Making Americans: Schooling, Diversity, and Assimilation in the 21st Century

• In Event: 54.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The United States has become increasingly diverse over the past four decades, largely due to ongoing immigration from Latin America and Asia. Yet little research has explored how schools - as institutions of Americanization - have adapted their curricula, structures, and classroom relations to accommodate these demographic and cultural shifts. In this study, I illuminate the everyday ways that one middle school teaches American identity in the context of immigration-driven diversity. My work provides a novel bridge between assimilation theory, social theories of national identity, and culturally responsive teaching. I theorize that staff efforts to reduce the “ethnic distance” between schools and their minority students are evidence of bi-directional assimilation (Alba & Nee, 2003), whereby both mainstream institutions and immigrant communities undergo ethnic change and evolve toward a common culture

Author

• Cristina L. Lash, Stanford University