Between Worlds: Moving Sarahí to Second Grade

• In Event: Equity Across the Border: Reimagining Mexican Teacher Preparation to Meet the Needs of Transnational Students

Abstract

In the last several years, a number of scholars in the US and Mexico have begun working together on the challenges of educating binational students whose family circumstances require them to move between two educational systems (Hamann & Zuniga, 2011; Hamann, Zuniga & Sanchez Garcia, 2010; Zuniga & Hamann, 2009; 2013). What these scholars have emphasized is that children who spend part of their lives in both Mexico and the United States are students that we share (Gandara & Jensen, 2021), youngsters who deserve attention to their specific needs, access to educational opportunities, and good quality teaching on both sides of the border. As Santibañez (2021) has pointed out, however, differences in the Mexican and US education systems can deeply affect the lives of children who are caught up in contrasting realities.

The purpose of this fictionalized narrative is to provide information for Mexican teachers about the challenges encountered by Mexican school children who transfer to American schools during the early grades. Because Mexican public school do not ordinarily enroll privileged children who need to be accommodated along with the children of low SES backgrounds, the narrative seeks to describe a school context within which administrators must struggle to respond to parental pressures, policies requiring language and content testing for English language learners, and the conflicting needs of both children and teachers. The narrative is based on the case of a fourth grader named Sarahí, a participant in a five-year school study (author, 2010), who, upon her mother's death in Mexico, was sent to live with her grandmother in the United States. The fictionalized narrative draws from her experience as well as experiences of other children's to provide broad information for Mexican teachers about teachers' specialized roles in American public schools (e.g., the ESL coordinator); the rigidity of content and language testing , the challenges faced by teachers who are not prepared to work with students who are developing English (Hamann & Reeves, 2013, and the impact of administrative decisions (e.g., grade retention) for talented children.

The paper resists the idea of depicting U.S. schools as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as both summations would be too simplistic. Rather an emphasis is to highlight both the quotidian and the harrowing that can happen in U.S. and to help Mexican teachers to imagine what they would need to do if/when they had a student in their own classroom with experiences and conditioned expectations like those of Sarahí.

Author

• Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University