More Than “English Learners”: A Social Studies Teacher’s Indexing of Immigrant Students’ Countries of Origin in Official Classroom Space

• In Event: Teachers and Immigrant Youth: Expanding and Complicating the Social Context of Migration in Teachers’ Classroom Work

Abstract

Immigrant youth are typically framed within educational discourse and in U.S. schools as “English Learners”. Meanwhile, bilingual scholars shift the frame from an English-focused one to one that more accurately represents students’ bilingualism, arguing for using the term “emergent bilingual” (e.g., García, Kleifgen & Falchi, 2008). While bilingual education scholars have pushed thinking about students’ cultures in addition to their language(s), neither term explicitly acknowledges that students come from other countries of origin. We argue here that—particularly in social studies classrooms—understanding how immigrants rather than “language learners” or “bilinguals” have occasions to have their immigrant-ness as part of the official classroom space presents especially important learning opportunities, and widens narrower visions of curriculum and practice that typically only acknowledge a U.S. frame of reference.
In order to broaden visions of practice, we examine how one U.S.-born White high school teacher oriented toward his students as immigrants rather than only as language learners. We also analyze the ways in which he indexed students’ countries of origin within the official classroom space and the affordances of this approach.
In this paper we expand on the funds of knowledge framework (Moll et al., 1992) to include the ways that immigrant youth’s position as crossing national borders contributes to their already developed knowledge about their countries of origin and how this is incorporated in their knowledge of their new country. In this sense, immigrants are “cosmopolitan intellectuals” (Campano & Ghiso, 2011) whose unique perspectives offer rich dimensions to the learning experience in social studies classrooms.
Data for this article was collected during a year-long qualitative study in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. within a high school U.S. history and civics class officially designated as “sheltered” (i.e., serving immigrant emergent bilinguals through content-based instruction). Data sources include 15 audio-recorded classroom observations, fieldnotes, 3 teacher semi-structured interviews, and classroom artifacts (photos, student work, copies of handouts). We developed findings from coding field notes (Emerson et al., 1995) for “indexing moments” and verified conclusions with audio and matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Emerging findings demonstrate a pattern in instruction where the teacher consistently indexed students’ countries of origin within the social studies class. Students were invited to think about their own countries of origin as part of the official space of the classroom. To illustrate the affordances of this approach, we focus on an episode where the teacher incorporated one students’ “vacation” assignment while visiting family in Pakistan—bringing transnational voice into the shared classroom space.
This paper contributes to understanding how immigrants rather than “language-learners” or “bilinguals” have occasions to have their immigrant-ness acknowledged as part of the official classroom space, which presents learning opportunities related to transnational epistemologies, widening narrower visions of curriculum and practice to better reflect and build upon youth’s assets.

Authors

• Dafney Blanca Dabach, University of Washington - Seattle

• Aliza Fones, University of Washington