Making Visible the Excesses of an Educator's Language Around Latinx Students of Varying Legal Status

• In Event: Undocumented Youth and Education Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives

This theoretical paper looks at one educator’s language around students of varying legal status, policy, and schooling toward an understanding of how that language may have unintended consequences on an undocumented student’s experience and opportunity within schooling. We draw from a larger research project examining the extent of policy knowledge that Pk-12 educators in one district in rural Midwestern community have regarding undocumented students’ educational rights. In the course of coding, legal status was conflated with terms such as “Hispanic,” “ELL,” “immigrant,” and “poverty” – distinct categories with potential but not given intersection. We stepped back to ponder the ways undocumented students and families are rendered visible and invisible in schools. The question that emerged is how does the excess of an educator’s language around race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural and/or linguistic heritage of immigrants render Latinx students of varying legal status visible and invisible in a school?

Theoretical Framework
In this paper we utilized Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) thinking with theory approach, which derives from a shift in qualitative research toward a “post-framework” (p. ix) and enables scholars to concurrently think philosophically and methodologically, “conversing” with data and theory in an iterative manner (p. x). This paper focuses on excesses of meaning and deferred meaning around the general Latinx population by the educator we interviewed. It is due to the strained language we choose to draw on Jacques Derrida’s (1991) concepts of deferred presence, differánce, and trace. Using a thinking with theory approach, we view snags and excesses as new possibilities to consider the instability of meaning regarding Latinx students within a hierarchical system of education.

Methods & Data Sources
To resist macro generalizations, we choose to examine one extended interview with an elementary school principal from a rural Midwestern district. We found the principal’s views and descriptions to be largely archetypical in how other leaders and personnel in the district talked about their Latinx population.

Findings & Significance

In the last two years, the federal government has proposed and put into action sweeping changes to U.S. immigration policy. Pk-12 schools and educators must choose whether and how to discuss the current climate and its corresponding effects. While the number of unauthorized immigrants in Missouri is smaller than Border States, little is known about how rural school communities approach immigrant students. An excess of language attempting to identify, categorize, and rationalize the Latinx population generally came forward in the data. We identified words/phrases in the transcript that signified identity – a mutual conceptualized understanding of what a Latinx is. For example, defending Latinx parents within the same context of placing education as a high priority, “They do care, they care about their kids being educated…cause I don't think that they all had that privilege back where they were from.”
Corresponding recommendations of our inquiry include teacher training on the specifics (e.g., policies, laws) of working with undocumented and immigration students and their families as well as racial and ethnic literacy.

Authors

• Sarah L. Hairston, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Emily R. Crawford-Rossi, University of Missouri - Columbia