Analyzing Educational Inequities Through Activity-Meaning Systems: The Authoritative Interaction of Immigrants in Policies and Laws

• In Event: Crossing Borders to Connect Routes: Understanding Educational Inequities Affecting Immigrants, From a Transnational Perspective

Abstract

Policies and laws are designed to address injustices, yet ongoing social, political and economic circumstances often lead to altering those same policies/laws. Interventions in educational institutions and community organizations can mediate policy/legal systems in collaboration with students and stakeholders to address resulting ongoing injustices and generate new insights. This paper approaches two of the cases that make up the overall project: the DACA@10 Project and the Wisconsin Project. Both examine the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Executive Order and aftermath, to critically analyze the role of legal and political frameworks in enhancing or limiting educational opportunities.
DACA is a 2012 federal policy established as a temporary fix for children brought to the USA illegally before age 16. After a cautious update of 800,000 young people whom the policy allowed to get driver’s licenses, official employment, in-state tuition (in some states) and relief of deportation, DACA was abruptly rescinded in 2017 and later declared unlawful by a Texas federal court in 2021. Federal policy moved from protecting eligible immigrant youth, to putting them at risk of being deported.
The main goal of this paper is to identify a) obstacles to equitable policy implementation, b) relevant intervention strategies, and c) implications for ongoing collaborations between policymakers and policy subjects, while paying special attention to how the pandemic has put undocumented immigrants into an even more vulnerable position.
Dynamic-narrative theory (Daiute, 2014; Daiute and Kreniske, 2016) is the primary theoretical and methodological framework of this paper. It allows us to highlight the social, interactive and dynamic nature of storytelling as a cultural tool and a meaning-making process. From this perspective, both the DACA@10 Project and the Wisconsin Project share a focus on DACA’s history, for insights about the interacting perspectives of engaged stakeholders, addressing the interacting dynamics of relevant policies, institutional initiatives and student perspectives in each context.
Data sources in both studies include federal, state, local and organizational policies, media narratives and interviews with individuals. A unique feature of both studies is the detailed analysis across these stakeholder discourses, thereby operationalizing them as potentially interacting. In this way, we identify reciprocal influences and strategies, rather than only from policies to policy subjects.
Preliminary findings reveal two different kinds of logics and approaches: humanitarian and political. For example, a paralegal who organizes her practice in humanitarian logic emphasizes connecting with clients through her own socioemotional history and support strategy, which also echoed the organization’s mission statement. Another paralegal explains her experience and approach in terms of injustice and political mobilization, such as via powerful people at the local university.
This paper makes a relevant scientific contribution to a deeper understanding of structural and emergent obstacles to equitable policy implementation, at a time when policy and advocacy are becoming increasingly important, due to political division, decentralization of protections for people in vulnerable positions and the effects of the pandemic. Results also contribute to identifying relevant intervention strategies and their implications for ongoing collaborations between policymakers and policy subjects.

Authors

• Colette Daiute, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Presenting Author

• Sham Habteselasse, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Presenting Author

• Dante Javier Salto, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
  Presenting Author

• Madison R. Parola, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
  Presenting Author