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  • Latino Change Agents in Higher Education: Shaping a System That Works for All
  • Ilda Jimenez y West
Leonard A. Valverde. Latino Change Agents in Higher Education: Shaping a System That Works for All. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. Cloth: $40.00. ISBN-13: 978-0787995959.

While the book’s title, Latino Change Agents in Higher Education: Shaping a System That Works for All, implies that the focal audience is higher education, the “works for all” also claims P-12 practitioners, community stakeholders, and policy and political leaders at all levels, both in and outside of the realm of education. The notion that it takes a village to educate a child is truly exemplified in this collection of insightful recommendations for systemic change. Change is defined as transformation in dialogue with the second main theme of this book—the dialectical relationship between the local and the global.

In the realm of education, Valverde and his 11 contributors do what cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1997) challenges us to do—to unpack the term “glocal,” in which the relationship between the local and global mandates thinking globally and acting locally.

The “grito” or call for transformative education by the well-respected Latino education leaders in Valverde’s book unreservedly proclaims that, due to the increasingly non-Anglo population in the United States, the need to effectively serve this demographic segment, many of them Latinos, is urgent. This book urges the transformation of higher education to provide greater access for Latinos on all levels as students, faculty, administrators, and leaders.

This placement of Latinos creates an institutional holding power that then produces educated Latino citizens and creates a cycle of achievement. Each chapter of this anthology addresses the goal of creating such a cycle of achievement. The 12 chapters are grouped in four main sections: “The Past Cannot Be the Future”; “Systemic Change, Si: Special Add-On Programs, No”; “A Bright Future Necesita Un Grito Fuerte”; and “Beginning the Work of Reshaping Higher Education.” The chapter titles guide the reader to his or her topic of interest.

In Chapter 1, Leonard A. Valverde, Baltazar Arispe y Acevedo Jr., and Monte E. Perez outline six compelling imperatives to change the cycle of Latino achievement and success: social justice, changing demographics, economic vitality, institutional vitality, reshaping local Latino communities, and Hispanics as global citizens. The 11 chapters that follow take on one or more of these imperatives [End Page 127] and concretely provide a model(s), guide, map, or insight to translate such themes into practice.

Henry T. Ingles and Yolanda R. Ingles in Chapter 2 challenge the higher education community to transform itself to better serve the exponentially growing new segment of student demographics and to produce students who contribute to and shape the culturally diverse and globally interdependent society by altering how we teach to fit the new traditional student with a complex identity and lifestyle. Such recommendations take a student-centered perspective and include (a) culturally responsive pedagogy, (b) faculty team-teaching, (c) altering time, location, and conditions for scheduling classes, and (d) integrating innovative new technologies for instruction to connect school, home, and work environments into a seamless environment for learning and teaching.

In Chapter 3, Gloria Ann Lopez discusses the imperatives for fulfilling a social justice agenda and positively reshaping local communities through a quality K–16 educational continuum. The continuum requires schools to engage local community stakeholders in business and politics.

The four chapters in Part 2 of Latino Change Agents identify gaps in the current educational structure that need to be addressed to serve the growing Latino population. In Chapter 4, Ed Apodaca encourages educators and policymakers to provide opportunities for the growing Latino population in Texas to fully participate at all levels of the educational pipeline, arguing that if Latinos succeed, then others will follow. K–12 institutions’ main objective (Chapter 6) should be to produce Latino professionals instead of laborers by providing more Latino faculty and administrators as professional role models.

Chapter 5 describes various federal TRIO programs, such as Upward Bound, and institution-specific programs, such as ENLACE. Silas Abrego argues that these programs catch first- and second-generation students and are effectively grooming...

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