Immigrant Youth in Superdiverse Schooling Contexts

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Complicating Superdiversity Through Children and Youths’ Communicative Repertoires

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which recently-arrived immigrant students take advantage of schooling situated in contexts of “super-diversity”, as defined by contemporary European scholarship (Blommaert & Backus, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). The strategies that recently-arrived immigrants take to belong depend on the kind of diversity they encounter in their contexts of reception (Portes, 2005). Drawing on ethnographic evidence from two high schools in super-diverse global cities, one in NYC and one in LA, the paper demonstrate how the presence of multiple languages, diverse communicative repertoires, and myriad ethnocultural resources were a source of enjoyment that supported the development of a vibrant educational communities of practice.
Research took place across two school sites beginning in 2010. Both schools are located in traditional immigrant-receiving centers (New York City and Los Angeles) and have highly diverse populations of recently-arrived immigrant youth. The focus of the ethnographic investigation has sought to understand linguistic and cultural repertoires of practice in schools in super-diverse contexts, noting especially recently-arrived youths’ practices and epistemologies. The Los Angeles' study was time-extensive (averaging 60 visits over nine months), and the New York study was time-intensive (one research trip included daily visits to the school site for six weeks; the second and third research trips lasted two weeks each). In addition, the researcher taught in the NYC school prior to data collection providing insider knowledge of the mechanisms of working in super-diversity. Data was collected through fieldnotes detailing site visits, semi-structured and focus group interviews, audio-recordings of classes and video-recordings of classes. Analysis was grounded and iterative.
Findings demonstrate how youth in both sites engaged their communicative repertoires in ways that drew on the resources of their context of super-diversity: (1) language brokering to support novice participants in the classroom, (2) resource-pooling when making sense of content, and (3) linguistic play across national, cultural, and ethnic differences. I argue that immigrant students in super-diverse contexts are “agentive transcultural navigators” (Author, forthcoming) whose practices index broach new understandings of social life and learning, and present a pedagogy of possibility. In fact, these multiethnic, multilingual classrooms mediated the ways in which immigrant students' goals for community and belonging were bound up in their vibrant linguistic practices. As such, it could be argued that classrooms situated in super-diversity present a compelling counter to the dismal research on the persistent educational failure of language minority youth (e.g., ELL students). Yet, on the other hand, so-called "language isolates" in the two classrooms remained minoritized and were unable to access the communities of practice present in the schools. Overall, the paper presents a complex portrait of how language-minority youth engage communicative repertoires in order to belong-- or not-- in super-diversity.

Author

• Christine Brigid Malsbary, Vassar College