Providing Higher Education Guidance to Adolescent Immigrant Youth: An Intergenerational Narrative

• In Event: Bridging Multiple Worlds: Innovative Partnerships to Educate Diverse Democracies Within Culturally and Socioeconomically Diverse Communities

Abstract

Objective
This study examined how strategies for guiding immigrant Latino secondary school students towards completing high school and college can be built on self-knowledge acquired by a community member who attained a university education and returned to support higher education access of community members.

Theoretical Framework
The study builds on concepts from Bridging Multiple Worlds Theory (Cooper, 2011); narrative theory applied to education (Bruner, 1986); and Bakhtin’s Cultural Psychology on life as authoring (Kozulin, 1991). These complementary perspectives highlight how as young people mature, they develop cultural models of identity tied to reaching their aspirations. Attaining these aspirations through higher education benefits from mediational systems; thus, college outreach programs, parents, community members, and peer support groups can each serve as cultural brokers for youth learning how to prepare for and attain a higher education.

Methods
The second author worked in a college outreach program at her university serving Latino immigrant youth, and had participated in this program as an immigrant high school student. The authors used reflective self-narrative (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004) to analyze how the second author’s approach to counseling secondary school students in this program was related to her own similar experiences and community understandings.

Results
In navigating the educational system, I gained knowledge and a vision that I use in my work for the outreach program. The educación I received extends further than a college degree; I now have a civic responsibility to take action. As my vision and responsibility for the Latino community has expanded, the work I do in the program is where I can take action.

Many of the students with whom I work are first-generation college students from immigrant families with high aspirations for completing higher education and reaching their life goals, but who have had little guidance on successful college pathways. I communicate what I have learned in my journey to help students pursue their aspirations.

It is important for students to develop identities as scholars and reach towards their dream careers to stay engaged and develop their full potential by drawing on mediators or cultural brokers, such as peer support groups, outreach programs, parents, and community groups. I strive to be among these mediators in my role as a counselor who encourages them, believes in them, and guides them. I wish to convey critical information and promote their understanding their own agency, know where to find information, how to ask questions, and how institutions function.

My journey taught me that succeeding in one’s life goals includes learning to navigate different identities, including academic and community selves. Finally, educación is being able to take action for the public good and community, based on knowledge and a sense of moral responsibility; it means helping others, just as one day someone helped me.

Significance
This self-narrative analysis illustrates how self-knowledge of a community member attaining higher education, now employed by a higher education outreach program, can inform secondary students’ college aspirations and access and brings an innovative intergenerational perspective on partnerships towards social justice.

Authors

• Ana Guerrero, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Richard P. Duran, University of California - Santa Barbara