Second-Generation, Multilingual Adolescents Shaping Spaces of School Belonging and Inclusion for Immigrant Peers

• In Event: Futures in Flux: How Young People Navigate an Uncertain World

Abstract

Schools are main institutions for newcomer immigrants entering the U.S. and developing networks for support, inclusion, and belongingness. They are also spaces where racially minoritized, multilingual, and immigrant students experience multiple forms of exclusion and “unbelongingness,” especially within the recent anti-immigrant climate in the U.S. Past research points to school conditions fostering peer and educator relationships as important for immigrant students to feel a sense of belonging and connectedness within schools; however, this focus on friendships or educators removes the agentic ways in which immigrant students themselves participate in and shape spaces of belonging in schools. Additionally, we know less about how second-generation, multilingual immigrant youth engage in processes of inclusion and advocacy on behalf of emerging multilingual (EM), immigrant peers. We contribute to past research using multi-wave interview data with multilingual peer mentors of color within a historically White public high school with increasing immigrant populations in the U.S. south. We examine how these mentors support school and classroom belonging and inclusion for EM immigrant peers while negotiating power relations and their own inclusion as multilingual students of color from immigrant backgrounds. We draw on theoretical scholarship on spaces of belonging, which can occur at the relational level and involve “the phenomenological experience of feeling recognized, valued, and securely cared for” (Bruhn & Gonzales, 2023: 6). We bring attention to how second-generation immigrant youth transform school exclusionary processes and construct spaces of belonging through their peer mentoring, classroom advocacy, and brokering of communication and educator relations for immigrant peers.

Authors

• Melanie Jones Gast, University of Louisville

• James Chisholm, University of Louisville

• Yohimar Sivira-Gonzalez, University of Cincinnati

• Jillian Pearsall, University of Louisville