Healing-Centered Praxis at an Immigrant-Serving High School

• In Event: From Remedy to Reality: The Intersections of Immigration and Education Over 40 Years After Plyler

Abstract

Objectives & Framework: This paper illustrates how trauma-informed practices can be employed to remedy and repair the damaging effects of immigration policies on immigrant students’ lives. Nationally, immigrant students are a growing and vulnerable population, facing xenophobia, migration-related stressors, racism, and peer victimization (Closson et al., 2013; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2018). Restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigrant discourses expose immigrant youth to trauma and chronic stress (El Yafoori, 2022), which undermines higher-order thinking (Craig, 2017) and can manifest as behavioral problems and academic disengagement (Thomas et al., 2019). Trauma-informed and healing-centered pedagogies and school policies can mitigate these adverse effects (Ginwright, 2018). Given their increased vulnerability, trauma-sensitive approaches are especially important for unaccompanied minors, students from mixed-status households, and recent arrivals from Latin America (Custodio & O’Loughlin, 2021).
“Roosevelt High,” our research site, educates all three of these groups. Roosevelt’s [im]migrant students are primarily Spanish speakers -- members of longstanding Dominican and Puerto Rican communities, as well as more relative newcomers from Central America, many who arrived as unaccompanied minors. A sizable minority is from Haiti, followed by small numbers from around the world. Roosevelt’s ESL students have varied documentation statuses and migration histories, many shaped by restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigrant discourses (Turner & Mangual Figueroa, 2019). Family separations, time spent in border detention centers, and experiences of violence before, during, and after migration are common narratives in Roosevelt classrooms. In this paper, we explore how Roosevelt educators have responded to these adverse experiences via curriculum and pedagogy.

Methods & Results: Ethnographic field work at Roosevelt (2015- 2024) has included ESL and sheltered-content classroom observations, document collection, and interviews with students, teachers, and other staff, focused on curriculum and pedagogy, school policies, and classroom experiences. Collaborative coding, memoing, and theme- development have revealed intentionally healing-centered educational praxis: "They get a lot of opportunities to share… their culture, their experiences, problems that they had…we give advice to one another. [T]he more that they feel safe and respected and heard in the classroom, that helps to push the trauma to the side [when] not directly working through it.” In this paper, we highlight four key trauma-informed practices Roosevelt educators employ: unconditional positive regard in response to behavioral dysregulation or academic disengagement (e.g. “Sometimes we have kids that consistently make bad decisions…but that doesn't mean that they're not worth the 100th or the 200th chance.”), migration-related themes in classwork, highlighting less common languages and cultures to ensure all students feel welcome in Spanish-language-majority classrooms, and integrating therapeutic outlets in the organization of classroom life.

Significance: Despite a considerable body of literature on the ways specialized high schools create positive educational environments for newcomers (e.g. Bartlett & Garcia, 2011), there is a dearth of scholarship on how students and educators successfully overcome the stresses and traumas of migration at the non-specialized high schools most immigrant students attend. Developing a holistic portrait of a neighborhood high school in which immigrant students thrive thus offers important insights for scholarship, policy, and pedagogy in immigrant and emergent bilingual education

Authors

• Elaine Cristina Allard, Swarthmore College

• Barbara Thelamour, Swarthmore College

• Yusra Ali, Swarthmore College

• Naw Hser Nay Paw, Swarthmore College