Binational Students and Their Teachers in Central Mexico

• In Event: Preparing the Teachers We Need for the “Students We Share” Between the United States and Mexico

Abstract

In this paper, I share findings from a year-long ethnographic study with Mexican heritage students who recently enrolled in rural schools in Puebla, Mexico due to their family’s repatriation. I present findings from routine classroom educational practices with recently arrived students to understand the often invisible mobile and heterogeneous knowledges that young students bring to their classrooms. I aim to generate insights on ways to better prepare practicing Mexican teachers working with this growing student population.

To understand these schooling realities, I draw upon asset-based pedagogies. Many education scholars have demonstrated that children develop knowledges and resources across contexts of learning, and that non-mainstream students are more academically successful when we incorporate these resources into their schooling (e.g., González, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Orellana, 2009). Through close attention to children’s educational experiences and perspectives, we can understand how students serve as social actors in which they negotiate their own self-positioning across institutional settings and geopolitical borders in ways that can contribute to their schooling success (González, 2011; Orellana, 2009). Drawing from an asset-based approach, this ethnography captures the range of resources that repatriated students bring to their schooling and how they are overlooked, positioned, or leveraged within Mexican schools.

Methods for the study included weekly participant observation, video recording, and interviews in students’ classrooms, families’ homes, and the local community. I worked with 10 recently enrolled students attending 5 schools (primary through high school) in Puebla, Mexico for the 2016-2017 academic year.

I first illustrate the ways educators felt unprepared to work with recent arrivals from US schools or develop their Spanish literacy. Due to a national curriculum and expected pedagogies that left few opportunities for differentiated instruction, teachers rarely altered their teaching style to support binational students. Special supports for students developing Spanish literacy were not required or available in these schools and teachers received no training to work with bilingual students. This challenge was most pronounced during el dictado, a common dictation technique used in teaching. Overall students were left to their own devices to transfer their English literacy skills to Spanish.

I then illustrate how several students faced great social isolation, including bullying, for being different in their Mexican schools. Teachers varied greatly in how they addressed these issues. In this instance, we learn from Mexican educators who found ways to combat this challenge and helped develop support networks for recently arrived students.

In Mexico, binational students’ schooling realities are under-considered and under-researched (Zúñiga, Hamann, & García, 2011) and this ethnography provides textured insights into students’ transition into Mexican schooling within contexts of immigration policies that force many mixed-status families in the US to move to Mexico. This paper highlights the pedagogical complexities of how topics of Spanish literacy and bullying get broached and incorporated into learning in Mexico. It provides insights into the types of professional development that Mexican teachers could benefit from in order to better recognize and leverage the educational resources of recently arrived students.

Author

• Sarah Gallo, The Ohio State University