Community-Based U.S. Naturalization Classes: What Do Newcomers Learn About Participatory Citizenship?

• In Event: Collaborating for Educational Equity and Excellence for Immigrant and Refugee Newcomers: Research Trajectories Across Stakeholders

Abstract

This paper employs symbolic interactionism applied to educational contexts (Bron, 2002) and positioning theory (Wortham, 2004) to examine how prospective citizen identities are enacted in community-based U.S. naturalization classes and the consequences these processes carry for the participants’ civic engagement as newcomers to the polity. Immigrant applicants for U.S. citizenship must pass a naturalization test on U.S. history, constitutional principles, government structure and basic English skills. No formal preparation for the exam is required, yet many immigrants, especially those with limited English proficiency or lower levels of formal education, avail themselves of citizenship classes offered by community organizations (Cordero-Guzman, 2005). Among these, local public libraries rank high as “reservoirs of community resources” having “played a formative role in the first Americanization movement and can continue to do so” (Taskforce on New Americans, 2008, p. 20). Sixty percent of urban libraries reported having active programs to teach English to immigrants, and 40 percent reported hosting citizenship classes, often being the only formal civic education participant access. This has important implications for their participation in the democratic project and the country’s overall justice-oriented civic participation.
The data examined in this analysis were generated in two 6-week naturalization classes in a public library in a Midwestern city, through participant observation, field notes, and analysis of curriculum materials. The analysis suggests that these classes’ limitations as civic education are structurally imposed by the official demands of the naturalization exam, but also locally manifested by the decisions made by both the volunteer teachers and the students in each context-dependent classroom configuration. All those involved attempt to establish the parameters of a social situation—norms, values, authority, participants' roles—and discrepancies lead to tension over these frames of interaction and identities. The discursive and social practices in naturalization classes, although patterned, are not static—participants draw on social positioning (of self and others) and prior experiences to guide their participation in these local events—these classroom episodes—and to define the repertoires of what it means to be a citizen in the new society. As such, they engage in subtle and overt undercurrents of critique, questioning the teachers and thus enacting forms of participatory citizenship.
These classroom episodes may be limited in scope, but the concerns are similar to those raised in the scholarship on differentiated opportunities for civic learning and civic empowerment (Kahn & Sporte, 2008; Levinson, 2010). Social positioning theory applied to educational contexts implies that over time, subject positions influence participation in social settings and teachers’ and students’ understandings of who they are in a particular space can promote or inhibit teaching and learning (in this case, citizenship positioning and efficacy). The study thus adds to the few existing studies of current community-based citizenship classes (Carpenter, 2005; Griswold, 2010; Gordon, 2010) to add another level of nuance by highlighting the dynamics of working in non-traditional contexts of adult education for newcomer citizens.

Authors

• Ramona M. Fruja, Bucknell University

• Evelyn C. Baca, Illinois State University