Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices

• In Event: Status and Schooling in New Latino Communities: Ethnographic Perspectives on Immigration Status in K-12 Contexts

Abstract

Although immigration status and related immigration practices increasingly affect children’s daily lives and learning across receiving contexts and levels of schooling (Suárez-Orozco, et al., 2011), the pedagogical implications of these issues are rarely addressed in policy, research, or teacher education. In this paper we draw on a long-term ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora (NLD) community, focusing on their teachers’ perspectives regarding immigration practices and schooling in their young students’ lives. We address two questions: (a) How do elementary school teachers in an NLD community understand and respond to the effects of immigration practices in their students’ lives and schooling? and (b) What do these teachers believe could prepare them to better navigate and academically build upon students’ experiences with immigration practices?
In this paper, we draw primarily on two rounds of in-depth interviews we conducted with seven educators at a local elementary school during a period of unprecedented vigilance to explore their understanding and navigation of immigration practices in their classrooms. Our analyses iteratively drew out patterns from these transcribed interviews, 12 total, and involved triangulation of this data with other coded data from fieldnotes and videologs from the larger ethnographic project. To explore how teachers made sense of immigration practices affecting their students’ daily lives, we draw on borderlands theory (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987/2000). We argue that our community of study, while not located near the U.S.-Mexico border, is a borderlands place in which educators’ limited experience with newcomers and with the realities of living in an undocumented family created a context in which teachers were uncertain of how to meet the needs of students who were dealing with harsh immigration practices.
Our findings show how some educators pushed beyond their comfort zones, creating spaces in which they learned from and built upon students’ experiences, while others feared broaching such a sensitive topic. More specifically, we discuss how while teachers grappled with the notion of “illegality” for undocumented children, they all conceived of school as a “safe place” for immigrant students and attempted to make their classrooms into such places. Findings also indicate that due to curricular and testing pressures, teachers were frustrated by the lack of time they had to focus on students’ home lives. Thus although they desired to develop personal relationships with students and learn more about how immigration practices were affecting their lives, the majority felt they had little time to do so. The implications of the teacher perspectives presented here suggest that teacher education is needed to better prepare educators across the US to become cultural learners and border crossers who seek to engage with aspects of difference, such as immigration status, which are rarely discussed at the elementary school level. Finally, we argue that along with increased attention to these issues in teacher education, local school policies are needed that facilitate a deeper engagement with children and families and build on such relationships to foster more successful schooling experiences for all students.

Authors

• Holly Link, University of Pennsylvania

• Sarah Gallo, The Ohio State University