Community-School Partnerships as Racial Projects: Examining Belonging for Newcomer Migrant Youth in Urban Education

• In Event: Can Community Schools Be a Source of Democracy and Liberation? Critical Perspectives From Four Cities

Abstract

Objective
This paper shares insights from a community-school partnership (CSP) in Hartford, CT that sought to support newcomer migrant youth in the school district through a community-school partnership’s after-school program. The four-year mixed-methods study about a unique CSP between the school district and a public library examined how it could increase social belonging, and immigrant integration into the local community. The paper highlights stakeholder perspectives, and privileges migrant youth voice (N=63) and experiences on how, if at all, this CSP increased their social belonging, integration, and understanding of democracy.
Theoretical perspectives
The paper documents the origins and intentions of the CSP in this study, and with a critical eye, also describes its limitations. It draws on the concept of racial projects (Omi & Winant, 2014), and uses the partnership in Hartford, CT as a case example to explore the tensions of a CSP racial project. The paper refers to tensions in CSPs that structure opportunity and create sustainable change but simultaneously reproduce and maintain inequality.

Context, Methods and Data Sources
Hartford has a higher number of English language learners (ELs) than any other Connecticut community. Almost 19% of the district’s 20,132 students are ELs. The newcomers in this study, from Africa, Central and South America, have been in the country for 30 months or less, including a significant number (over 130 high school students) who have come to Hartford from Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. At the district level, a decade of reforms (2009-2019) attempted to serve language learning populations without attention to larger issues of social belonging. Thus, school district personnel and community stakeholders came together to identify a community need related to newcomers.

The data from an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design (Author, 2019; Hanson et al, 2005) collected from 2016-2020 included interviews and focus groups with 63 newcomer migrant youth, and CSP stakeholders (N=10, including school district personnel and program staff), and a pre/posttest survey measuring increases in belonging from participating in the CSP-program.
Findings/Significance
The data in this project reveal how community-school partnerships function as tenuous racial projects, i.e. they structure opportunity and inequality in urban communities. Three themes will be presented: “It’s a hub, “They need English: CSP structuring inequality, and Tensions of belonging: We’re in the same boat [...] we need to speak English.” These themes reflect the complexity of racial projects as productive and exclusionary.

Tensions emerged because stakeholders’ perspectives of belonging were rooted in commonplace neoliberal ideologies about immigrant assimilation, learning English, and becoming economically useful (Goodman, 2015). The paper explains the promise and problems of community-school efforts that target language learning migrant populations, and how a well-intentioned, democratic, equity-minded reform can still fall victim to neoliberal ideologies of assimilation. The racial project lens allows researchers and practitioners to identify, in both design and implementation, tensions where attempts to disrupt the existing status quo and structure opportunity can ultimately reproduce inequality.

Author

• Sophia Rodriguez, University of Maryland - College Park