Rural Latino High School Students Considering Identity and Belonging Through Comparative Study of Newcomer Youth in South Africa

• In Event: Community and School Narratives, Policies, and Practices for New Immigrant Populations

Abstract

There is an old axiom in anthropology that it can be helpful to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar in order to better understand what is happening. The objective here was to encourage Latino youth in a new Latino diaspora community (Hamann & Harklau, 2010; Wortham, et al. 2002) in Nebraska to articulate whether and how they felt understood by their new community and, in turn, how they sought to identify themselves and define what those identities meant. The method for getting youth to describe these things was unorthodox. A Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers high school class prepared for and then hosted a visit by South African scholar, Dr. Saloshna Vandeyar, who has studied and written about that country’s new efforts to use schools as vehicles of post-apartheid social reconciliation, the formal and informal means of racial/ethnic affiliation in that country, and the ways newcomer students from elsewhere in Africa struggle to become included in their new host society. The idea was not that Latino newcomers’ experiences in Nebraska match that of South African youth exactly, but rather that consideration of how the experiences were similar and how they differed would be generative for the Latino students as they reflected on their own efforts and experiences.

As a first stage of the research project, the Nebraska students answered a questionnaire documenting what they did and did not know about South Africa. Then, over the course of two months, they considered several readings about South Africa and South African schooling. Three of these were by Dr. Vandeyar, and two were not. The articles were in English, but, in keeping with the premise of the class, students were asked to write short reflective summaries in Spanish. The students then prepared a loose interview protocol of questions for Dr. Vandeyar in anticipation of the next step, a visit to their high school that was documented on video. After the visit, the students were videotaped again as they discussed how their new knowledge about South Africa did or did not have parallels to their own situations. Finally, they were asked to respond in writing to a few short answer questions. The purpose of getting after-the-fact video and writing was to capture the generative interplay of conversation between students, but also to assure that all students’ views were included. Complementing these student reflections, the three co-authors of this paper (Dr. Vandeyar, the students’ high school teacher, and Dr. Vandeyar’s University of Nebraska host) each wrote their own reflective memos about the visit and the students’ ideas.

In the spirit of “knowing is not enough,” this paper highlights ways high school students can be engaged by comparative education in ways that help them articulate how they feel welcome or unwelcome (Gitlin et al., 2003) in American schools and how they identify and act in response. It also highlights possible curriculum for a Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers class, which is an action research interest of their teacher. Finally it highlights multinational university-teacher-student partnership as a vehicle for learning and praxis.

Authors

• Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Saloshna Vandeyar, University of Pretoria

• Janet Marie Eckerson, University of Nebraska - Lincoln