example, Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, “The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective, Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): 987–1006.Google Scholar

² These processes are well named and documented in a variety of fields. See, for example, Reed Ueda, “Immigration in Global Historical Perspective,” in The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1865, eds. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007): 14–29; Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (London: Viking Penguin, 2010); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA and London, 1998); Allesandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaugh, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998).Google Scholar

³ A specific focus on globalization processes and the evolving contours of transcultural encounters, cultural and political practices, and new networks of interconnection has captured the attention of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and post-colonial scholars who have written about the last half century of history in the United States and elsewhere. See, for example, Nancy Foner, “The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes,” International Migration Review 31 (1997): 961–84; Nancy Foner, The New Immigrants (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2005); Joel Perlmann, Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second Generation Progress, 1890–2000 (New York: Russell Sage, 2005); Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, “Introduction,” The New Americans: A Guide to Migration Since 1965, eds. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2007):1–14. In addition to historical studies, there is an array of anthropological, sociological, demographic, and post-colonial studies that document the emergence and importance of transnational social fields—networks of communication through which immigrant newcomers stay continually in touch with far distant families and friends, retain close transnational ties, sustain a sense of belonging which encompasses two or three homelands simultaneously, engender culturally hybrid identity, and generate youth driven forms of political and cultural action that bear on levels of academic achievement. See S. Fouron and Nina Glick Schiller, “The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second Generation within a Transnational Social Field,” in Migration and Transnationalism in a Changing New York, eds. H. S. Guzman-Cordero, Hector R. Robert, Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfuegel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001): 58–86; Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, “Education,” in The New Americans, 241–69.Google Scholar

⁴ There is a robust literature that focuses on the relative perdurability of memory and the intersections between personal, collective, and refracted memories. See, for example, Alan Peshkin, Places of Memory: Whiteman's Schools and Native American Communities (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997). For an excellent review essay, see William W. Cutler III, “Cultural Literacy, Historic Preservation, and Commemoration,” History of Education Quarterly 40 (Winter 2000): 477–83; Paul Thompson, “Believe It or Not: Rethinking the Historical Interpretation of Memory,” in Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience, eds. Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994): 1–17; Paul Thompson, “Community and Individual Memory: An Introduction,” Oral History Review 36 (Summer/Fall 2009): 1–4; Mary Chamberlin, “Migrant Myths and Memories,” History Workshop Journal 67 (Spring 2009): 244–52. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); John Bodnar, “The Memory Debate,” in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992): 3–21; Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, eds., Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007). William Frijhoff, “Education's Memory,” in Education and Cultural Transmission: Historical Studies of Continuity and Change in Families, Schooling, and Youth Cultures (Supplementary Series 2), eds. Johan Sturm, Jeroen Dekker, Richard Aldrich, and Frank Simon (Gent: Paedagogica Historica, 1996): 340–53.Google Scholar

⁵ Sonia and Omékongo are uncommonly creative educators. They have identified and constructed terrains of freedom and repertoires of teaching and learning that catapult them outside the pedagogical mainstream. They are superstars, as Bob Hampel has suggested. They are neither compliant nor easily devastated by the force of adverse circumstance. As educators, they might reveal a way forward for new generations of teachers and learners. Or they might not. They might be part of a vanguard or might not. They are, however, new-age educators, and exemplary teachers for a bewildering world in continuing motion.Google Scholar

⁶ Daniel Rodger's extraordinary study of social politics during the Progressive Era in the United States has situated the origins and character of social politics and practices in the “in-betweens” of three intersecting worlds rather than within the boundaries of a single nation-state—a concept that is also useful in thinking about the evolving professional lives of teachers in the last half century. See Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 5.Google Scholar

⁷ There is a substantial literature—not necessarily historical—that documents the emergence of transnational, social fields—networks of communication through which immigrant newcomers stay continually in touch with far distant families and friends, retain close transnational ties, sustain a sense of belonging encompassing two or three homelands simultaneously, engender culturally hybrid identities, and generate youth driven forms of political and cultural action. See Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick-Schiller, “The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second Generation within a Transnational Social Field,” in The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, eds. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002): 168–210. Also, the writings of post-colonial scholars, see, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).Google Scholar

⁸ The following mini-bio is based on oral history testimony gathered with Sonia over many hours; on personal correspondence with her; and on a series of her reflective essays on the work of post-colonial theorists, such as Homi H. K. Bhabba, “Culture's In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart D.G. Hall (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 53–61; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). There is also Sonia's meditation on the history and lives of three Nigerian students, a Yoruban, an Ibo, and a Hausa. See, Sonia O'Connell, “Opening the Window,” an unpublished paper.Google Scholar

⁹ She makes note of the fact that her mother wanted to become an American, “looked down on her country of origin,” and spent a lifetime learning English—a disposition, Sonia believes, that is not shared, among the new homeland connected, Skype-capable families of new immigrants whom she now teaches.Google Scholar

¹⁰ The foundations of school achievement for new immigrant students are analyzed in Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society (Cambridge, MA and London, 2008).Google Scholar

¹¹ Sonia O'Connell, e-mail message to author, April 2011.Google Scholar

¹² C. T. Reed was founded in 1970. It was an all middle-class white school that, in the wake of desegregation mandates and unprecedented global migrations, gradually morphed into a school of dazzling diversities.Google Scholar

¹³ This term was used by David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy Shigamatsu to describe the cultural situation in Japan. See Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender, and Identity (London: Routledge, 2008): 30.Google Scholar

¹⁴ James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 7. The concept of pre-contact history is designed to substitute for more culturally demeaning and misleading pre-history labels.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Sonia O'Connell, “Opening the Window,” an unpublished paper (College Park, MD, 2009).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Sonia constructs herself as a cultural broker who creates in-between spaces where students can fashion complex identities, construct terrains of freedom, and work around the regulatory universes of home and school. The work of ethnohistorians, such as Anthony F. C. Wallace, James Axtell, and Alan Peshkin, and others, suggests that the presence of cultural brokers has a long history in the now-United States.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The portrait of Omékongo is part of a larger transgenerational oral history of his family that was generously supported by a grant from the General Research Board, University of Maryland, College Park Graduate School. It emerged from many hours of oral history testimonies with him; his own oral histories of the Dibinga family; observations of his performances; the contents of his signature motivational book entitled Grow Into Your Greatness, his poetry—both spoken and recorded; and other work that can be found on his website: [email protected].Google Scholar

¹⁸ Omékongo, “So That I Might Be Born: An Unfinished Poem,” an unpublished paper (2008).Google Scholar

¹⁹ omekongo.comGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Omékongo is not alone in the effort to craft a community in between. Theorists do as well. For one example, see Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999).Google Scholar