Decolonial interrogation of immigrant education

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Global migration: biopolitics, interruptions, and trends in theory and method

Proposal

Twenty years ago, Valenzuela (1999) examined the educational experiences of immigrant youth in a U.S. school. Facing deficit mindsets and exclusionary tactics from the school, Valenzuela determined that immigrant youth who were “underachieving” “oppose not education” but “a schooling process that disrespects them” (p. 5). A decade later, Bartlett and Garcia (2011) inverted the narrative, showing highly successful outcomes in a culturally and linguistically affirmative school for recently arrived immigrant students. Where 50% of recently arrived (im)migrant youth drop out of high school nationwide (Fry, 2005), many of these newcomer schools achieve graduation rates above 90% (e.g. Fine, Stoudt, & Futch, 2005). Yet, what about those students who continue to “underachieve,” even in these affirmative environments? In a school built for those who may fail elsewhere, what about those still falling to the margins? This project examines the everyday educational practices of migrant youth labeled “at-risk” of dropping out of a newcomer school. Through ethnographic methods in school and in youth’s everyday lives, the project explores what knowledges, repertoires, and ways of being are permitted, negotiated, and rejected in school. Rather than searching for a better path to inclusion, exploring the already-present, productive educational practices of immigrant youth opens new questions about education and equality. It also pursues decolonial inquiries about which educational lives count, in what ways, and what research questions about (im)migration and education exist beyond binaries of success/failure or access/exclusion.

Author

• Jordan Corson, Teachers College, Columbia University