"Sometimes, It's About Breaking Rules": School Social Workers' Role and Equity for Undocumented Students

• In Event: Undocumented Youth and Education Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This project investigates the critical role school social workers (SSWs) play in promoting equity and advocating for undocumented students in K-12 settings. We maintain two assumptions: 1) SSWs shape school climate and how resources are distributed to undocumented students. Yet, little is known about these key personnel’s role, how they perceive their role in relation to other actors, and how their identities and views of immigration shape their advocacy work. 2) schools are sites where social inequalities are both disrupted or reproduced, and thus represent a borderlands. Critical personnel such as SSWs are uniquely positioned to resist and advance equity. We ask: How do some SSWs develop as nepantleras for immigrant students, while others do not?

Theoretical Framework
We bridge Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) notion of nepantlera and Lipsky’s (2010) concept of street-level bureaucracy to guide our research. Anzaldua was a nepantlere – a term describing a type of visionary cultural worker. Nepantleras are threshold people: they move within and among multiple, often conflicting, worlds and refuse to align themselves. This refusal is challenging; nepantleras must open themselves to risks. We leverage these perspectives to understand the interplay of SSWs’ perception of their role, potentially as nepantleras negotiating the borderlands of schools, and the constraints at micro-relational and macro-institutional levels that enhance or inhibit their advocacy work. As street-level bureaucrats, SSWs are structurally positioned in schools to broker resources, and this framework elucidates how SSW’s own views of immigration shape their decision-making.

Methods & Data Sources
We analyzed semi-structured interviews (N= 100) from a larger mixed-methods study (Creswell, 2014), specifically from a national sample of SSWs who work with undocumented students. Using a “flexible coding” (Deterding & Waters, 2018) strategy and analytic memos (Birks et al, 2008) after each interview, we organized data into themes aligned with the conceptual framework of nepantlera. These analytic procedures allow researchers to build and expand theory.

Findings and Significance
The results demonstrate the variation across SSW’s nepantlera work. We identify three themes regarding (1) how SSWs define their role, (2) how they enact relationships with other school-based actors, and (3) how their personal identities inform their decision-making about how to broker resources. From here we offer a conceptual model of the variation of nepantlera-work, i.e. border-crossing work within schools, arguing that some SSWs are border-abiders who work within the constraints of the school, border-expanders who challenge the constraints and lack of resource distribution, and border-breakers who disrupt the structures often to their own detriment, isolation, and rejection in the school context.

This study reveals how SSWs address the needs of undocumented students in a precarious contemporary moment that criminalizes immigrants and constructs them as undeserving of access to social and educational resources. It explains the role of SSWs and the factors that enhance (or inhibit) their work. Our findings have practical significance for both school social work and education by expanding the critically-conscious work SSWs engage in as connected to similar work among school educators (Rodriguez & McCorkle, 2019; Rodriguez, Monreal, Howard, 2018).

Authors

• Sophia Rodriguez, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ben Roth, University of South Carolina

• Leticia Villarreal Sosa, Dominican University