With discourse on immigration policies being brought to the forefront in U.S. education, educational leaders need to be more conscious than ever of changing demographics, diversity, and the multilingual and multicultural value of their students and community. This case study focuses on how educational leaders engage with Latino/a parents and how caregivers in Southwest borderland rural communities can assist in the academic success of their Latino/a students from a culturally responsive approach. The principal and the PEA (Parent Education Association) encourages administrators to engage in conversations regarding immigration policies and parental involvement in hopes of better understanding cultural disparities in parental involvement.

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In this paper, we put center stage the story of a community in the borderland of Palomas and Deming, two twin towns located across the border from each other. In regular times, almost a thousand children crossed the checkpoint every day from Palomas in Mexico to Deming in the United States to attend school. During the COVID-19 pandemic, accessibility to education has been almost completely denied for students living in Mexico. This paper unpacks the findings from a critical case study focused on the school leadership of the community and marks the beginning of a larger action-research initiative aimed at forging alliances with and among community stakeholders, researchers, and community leaders to bring transformative change. Findings suggest that these borderland cities do not view themselves as divided by a physical or ideological Frontera or Barrera. Rather, they see themselves as a unified community whose members live on both sides of the border. The Palomas-Deming borderland community shares one mission of creating the necessary conditions to provide educational equity for all students in the region with U.S. passports regardless of a student’s country of residence. Within these contexts, our paper adds to the sparse scholarship on borderland education and highlights community-based needs for and capabilities of transformative educational change that we perceive as the pathway to more equitable opportunities for learning.

This chapter shares the process and rationale behind a library workshop with the Reference and Research Services Department and Archives and Special Collections Department at the New Mexico State University Library. The workshop was part of a grassroots social justice initiative aimed at forming a more equitable and sustainable library instruction program. The concepts of equity, economy, and environment taken from the 4th U.N. Sustainable Development Goal and the extant literature in the fields of library instruction and educational leadership were utilized to plan and implement this workshop and research. Holmes's definition of positionality was used as the theoretical framework. This chapter unpacks the learning and reflection from an initial meeting with library staff to craft individual positionality statements that will be used to co-create a crowdsourced mission statement informed by positionality and core values.

The prevailing picture of intercultural adaptation among international student sojourners features a reified process of overcoming culture shock or culture-related stress and anxiety. In the context of increasing recruitment of Chinese students by German higher education institutions, there has been a growing interest in understanding Chinese students' intercultural adaptation experiences, and in exploring approaches that can be adopted by Chinese and German higher education to support these sojourners' learning experience. Drawing on a six-month mixed-methods study of 84 Chinese students attending German universities, researchers explored their intercultural experience regarding psychological, sociocultural, and educational aspects to university life. The challenges faced by these students are discussed in terms of psychological, sociocultural, and educational adaptations.