Social Justice Teaching of Immigrant Youth in an Era of Technocratic Accountability

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

Abstract

Teachers have always played a critical role in the schooling of immigrant children, and the ways in which they have played that role that has changed over time. For example, during last immigration peak (1900-1920), teachers were considered responsible for assimilating foreign-born students in American democratic ways of life (Eick & Valli, 2010). While much of that attitude has disappeared among today’s teachers due to increased multicultural sensitivity to non-majoritarian identities, teaching immigrant youth is still reduced a technocratic endeavor (e.g., “teaching English”) in the achievement era (Eick & Valli, 2010). Teachers’ attitudes are mirrored in scholarship: despite burgeoning research on the difference between teaching immigrants and teaching so-called “English Learners” (Author 1, forthcoming; Author 2, forthcoming), current research on teachers’ work tends towards conversations around second language acquisition strategies. In teacher education journals, for example, scholarship is skewed heavily towards second language learning; "in teacher preparation, conversations about diversity seem to be general and undifferentiated; specific attention to immigrant children appears to be lacking" (Goodwin, 2002, p. 160). The paper presented here examines ethnographic data to probe teachers' educational relationships with immigrant children and youth in an era of technocratic accountability.
The paper is a case-study of one teacher of immigrant youth in New York City. It situates her specific case in a reanalysis of longer-term ethnographic work with immigrant students and their teachers. The re-analysis of the larger study includes: 15 in-depth interviews with teachers who currently and regularly work with immigrant students; a survey of 64 teachers who had worked with immigrant students at some point over their teaching career; Thirty-three hours of video classroom data from a New York high school that serves recently-arrived immigrant students; and, ethnographic fieldnotes from 60 site visits to four classrooms serving immigrant and immigrant-origin youth in a California high school.
Analytically, the paper telescopes in on the work of one teacher (co-author of the paper), and situates the teacher’s work in the broader discussion, analyzing the relationship between the teacher's understanding of the nature of her work, and her micro-interactions with immigrant students as captured in classroom recordings.
Conclusions suggest two primary constructs available to teachers' of immigrant youth given the dominance of technocratic accountability in their professional lives (e.g., teaching to the test, teacher evaluations): (a) Americanization/assimilation through English language acquisition, and (b) social justice advocacy through a variety of actions—including protesting testing. Analysis demonstrates how the case-study teacher portrayed navigated those constructs by deftly supporting social justice teaching by re-centering traditional power relations through creating student-led cooperative learning groups, while building English language acquisition strategies and native language support in her curriculum to satisfy testing requirements.
Scholarly significance of this work includes contributing to the glaring absence of dialogue around educating immigrant youth at the expense of privileging a narrow technocratic “EL” learning category.

Authors

• Christine Brigid Malsbary, Vassar College

• Katie Strauss, Internationals Network for Public Schools