Immigrant Youth Navigating Educational Borderlands: Implications for Progressive Politics and Pedagogies of Difference

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Identity Work and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how U.S. immigrant youth navigate three key educational borderlands: the geopolitical, institutional, and home community. Educational borderlands are the physical and/or conceptual landscapes where one must negotiate notions of cultural difference ― landscapes that envelope a wide array of pedagogical and cultural spaces. Drawing upon our studies of U.S. immigrant youth and demographic change in education we extend border crossing and cultural socialization theories to explain how many immigrant youth confront and resist inequities, negotiate their cultural identities, and enact agency in these spaces. We suggest how educators can learn from youth and engage in a politics of difference that promotes transformative leadership and disrupts hegemonic, essentializing, and deficit-based conceptions of immigrant youth and culture.

Authors

• Camille M. Wilson, Wayne State University

• Lucila D. Ek, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Ty-Ron M.O. Douglas, University of Missouri - Columbia