Search Results (18)

This article examines how media outlets create a “border spectacle” (De Genova 2013) in schools, which contributes to the criminalization and deportability of undocumented immigrant students. Using content analysis, we studied n = 30 news articles that covered an incident in 2017 where two undocumented young men were accused of sexual assault and rape of a young woman in the school they all attended. This paper builds on the “school-to-deportation pipeline” by suggesting that, in addition to the zero-tolerance behavioral policies established by schools and teacher’s racist behaviors, the media coverage of alleged criminal acts also play a role in the expulsion and criminalization of undocumented students. The analysis of the news articles highlights four types of media frames employed to criminalize the young men involved in the case prior to these allegations being addressed by a court of law: (1) immigrant youth as sexual predators; (2) immigration as a correlation to a criminal act; (3) parents as the real victims of the case; and (4) sexual assault victims as collateral damage. Each of these media frames are built on xenophobic tropes that have historically facilitated the marginalization of Black and Latinx people, but in this case, it specifically targets undocumented young men. Collectively, the four media frames exemplify how media create a “border spectacle” in schools, manufacturing a moral hysteria to further marginalize and criminalize undocumented youth. We argue that, as a result of schools becoming border spectacles, undocumented young people’s fear of feeling targeted based on their “illegality” is intensified, and their sense of inclusion is hindered in an often thought to be safe and inclusive space for undocumented young people. Full article

Although multilingualism is a major issue in educational policies, especially in states hosting a high number of newcomer immigrant students, there is limited research exploring the experiences of a multilingual group of newcomer students and how they use language in schools. This article draws on 112 interviews with students from an immigrant background across four high schools in Arizona and New York. We illuminate the role of language in shaping identity and inclusion. Through conceptualizing power and language ideology, we find that language ideologies and practices shape the perception of students’ social interactions in school settings. Our findings also indicate that teachers’ practices and school policies surrounding language(s) have the potential to affect how students view language in relation to their own identity and via social interactions. We contribute to an understanding of how language policies and ideologies shape the experiences and power dynamics of diverse, multilingual, immigrant-origin students. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings of 2020–2022 created an altered and challenging landscape for teaching public health. Challenging and direct experiences with these public health issues and their reverberations shaped how some faculty and many students participated in both online and in-person classrooms. In this project, we conducted a narrative analysis of oral history interviews with eight faculty members at a public university in New York City to understand how they reacted to these events and reconsidered their public health teaching during this period. We map what propelled faculty along paths of change and where these paths led. We learn that participating faculty shifted in varied ways toward more intentional and sometimes more antiracist teaching practices. Two experiences were foundational to these shifts: (1) faculty attunement to student realities during this time, and (2) faculty reflection on their own social positionings (i.e., race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, age, immigration status, etc.) and their development of critical consciousness. These findings provide insights into how faculty conceptualize, support, and change their teaching approaches during periods of upheaval, particularly in the context of limited institutional support for faculty development. Finally, we discuss key issues for institutions seeking to formalize and enhance shifts like those described. Full article

Across the United States, the number of classrooms welcoming young students who are new English language learners (ELL) is rapidly growing. Motivated by a dramatic increase in the number of Myanmar- and Burma-originating immigrants now attending English-speaking schools in the rural, upper midwestern United States, this study systematically considers how the presence of Karen immigrant students impacts the instructional decisions that K-12 classroom teachers make using an exploratory case study method. Several recurrent themes emerged, and findings can be used to help better prepare both pre-service and in-service teachers to meet the needs of their ELL students, as well as policy makers. These emergent themes include the following: (a) authentic teacher–family relationships are key; (b) visual/hands-on learning and the use of technology enhance student achievement; (c) student work must be completed during the school day in classrooms; (d) teachers’ purposeful use of parallel language is critical for learning; (e) rigor can be maintained, although quantity is often adjusted; and (f) targeted ESL/cultural training for pre-service and newly hired teachers is positively influential. Such informed training often seems to help teachers learn key cultural distinctions and become better able to identify the most effective ways to meet the needs of students. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent school lockdowns in many countries forced teachers to deliver lessons online to ensure that students continued their studies. This shift, which caused major challenges for school systems worldwide, significantly affected the Cypriot education system, which is highly centralised and in which teacher-centred practices are widely used. In many countries, teachers and students were unfamiliar with the new teaching and evaluation methods, and learners in the most marginalised groups were deemed to be at risk of falling behind. For these reasons, an online survey was undertaken in Cyprus from March to September 2020 as part of an international online survey initiated by a university in the Northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. The survey examined teachers’ perspectives on the new online pedagogical practices; the challenges they faced; and the impact of these practices on the learning progress of all students, including two vulnerable groups, i.e., individuals with learning disabilities and immigrant students aged 6–18 years. Key findings suggest that the teachers were unprepared to design inclusive student-centred digital activities and deliver online lessons and that distance teaching may have negatively affected students’ learning experiences, especially in the vulnerable groups. Full article

The perception that teachers have of cultural diversity is essential when it comes to the educational attention given to immigrant students. The objective is to determine how teachers perceive students’ cultural diversity and families’ commitment with the education of their children, and if this perception can influence teachers’ expectations regarding students and their families. This is qualitative research study based on hermeneutic phenomenology developed through semi-structured interviews, applied on an intentional sample of 16 Spanish primary school teachers. The results indicate that teachers need the assistance of educational specialists, training in cultural diversity, and intercultural communication skills. They also recognize the importance of enhancing collaboration with immigrant families. Hence, education must be rethought, bearing in mind the perceptions of teachers, empowering students and their families with new innovative formulas aimed at incorporating their cultural references in the curriculum, and providing culturally relevant teaching. Full article

This article presents findings from a four-year collaborative research project on immigrant and mixed-status families in Santa Cruz County, California. The project employed a new model of critical community-engaged scholarship called Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) in order to gain access to and build trust with this vulnerable population. The study used an overarching theoretical framework of “belonging” to identify six key factors most consequential for belonging and/or exclusion, including access to education, economic security, legal immigration status, health services, opportunities for youth, and social networks. The findings reveal the complex and interconnected nature of these factors and demonstrate how exclusion experienced due to a lack of legal immigration status had far-reaching effects on interviewees’ job prospects and experiences of economic, health, and housing insecurity. The article highlights the importance of using an assets-based approach to draw out the myriad ways interviewees and communities create spaces, networks, and ways to promote and enhance both material and emotional forms of belonging. The CISER model and its participatory approach also provide tangible benefits for community partners and undergraduate researchers. This article contributes to the literature on immigrant experiences and critical community-engaged research while offering insights into sources of and systemic barriers to collective belonging. Full article

This paper examines Latino/a children’s roles and obligations to their immigrant families. Bridging insights from the literature on the “new sociology of childhood,” immigrant incorporation, and care work, this essay argues that children perform important—but often invisible—labor in immigrant families. Dominant ideologies depict childhood as an “innocent” time wherein young people are in need of guidance and are too underdeveloped to make meaningful contributions. However, this construction of childhood ignores the lived realities of the children of immigrants, who often serve as gatekeepers and connect their families to services and resources in their communities. This essay examines six dimensions of support that the children of immigrants provide to their families, namely, language and cultural help, financial contributions, bureaucratic assistance, emotional labor, legal support, and guidance with technology. This essay concludes with implications for scholars, students, and policymakers on the importance of recognizing this labor, along with future directions for research. Full article

The increased aging of populations and rises in immigration have prompted the design of new methodologies and instruments for fostering the invisible care of geriatric patients among health science students in accordance with the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. A total of 656 psychology, nursing and dentistry students participated in this study, which had a pretest–posttest design and was implemented over the course of three academic years. The intervention groups received training using an active learning methodology based on a case study involving a geriatric patient; specifically, a Maghrebi woman. The control groups were not exposed to the case study. The CCI-U questionnaire was designed ad hoc to evaluate the acquisition of invisible competences for caring for geriatric patients in accordance with their age, sex, emotional situation and ethnic origin. The questionnaire had a reliability of α = 0.63 to 0.72 and its factor solution was found to have a good fit. Students in the intervention groups scored higher than those in the control groups, with the difference being statistically significant for ethnic origin in all three undergraduate courses and all three academic years. The proper application of this active learning methodology fosters the invisible care of geriatric patients among students in accordance with the 2030 Agenda. Full article

Academic and community research partnerships have gained traction as a potential bridge between the university and local area to address pressing social issues. A key question for developing justice-oriented research is how to integrate best practices for creating genuine, authentic research partnerships. In this paper, we discuss the process of building a critical community-engaged project that examines how urban redevelopment changes neighborhoods within immigrant and/or communities of color. Focusing on Long Beach, California, in this article, we detail the development of a mixed-methods study that involves undergraduate students and community members as co-collaborators. We discuss the use and outcomes of co-walking as method, emphasizing observational findings, as well as the process of building team collaboration. We find that neighborhoods in Long Beach are changing rapidly in terms of the use of greening, increased technology integration within neighborhoods, and modern aesthetics, revealing that new residents will likely be younger and single residents with disposable income and no children. From this process, we identified a more critical question for the research project: “Development for whom?”. We argue that co-walking as method is an observational and relational process that assists with the foundational steps of building a critical community-engaged research project. Full article

Migrant workers have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine their access to health services and social protection during the pandemic, we conducted an exploratory scoping review on experiences of migrant workers in three countries with comparable immigration, health, and welfare policies: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. After screening 961 peer-reviewed and grey literature sources, five studies were included. Using immigration status as a lens, we found that despite more inclusive policies in response to the pandemic, temporary migrant workers, especially migrant farm workers and international students, remained excluded from health services and social protection. Findings demonstrate that exploitative employment practices, precarity, and racism contribute to the continued exclusion of temporary migrant workers. The interplay between these factors, with structural racism at its core, reflect the colonial histories of these countries and their largely neoliberal approaches to immigration. To address this inequity, proactive action that recognizes and targets these structural determinants at play is essential. Full article

This article provides an insight into ethnic inequalities in education, from the point of view of successful students with an immigrant background. Since the 1990s, educational and migration studies have examined the unexpected pathways of disadvantaged students: researchers tested different hypotheses concerning drivers of success, highlighting social, family, and institutional mechanisms that have reproduced inequalities but also generated new opportunities. The educational success of students with a migrant background, however, is under-investigated in Italy, which represents a relevant context in which to explore the coexistence of persisting educational drawbacks and successful schooling for the children of migrants, born in Italy or abroad. Using data from a qualitative study carried out in northern Italy, the analysis is based on autobiographies written by an heterogenous group of 65 students of immigrant origin attending different types of upper secondary schools. The analysis reveals the presence of different meanings, attitudes, and narratives of success among these students, which vary according to the different cohorts of immigrant-origin students. Each group implements different successful strategies—standing out, working hard, waiting—inspired by individualistic and collective logics, which can imply specific risks for students and different types of impact on equal opportunities and social cohesion. These findings could open new avenues of research and intervention, helping policymakers and practitioners to think and act, given that success is indeed possible for immigrant-origin students. Full article

In this piece, we share some insights gleaned from oral histories of immigrant organizers involved in New Jersey state campaigns for access to higher education, weaving them with scholarly personal narratives (Nash & Viray, 2013) from the authors on their own youth organizing and/or experience working in an undocumented student support center. We are guided by the following questions: (1) How do New Jersey immigrant organizers make meaning of and create spaces of hope and home through their organizing? (2) What propels this work and sustains it across cohorts of organizers? We discuss five general areas in response: the experience of invisibility and organizing efforts that aim to counter it, the co-construction of homespaces within higher education institutions, the importance of (re)setting narratives, celebrating wins while pressing for more, and the intergenerational work that inspires and sustains change. We close the article with reflections on the ways in which formal and everyday organizing are acts of love and care, from which home is collectively built. Full article

In the context of globalization, the landscape of language in Korea has changed dramatically in the last three decades because of the influx of marriage migrants and foreign workers. The growing number of immigrant and international marriages has led to the emergence of new linguistic minorities in Korea who have multicultural and multilingual backgrounds, and they challenge Korea’s long-lasting tradition of linguistic homogeneity and purity. Language related education for this newly emerging group of language minority students, whose number has increased dramatically since the late-1990s, has become a salient issue. This paper critically analyzes the current education policies and programs designed for the newly emerging group of language minority students, and examines the prospects for sustainable development of these students in Korea. In particular, it focuses on the underlying ideology of linguistic nationalism and assimilationist integration regime embedded in various education policy initiatives and reforms, which require language minority students to forgo their multilingual background and forcibly embrace linguistic homogeneity. The paper elaborates on alternative educational programs that could enable language minority students to achieve sustainable development and progress. Full article

With its unique geopolitical status and multicultural setting, Hong Kong has harbored different youth groups generated from cross-border migration with mainland China who are tied to different cultural values and identifications. This study aims to investigate how social capital embedded in the family, school, and community influences the cultural identities across three groups of Chinese youths in the educational system: local students; cross-border students (born in Hong Kong, living in the neighbor city of mainland China but attending schools in Hong Kong on daily commute); and new immigrant students (born in mainland China but living in Hong Kong for less than seven years). Using data from a cross-sectional survey with 2180 fourth- to ninth-grade students in Hong Kong, the logistic regression results suggest that family and community social capital play significant roles in shaping the cultural identity of youths. Implications of the research findings are discussed. Full article