Pedagogical Openings for Transnational and Immigrant Youth

• In Event: Sanctuary Schooling: Educational Renewal for Im/Migrant Youth Through Research, Remedy, and Repair

Abstract

Purpose: Legal protections like the Plyler v. Doe (1982) ruling can stop schools from carrying out the most blatant forms of discrimination against immigrant youth, but they do not account for the multi-level forms of pushout that render teenage immigrants what Fine (2018) calls exiles within. This paper shares findings from an ethnographic study at one NYC school for recently arrived immigrant students over the course of 20 months to explore the pedagogical questions of creating welcoming and thriving educational spaces for immigrant youth.


Theoretical Framework: Following culturally sustaining, critical, and abolitionist pedagogical traditions (e.g., Alim & Paris, 2017; Love, 2019; Freire, 1970), this study makes immigrant youth the best informants for the educational justice efforts intended to support them. Ten young people who arrived in the U.S. as teenagers participated in the study. They were from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, and Puerto Rico through varying immigration trajectories and documentation statuses. As teenage immigrants, they represent a group whose presence in the U.S. is highly contested and for whom social justice efforts in schools are often decided top-down.


Methods and Data: The data were gathered primarily through interviews, observations, and artifacts that captured youth interactions with their social studies classroom lessons and activities and how these lessons informed or contrasted their lives outside of school.


Results: Guided by the research question (i.e., What entryways do teenage immigrants offer to their own anti-oppressive education?), three findings emerged:


Young people were living the interplays between race, culture, language, and immigration through an assemblage of multisited experiences. For example, in school youth were culturally and linguistically flexible with their classmates at the same time that they applied and experienced racial and country-of-origin-related hierarchies. Outside of school, youth looked for ways to make sense of the cultural and linguistic tensions they felt at work or about town when interacting with customers and neighbors.
Transnational and immigrant youth live cross-border lives in a world of ever-shifting borders. When unpacking the issues they were learning in their social studies class, they utilized their built-in transnational lenses. This made U.S. centrism, even when learning about U.S. issues, a flawed entryway to their anti-oppressive education.
In their progressive school, the young people in the study appreciated the social justice-oriented education they were receiving. However, they had critiques about the lessons leaving them feeling hopeless. Anti-oppressive education is not anti-oppressive if it does not allow young people to think for themselves and learn to act in order to change the world in front of them.


Scholarly Significance: To create educational environments that are affirming for immigrant youth, it is critical for pedagogies and school/classroom practices to be in dialogue with the social interactions and power dynamics in the everyday lives of immigrant youth. Even in New York City, where educational equity work in schools is ubiquitous, these efforts miss important aspects of the curricular and social needs of immigrant youth. This study offers policymakers and educators alike some entrypoints to educational justice for teenage immigrants.

Author

• Pamela D'Andrea Martinez, Wellesley College