Immigrant Children's Social Lives in the Liminal Interludes of Schooling

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

This paper examines how liminal spatio-temporal contexts both afford and constrain how immigrant children navigate their social lives in educational settings. A larger objective is to reflect on the methodological consequences of focusing our analytic lens on sanctioned school activities as traditionally preferred units of analysis in the linguistic anthropology of education. What can we learn about the everyday schooling experiences of immigrant youth when we shift our ethnographic lens to the interactions that take place in the liminal interludes (in between ratified activities or places, etc.) of institutional processes?

One of the methodological hallmarks of anthropological discourse analysis is to capture habitual/routine social interactions that constitute the core dimensions of life in a community through the comparisons of units of interactions (Goodwin 2018; Philips 2013). Often those units come from participation in activities that are considered focal in defining community membership. In educational research, this orientation has often translated in an overemphasis on institutionally defined and valued practices and activities. Evidence of this overemphasis can be found in the exponential growth of classroom discourse analysis as a field of inquiry (Blomme et al, 2004; Cazden, 1988/2001; Heath, 1983; Philips, 1983; Rogers, 2004; Rymes, 2009/2015). A a smaller subset of scholarship has analyzed forms of interactional side-/byplay (or what Goffman, 1981 called the “underlife” of institutions) at the boundaries between official and unofficial classroom discourse (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999); yet, liminal schooling contexts have largely been unexamined in linguistic ethnographies of schooling, despite the potential of these contexts for illuminating the educational lives of youth (Echeverría 2003).

This paper builds on a linguistic ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children in a Southwestern Spanish town. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I focus on videotaped interactions between immigrant students and their local counterparts taking place in the interstices of school life--when students are walking between buildings, in the fringes/corners of the schoolyard, in between classes…etc. This ethnography allows me to examine the interactions occurring in these liminal contexts in relation to institutional culture and to the relational history between children.

Examining interactions occurring in liminal schooling contexts reveal heightened forms of behavior at the extremes of a continuum ranging from empathy/inclusion to violence/exclusion. On the one hand, liminality can render immigrant youth more vulnerable to racialized bullying, including verbal and physical aggression, since many of the institutional protections that apply in ratified schooling contexts are in abeyance (Author). On the other hand, liminal contexts also allow for displays of support and empathy that can lead to the development of cross-ethnic peer friendships, which can happen when social-ethnic boundaries and hierarchies that are reproduced in more central contexts are relaxed.

This paper is a call for examining youth’s schooling experiences more holistically. What happens in liminal contexts is crucial to achieving educational equity in the 21st century: it can, for example, undermine progressive curricular efforts and can have positive/negative implications for immigrant youth’s enduring feelings of belonging and educational enfranchisement.

Author

• Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, University of California - Los Angeles