Resisting Invisibility through Creative Expressions: Immigrant Students and Families’ Voices and Actions (original) (raw)
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Curricular Agents: Adolescent Immigrant Students in a Third-Space-Imagined-Community
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2014
This dissertation explores how Latino immigrant youth make sense out of their educational experience, identity, and sense of belonging in an urban, public high school. This critical ethnography examines their social interactions. The youth live in a segregated neighborhood that is largely abandoned by policy-makers and recently impacted by massive school closures by the district. The youth, within the context of a community-school partnership, advocate for immigrant rights, march in solidarity with their teachers, and engage in organizing to transcend their immigration status and/or achievement status. The central question is: How do Latino immigrant youth in a community-school experience identity formation in relation to community belonging? Across a traveling field, I interviewed youth to deepen the understanding of their identity formation as they encounter the community-school partnership. The chapters of this dissertation reveal the multiple ways in which youth identity forms. The analysis here builds upon previous sociological studies of racial/ethnic identity and its interaction with student achievement and moves away from cultural-deficit models as explanations of racial/ethnic minority under-achievement. In addition, the analysis here highlights the positive social identities that emerge for students involved in the community-school programs. This is a key contribution as it emphasizes the role of community-school partnerships on social identity production. In this study youth position themselves as xii agents of social change. Youth interpret community as a set of social relations across spaces, e.g. a protest at the Board of Education headquarters and an act of civil disobedience in an intersection. This study asserts that youth from low-income communities can transcend the labels from their immigration or racial/ethnic status, or their perceived propensity for failure. By highlighting moments of youth organizing and their articulations of justice, it is evident they engage in critical thinking beyond what their achievement data reveals. The data lead us to consider how schools often fail to reward social identities and alternative pedagogic spaces-provided through communityschool partnerships-such as a protest or a service trip, but there exists cultural and symbolic value when asserting a particular social identity. The research offers insight into the disconnection between how institutional forces and policies situate youth and then abandon or intervene through false assumptions. I suggest we build on youth's knowledge and assets.
Journal of Multicultural Affairs, 2022
The United States’ education system lacks a commitment to multicultural education. This failure to validate all students’ cultural assets is problematic. Multicultural education challenges the status quo to change schools to validate the diverse backgrounds of students of color (Banks, 1993; Banks & Banks, 2015). The United States education system must adopt a multicultural education policy that focuses on equity, freedom, and diversity to ensure students’ success (Grant & Tate, 1995). Consequently, schools and students benefit academically and socially when schools validate, incorporate, and respect underrepresented students’ cultures as an integral part of the school curriculums and classroom cultures. This inclusion is crucial because multicultural education benefits teachers and administrators (Ladson-Billings, 1994). This paper explores the lived experiences of a bilingual Mexican American high school senior and first-generation college student as she navigated school and a hegemonic society that fights cultural and linguistic diversity. This paper describes the student’s lived experiences and the influences of hegemony on her and her family’s lives. The researcher audio-recorded the participant’s interview in her home. The participant responded to three primary questions and 30 supporting questions. In addition, the researcher asked questions that solicited details about her school experiences as a child of immigrants. The study’s findings conceivably inform school administrators, curriculum designers, teachers, boards of education, and other K-12 decision-makers of the need to implement multicultural education. Keywords: multicultural education, cultural capital, funds of knowledge, white privilege, marginalization, hegemony, macroculture, segmented assimilation theory, critical race theory (CRT), anti-racist education, linguistic diversity, hegemony, DEI
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This article sheds light on the educational trajectories of undocumented youth who engage in forms of organizing through a community-school partnership in an urban public school in Chicago. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study in an urban public high school, readers learn that undocumented youth gain a positive sense of identity and belonging to their school and community by participating in a community-based after-school program called The Dream Act Club. First, the article argues that undocumented youth participation in community organizing helps them make sense of their identity in relation to the larger community and societal context. Second, the article argues that social spaces like The Dream Act Club provide networks of support and what Levinson calls (2001) “intimate cultures,” enabling undocumented youth to accomplish two things (a) critique and dismantle negative stereotypes around the undocumented status that are perpetuated through the media and political figures on a larger scale, and through school-based personnel perceptions’ of undocumented youth on a local, school level; and, (b) critique larger immigration policies through community organizing ef- forts. By situating these powerful narratives of undocumented youth in the context of current issues in immigration policy, I (they/we) can write against the negative discourses that circulate in the national immigration debate in the United States about undocumented youth. These narratives enable us to consider the voices and needs of undocumented youth through their eyes. Their narratives challenge educators, researchers, and policy-makers to humanize the complicated identity formation processes in contentious political climates to better understand their social worlds and impoverished realities.
Harvard Educational Review, 2021
With the increasing numbers of immigrant and refugee students across the US K–12 system, the xenophobia of the current political climate, and the effects of COVID-19 on the immigrant community, it is critical to examine schools that serve immigrant students and their families. Drawing on case studies of two public high schools that exclusively serve immigrant students, authors Adriana Villavicencio, Chandler Patton Miranda, Jia-Lin Liu, and Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng examine how educators frame the current political context and how this frame informs their collective approach to engaging with and supporting families. The study finds that these schools shifted norms of parental engagement by proactively forging relationships with families, cultivating alliances with community partners, and mediating within families around challenges related to work and higher education to benefit the communities they serve. In so doing, these school actors have shifted the norms of parental engagement to center the perspectives, voices, and experiences of immigrant families.
Journal of Contemporary Research in Education, 2(3), 2014
The Latino population in the United States is on the rise, but historically, Latino graduation rates have been low. Many educators lack sufficient intercultural preparation, and therefore, teachers may tend to blame student failure on cultural and familial deficiencies. In this study, we elicited educators’ perceptions of Latino students and the students’ families through 10 focus group interviews at 6 target schools (4 elementary schools, 1 middle school, and 1 high school). Findings include contradictory views of students’ and families’ attitudes towards education, and consistently negative views of students’ and families’ educational backgrounds. Latino families were seen as close, caring, and hard working, but with the wrong priorities and in a state of crisis. Given these findings, we believe that there is a need for educators to question their assumptions through self-reflection, in order to overcome stereotyped images of Latino students. To that end, we recommend 3 overlapping tiers of professional learning with increasing depth of challenging experiences: (1) intercultural information, (2) intercultural inquiry, and (3) intercultural immersion.
Chang, B., & Martínez, R. A. (2009). In the majority: Challenges, resources, and strategies for educating immigrant students and students of color in LAUSD. UCLA CCCP., 2009
The communities surrounding Belmont and Lincoln High Schools (LAUSD) in inner-city Los Angeles have been the context of many struggles for social justice over the past several decades. These school communities have historically been under-served by the schooling system and plagued by dismal academic outcomes. Moreover, students and parents from these communities have seldom been invited to participate in efforts to improve these inequitable conditions. Supported by the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, this report is the result of a collaborative project between the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) and Principal Investigator, Professor Kris Gutiérrez (UCLA).
Supporting School Responsiveness to Immigrant Families and Children: A University-School Partnership
2017
A partnership between a university program and an urban public school was created to help the school respond to the significant increase in the school’s population of immigrant, English language learners. School staff and university faculty established an agenda to learn about local immigrant families, improve communications with the families, and provide responsive instruction to the children. Over a two-year period, a series of graduate courses were offered to teachers, focusing on culturally responsive curriculum, second language instruction, and Spanish language learning. In addition, the university faculty provided ongoing consultation with teachers in classrooms, as well as a series of parent workshops with the school families. Dedicated to embracing the immigrant community and children, more than twenty teachers and the school principal participated in the graduate courses and used the experience to change the school culture, promote school-community relationships, and improv...
Mapping Cultural Boundaries in Schools and Communities: Redefining Spaces through Organizing
Democracy and Education, 2015
For this study, the authors look specifically at cultural maps that the youth created in Student Involvement Day (SID), a program committed to youth empowerment. In these maps, youth identified spaces in their schools and communities that are open and inclusive of their cultures or spaces where their cultures are excluded. Drawing on critical geographies of/in education and Freirian notions of praxis, this paper considers the nature of school spaces through school curriculum and offers ways to render these contested spaces more democratic. Using these cultural maps, students work to individually identify spaces that allow them to engage meaningfully and collectively build key alliances and organize for more equitable and inclusive spaces in their schools and communities. Arizona is under attack. Children of color and communities of color are the targets of the assaults. That may sound extreme or exaggerated, but for those of us in Arizona who believe in equity and justice for all Arizonans, there is no doubt we are under siege. In opposition to these assaults, tens of thousands of documented and undocumented folks alike have protested, boycotted, petitioned, marched, and walked out around the state and the nation. (Fernández, 2010/11, p. 49). Arizona has mounted an attack on immigrant communities. Through Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070), Arizona's Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act, and other anti-immigration legislation, this attack has more firmly entrenched historical, cultural, political, and economic divisions among various communities by criminalizing undocumented individuals. In conjunction with other anti-immigrant legislation, the stated policy of SB 1070 is "attrition through enforcement" (Senate Bill 1070, p. 2). The 2010 legislation addressed by the United States (U.S.) Supreme Court upholding the provision commonly known as Show Me Your Gerald K. Wood focuses on community and youth organizing. He draws on critical geography and place-based education to underscore the complex realities impacting immigrant youth. Christine K. Lemley grounds her scholarship in the ideal of culturally relevant pedagogy to engage and empower historically marginalized teachers and students. Most recently, her work focuses on social justice and equity issues through critical community engagement. They are both faculty at Northern Arizona University. Papers (or Section 2b), cements the divisions between Latinos/ Latinas and law enforcement and escalates a long history of distrust between these two groups. In addition, on January 1, 2011, House Bill 2281 (HB 2281) A.R.S. §15-112, went into effect, banning ethnic studies. Challenging this idea regarding social movements and collective power, the language of HB 2281 focuses on how "public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as