Critical Perspectives and Critique in Policy and Discourse About Undocumented Students in American Higher Education

• In Event: Undocumented Students and Access to Postsecondary Education: Reviewing Policy Research and Setting the Research Agenda

Abstract

Purpose
In-State Resident Tuition (ISRT) policies for undocumented students have emerged within the frontlines of a hostile national debate about immigration reform and higher education access. Cutting through the extant noise and fostering a deep understanding of how higher education, immigration, policy, and discourse are creating new and reifying old ideologies of opportunity can be difficult, but remains necessary if the education community wants to participate responsively rather than reactively. In short, there is a call for policy critique, as founded in critical inquiry (Cannella and Lincoln, 2011) and critical policy analysis (Anyon, 2011).
This paper argues for critical and radical ways to understand the underlying assumptions that drive policy related to undocumented students and U.S. higher education. In our exemplar, we do this by privileging the role of discourse, paying particular attention to the discourse of ISRT policies for undocumented students. These policies have remained largely unexamined in terms of their discursive effects.

Framework
Critical discourse analysis and policy discourse analysis assume human realities are made possible through talk and action (Allan, Iverson, & Huilman, 2010; Fairclough, 2006) We cannot come to understand a reality without first being able to imagine it. As our imaginations are bound by language (albeit in a recursive relationship), discourse is assumed to be an interlocuter to reality. That is to say that different concepts of the world become discursively available for use through our talk and action in our everyday lives. These are processes laden with power and ideological formation. As such, analysis seeks to understand the underlying assumptions that co-construct the discursive availability of our understandings of the world. Of interest in policy discourse analysis are the ambiguities and contradictions within and across policy discourses. These ambiguities and contradictions are assumed to be the lair for material formations of oppression and/or opportunity. These spaces are fissures within and across policy discourses that might afford possibility for social change.

Methods, Data, and Findings
The exemplar-study interrogates the 13 current ISRT policies that impact undocumented immigrant students. Through a critical discourse analysis particular attention will be paid to the text used in ISRT policies and the language that text uses in order to form (new) understandings of students and the problem of access from the interplay between the text and its meanings (discourse). By focusing on the text of ISRT policies themselves, these analyses will show the discursive junctures wherein policy ideologically and politically mediates the reconstruction of college access for undocumented students.

Significance
In order to contribute to a research agenda focused on undocumented students and higher education, this paper has three primary goals: 1) review literature on critical inquiry and critical policy analysis, 2) make such literature relevant to policy related to undocumented students in American higher education by highlighting key examples, and 3) provide a brief exemplar of such inquiry taken from our own work in critique and education policy related to undocumented students.

Authors

• Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, University of Denver

• Susana Hernandez, Iowa State University