Undocumented Educations: The Everyday Educational Lives of Immigrant Youth

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Migration and Mobility

Proposal

Jordan Corson
Teachers College, Columbia University
Faculty Advisor: Daniel Friedrich

When recently arrived immigrant students arrive at the school doors in the U.S., regardless of their immigration status they are, at least legally speaking, guaranteed a place in schools. As educators identify specific needs for immigrant youth, a battery of interventions rushes forth to ensure their educational success. Students may be identified as English Language Learners (ELLs) and placed in intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. Educators have also created interventions such as afterschool programs for immigrant students with interrupted formal education (SIFE). Among the approaches to helping immigrant students succeed, one intervention is the newcomer school, an entire school created to serve recently arrived immigrant youth. Where 50% of ELLs and SIFE drop out of high school, these schools routinely achieve graduation rates above 90% (e.g. Sylvan, 2008).
Early in this research, while discussing these outcomes with a prominent newcomer school leader, I asked about the 5% of students dropping out of a particularly successful school. This person seemed offended, asking why I would focus on this issue when the school overall was so successful. My question did not intend to critique these schools or suggest a way to reach 100%. Rather, I wonder about students who, even in a school designed for students who may fail in other educational settings, still fall to the margins. In other words, why do the margins always appear? And, what possibilities exist for those on the margins of margins? Furthermore, if the newcomer school is the most holistic intervention, if it sits on the horizon of schooling immigrant students, what becomes of the educational lives of those considered “at-risk” in these schools?
This dissertation project examines the everyday educational practices of a small number of recently arrived immigrant youth labeled “at-risk” in a school specifically designed for immigrant students. It aims to explore educational lives marked as failing or precarious in ways that reveal them to be present and productive. I take up transnational theories to explore how the participants’ educational lives are shaped and remade across time and space, especially as they navigate borders. Additionally, I take up decolonial theories, asking what knowledges and ways of being are legitimated within schools and general education policy. Extending decolonial theories, I take up a Rancièrean framework to suggest that exploring everyday educational practices can peel back the “partition of the sensible” (Rancière, 2001), that boundary of police, which divides up and maintains the social order, so that it is possible to peek in on educations not legible in schools—not to categorize and tame them but to show that such educations can thrust an explosive contestation into how educational worlds are shaped and considered. Within this framework, the dissertation asks readers to understand that immigrant youth are already immersed in productive educational practices, ones that can engage and speak back to schooling practices of immigrant youth.
The dissertation poses 3 questions: First, it asks how the newcomer school became a thinkable and practicable intervention in relation to other ways of educating immigrant youth. Second, it asks how the everyday educational practices of a group of youth considered “at-risk” of dropping out of one of these schools relate to the curriculum and pedagogy they encounter in school. Third, the project looks in and outside of school at their educational practices and asks where and in what ways they sense educational experiences that are useful or make them feel successful. To pursue these questions, I take up a yearlong ethnography, working with participants both in the school and in their everyday lives. Interviews, focus groups, and participant observation will help build an understanding of participants’ educational lives. Simultaneously, I take up historical anthropology to situate this work in broader considerations of immigration and education across the globe.
Educational work such as language practice or autodidactically taking up musical instruments in ways and types that run counter to schooling instruction offer early conclusions that linguistically and culturally affirmative schools provide paths to “success” only insofar as schools and youth adapt to dominant educational practices. Where research questions about education and immigration across the globe dominantly focus on issues of access or outcomes, this project pushes toward new questions and unknown horizons for research on immigration and education.
Practically speaking, I have successfully proposed and now am in the middle of data collection. When CIES meets, I will be in the process of writing the dissertation. I plan to defend in the fall of 2019.

Author

• Jordan Corson, Teachers College, Columbia University