Diversity, Integration, and Cognitive Imperialism

• In Event: 65.028 - Unpacking, Reframing, and Resisting: Communities of Color, Internalized Oppression, and K–12 Schools

Abstract

It is a common adage that U.S. classrooms are ‘increasingly diverse.’ In this frame, diversity is seen as a challenge, but this framing raises questions of who experiences this diversity as a challenge and what we may be missing by viewing racial and ethnic diversity as challenging. In this paper, I posit that the ways that diversity takes shape in school settings with large immigrant populations is deeply shaped through Eurocentric frameworks, ultimately serving white settler colonialism. I close with a few examples of young migrants rejecting the neocolonial cognitive split (Asher, 2009) that schooling requires them to exact upon their views of themselves.
Migrant youth, whether with legal authorization to be in this country or without, now account for one in five of every school-aged child in the U.S. They bodily represent many things at once in today’s classrooms: the shifting racial and ethnic demographics of the nation (Massey, 2007), the push and pull of people across nation/state borders (Katz, 2004), and the promissory place of education to even the societal playing field through upward social mobility. A number of studies have demonstrated that although immigrant youth have more positive attitudes toward their school (Suárez-Orozco, Súarez-Orozco & Todorova, 2008), hold higher aspirations (Portes & Rumbault, 2001), and are more optimistic about their future than their U.S.-born peers, many perform poorly on a variety of academic indicators, including achievement tests, grades, dropout rates, and college enrollment (Orfield, 2001). Many studies have documented the protective factors, such as peer and mentor support, that bolster newcomer youths’ engagement in academic work (Súarez-Orozco, Pimental & Martin, 2009), but the prevailing frame of these studies is how to help migrant youth adapt and integrate into American schooling culture and standards. In keeping with this assimilative view, teacher education programs require the dominant population white middle-class pre-service teachers to take a smattering of courses about second language acquisition, conflating deficit views of language with cultural transformation.
Using frame analysis and empirical qualitative data from a long-term participatory action research project, I argue that this assmilative framing leads to school-based practices that require migrant youth to disabuse themselves of the intelligences they and their families hold and instead see themselves as remedial relative to Eurocentric ideals of intelligence. This acts as a form of cognitive imperialism (Battiste, 2013). Using settler colonial studies (Byrd, 2011; Smith, 2010; Wolfe, 2006), I demonstrate how comprehensive integration of ‘diverse’ populations in this neocolonial context is impossible, as the images of intelligence and ability in school are not commensurate with the intelligences found in migrants’ experiences. In this way, diversity, through its current frames of challenge for an implicit white teacher populations, functions as a tactic of settler colonialism, reseating those already holding the most wealth and power in schooling as arbiters of success and achievement.

Author

• Lisa (Leigh) Patel, Boston College