Guatemala's Current Educational Practices, Unaccompanied Youth, Families Separated: Immigration and Curriculum of Urgency

• In Event: 31.024 - "Dear Darling, Stiiir It Up!" Youth Reprogramming the World Beyond General Education and Family Separations

Abstract

The goal of this talk is to revisit the work conducted in Guatemala in 2014 and 2015 and examine how the results tell us something about current U.S. immigration concerns, specifically as applied to the education of indigenous Guatemalan children in U.S. classrooms. The “curriculum of urgency” is a reminder of the ways in which we misunderstand the historical, political and socio-economic positions that necessitate the migration of Central Americans to the U.S. Further, the “curriculum of urgency” questions bilingual education and dual language programs as they currently exist as curriculums that are limited and see children as monolingual, in this case monolingual Spanish speakers. However, some newly arrived migrant children are multilingual with different linguistic, cultural, and political needs

Author

• Lydia A Saravia, DePaul University