Latina/o Children Navigating Documentation Status in Elementary School

• In Event: 65.024 - Breaking the Silence: Unprecedented Deportations and Undocumented Status Across Contexts of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Drawing from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of children in a new Latino diaspora community in Pennsylvania, in this paper we explore how Latino/a elementary school students understood and responded to the increase in deportation-based immigration practices that influenced their daily lives and learning. Of the twelve focal students from this long-term ethnography, six had a parent who had recently been deported or was fighting their deportation. In this paper we forefront students’ voices to illustrate how they navigated when and how to share their immigration experiences at school. We argue that children are seeking and would benefit from opportunities to share such experiences, yet doing so would require classroom spaces in which all forms of difference, including family documentation status, are safe to share. In an educational environment in which teachers are pressured to focus on test scores and test preparation (e.g., Nichols & Berliner, 2007), there are few opportunities for teachers to develop trusting relationships with students and to build upon the tremendous resources and challenging experiences they bring to the classroom. We call for educational practices and policies reflective of humanizing pedagogy (cf., Salazar, 2013) that would better prepare educators across receiving contexts and levels of schooling to recognize and respond to Latino/a students’ immigration experiences for increased learning and engagement in school.

Methods for the ethnographic study included regular participant observation, video recording, and interviewing in twelve Mexican immigrant families’ homes, students’ classrooms, and a researcher-run afterschool club. To highlight the perspectives of a younger generation of DREAMers and U.S. citizens--- those in middle childhood whom little is known about beyond the “brute numbers” (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011, p. 439)---in this paper we focus primarily on seven in-depth interviews (Seidman, 1998) that we conducted with students during their fourth and fifth grade years. After transcribing interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) by coding the interviews. Following Maxwell (1996), we iteratively drew out patterns from interviews, which we triangulated with coded data from fieldnotes, videologs, and additional interviews with educators from the larger study. Our findings reveal that all classroom teachers wanted to provide the best education possible for every student in their classroom, regardless of documentation status. Yet in a sociopolitical context of hostility toward immigrants (Gándara & Hopkins, 2009) and in an educational climate centered on testing (Contreras, 2010), children from undocumented families often felt their immigration experiences were not welcome. Thus, although many focal students were constantly navigating immigration practices that affected their school learning, few decided to talk about these issues with their teachers or classmates. Those who did, however, found support from their teachers and in some instances were able to build on their experiences for school learning. We argue that rather than maintaining the status quo of silence around issues of difference like immigration, we, as teacher educators, need to foster dialogue and exploration around the topic if we are to prepare educators for the realities they will face in their classrooms.

Authors

• Sarah Gallo, The Ohio State University

• Holly Link, University of Pennsylvania

• Stanton Wortham, University of Pennsylvania