From Arrival to Graduation: Guatemalan Newcomer Immigrant Adolescents Refashioning Rural High School Enrollment and Retention

• In Event: Navigating Challenges, Cultivating Strengths: Rural Educational Leadership for Justice and Inclusion

Abstract

This research explores how recently arrived immigrant adolescents from Guatemala perceive their high school experience, and what alternatives they propose for their enrollment and retention advising rural high school educators, district leaders, and academics. For this project, I worked with 59 high schoolers in 2023-2024 in a rural school district in the Midwest, where they shared their educational needs and desires for better schooling practices, specifically on enrollment and retention. I followed youth participatory action research (YPAR) as an epistemology and added mindfulness and recreational activities as research methodologies for data co-creation, analysis, and socioemotional support. This project contributes to reducing the gap in the fields of rural education, immigrant and English Learners’ education, and YPAR with newcomer adolescents.

Author

• Sophia Piral Lee, University of Missouri