Two Straight Lines: Immigrant Students' Talk During Schooling Transitions

• In Event: 63.031 - Children Negotiating Everyday Borders: How the Anthropology of Education Contributes to Research on (Im)Migrant Children in Schools

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to draw our attention to the significant interactions and meaning-making moments that take place for immigrant children during those moments in the school day often overlooked or disciplined by adults. By focusing on talk in the liminal spaces of transitions between activities and walking in the hallway, this paper shows that children’s peer talk is a meaningful site for identity work and literacy practices.
Drawing from a Language Socialization approach to the study of children and immigration, this paper draws from a longer study that is ethnographic, longitudinal, focused on learning, and grounded in the analysis of audio recordings of children’s talk. Previous research on children’s peer language socialization in schools has shown that child-child interactions are meaningful spaces for the negotiation of power, language, identity and belonging (García-Sánchez, 2014; Kyratzis, 2010; Sterponi, 2007). The focus on children’s talk in public spaces is important because it draws our attention to what they know on their terms, permitting adults the opportunity to move beyond developmental and ideological assumptions about what children do or do not know (Orellana, 2009).
This paper draws on a yearlong initial phase of ethnographic research in Brooklyn, NY that took place in 2013-2014. During this year, I conducted participant observation in one dual-language elementary school and in the homes of six mixed-status families. The goal of this first phase of the study was to document and examine how and when children in a mixed-status Diasporic classroom made reference to forms of cultural and legal citizenship. One of the focal sites within the elementary school was the social studies class within a fifth-grade classroom in which students engaged in a months-long unit of study called Resistencia (Resistance). I audio-recorded classroom interaction throughout this unit, including its culminating activity in which the fifth grade immigrant students visited members of the local high school Dream Team to conduct a peer-peer interview on immigration, activism, and social justice.
This paper presents an analysis of peer talk recorded on the day that Ms. Daniella’s class visited their neighborhood high school to interview secondary students about their experiences fighting for immigrants’ rights as members of their school Dream Team. As the focal students walked the five blocks over to the high school, they passed local businesses, police cars, and familiar faces. The students’ interactions evoked evolving notions of belonging and citizenship. This interlude demonstrates the significance of children’s talk in precisely the liminal moments that adults tend to disregard or discipline when asking students to be silent and compliant as they move through space.
The findings of this paper demonstrate that children’s liminal space and peer talk is consequential for their understanding of the world, their school, and their identity. While adults in schools tend to view these moments––of transition, of movement––as non-class time, informal, or in need of discipline, this paper shows that these are precisely the moments in which children trouble with the complex ideas that they are expected to grapple with in formal learning activities.

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Rutgers University