Toward Race-Conscious Care-Based Healing to Support Latino Immigrant Youth

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

Abstract

Objectives: Latino students comprise nearly 30% of public school students (Jimenez, 2022). Relatedly, Latinos from immigrant families and recently arrived students are also increasing. Despite this increasing population in U.S. public schools, Latino students remain the group with a lower sense of belonging in schools (Author and other, 2023). While efforts to address belonging as well as academic opportunity gaps have supported significant gains to Latino educational equity, recent reports show that these gains reversed due to the COVID-19 pandemic as Latino immigrant families struggled with well-being and other challenges related to being essential workers while also facing immigration threats (Feliz, 2020). Latino immigrant youth well-being is a topic of concern in many communities and schools are often places of potential refuge; at the very least, schools ought to be welcoming and inclusive toward immigrant youth. However, barriers in promoting well-being and opportunities for positive relationships remain in schools.

Framework & Methods: This longitudinal convergent mixed-methods study sheds light on how school-based personnel such as educators, counselors, and district leaders perceive the needs of immigrant youth. Additionally, we explore how immigrant youth experience belonging and well-being in school and community spaces to advance a conceptual framework for ecosystems of care.
We ask the following research questions: 1.) How do schools respond to Latino immigrant youth and families’ needs? 2.) How do Latino immigrant youth perceive their sense of belonging? 3.) What are the factors that inhibit their well-being and belonging?

Results & Significance: We report school personnel responses to the influx of immigrant students in their schools, including the challenges they perceive of serving this population and how youth identify the need for care-based healing educational systems. We find that there are individuals, i.e., youths’ personal experiences, feelings, and interactions, and structural level factors that contribute to youths’ perceptions of their belonging as well as inhibit it. By structural, we mean at the organizational level, and macro-policy and societal level (Author, 2022). We situate this work within the larger social science research about contexts and nested contexts of reception, specifically viewing schools as nested contexts where tensions about belonging for immigrant youth manifest.
The research questions ask how school-personnel manage the welcome of immigrant youth and how youth perceive belonging and well-being in schools. We utilize survey data from school and district personnel (N=80) and qualitative interviews and participant-observations with 41 Latino immigrant youth from school districts on the east coast. The study reports adult perceptions of immigrants’ needs and school climates as well as professional role constraints in fostering belonging for youth. The qualitative data shows the individual and structural level factors that impact Latino immigrant youth belonging and well-being.
We theorize what we term race-conscious care-based healing in nested educational systems for Latino immigrant youth. We urge school systems, as an important nested context of reception, to consider forms of care-based healing to improve well-being, belonging and educational mobility for immigrant youth.
We expand educational policy and sociological literature about schools as important contexts of reception for mitigating inequality. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Authors

• Sophia Rodriguez, New York University

• Lisa Lopez Escobar, University of Maryland

• Staci Pippin-Kottkamp, University of Maryland

• Melissa Ortiz, New York University