budding scholar

On the last Friday of every month, Maria Kalman posts a unique artistic story on her New York Times blog. Back in August, the topic was immigration, and how people got to America. I posted about it. Back in April, a piece about women on the Supreme Court. More recently, there was a piece about Thanksgiving, and going back to the land. I love her style, the way she’s taken the medium of a webpage and made it into a story, a way of displaying her art. How she mixes painting and photography, and complicated topics. An inspiration for sure.

I think I’ve settled at last, found the fruit of my study. After days of flip-flopping again, soul searching about what I really care about spending the next three years understanding, I’ve made a decision to focus on specific programs that target integration for newcomers to Spanish schools, and drop the citizenship education focus. This is the opposite of where I thought I’d end up, but I think it makes sense. It allows me to study the broad questions that have been driving my work since I started graduate school. And it avoids the problem of veering too far from issues of immigration, cultural integration, and school interactions. As much as the citizenship education part would be interesting, it takes me too far away from the questions I care the most about. Questions like:

• How do educators, integration programs define integration in Catalonia and Madrid?
• What is taught in these programs?
• What interactions are there between teachers of newcomer programs and mainstream classes?
• How about interactions between students in these programs and the rest of the school?

The next steps are to re-write my study design, tweak the theoretical framing, and start making calls for data collection. (That is, if I don’t flip-flop once again. Hmmm, I hope not!)

Photo by Jim Wilson at the NYT

Who looks after elder immigrants? How do they meet people, get out of the house, make a new life? Is anyone studying their experiences? An article in the New York Times yesterday looked at older immigrants from India and Afghanistan mostly, in Fremont, California. According to the article, one in three seniors is foreign-born in California, and nationwide, about 11% of recently arrived immigrants are over age 65. To my knowledge, no researchers in immigration studies are looking at this population. Traditionally immigration studies has focused on adult workers, and recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on studying the experiences of the second generation. But perhaps I’ll focus my next project (post graduate school!) on studying the integration experiences and challenges of older immigrants. Perhaps I could convince people who fund research on the elderly (which is a growing population, and area of research) to fund a study of older immigrants, and/or one of my graduate students could study their experiences.

A New York Times article this Sunday talks about Somali-Americans in Minneapolis choosing to go back to Somalia to fight for an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that is trying to overthrow the government in Somalia. One of their teachers talks about their reasons for joining as being a “crisis of belonging”.  These young boys, who had come to the U.S. as teenagers or been born here to immigrant parents, felt disconnected from both their homeland and to their new country. Many of them had done well in school, gone on to college, but still felt they did not belong. Fighting for this group in their homeland gives them a feeling of purpose and belonging.

Belonging is important. Feeling that we have a place in the world, a meaningful place with others. I wonder about belonging for the many immigrant youth in Spain. I wonder about studying it here in the U.S.  I wonder whether anyone is studying the links between belonging and policy, how school policies might make a difference for youth experiences of belonging. Could the schools where these boys went in Minneapolis have handled things differently? What about the communities? What can schools do to teach people to be tied to their new country? What, if anything, should they do?  And what about policy implementation–does the policy matter if it’s not implemented?

A lot of discussion of language and multicultural policy talks about this very issue, with people having differing opinions about what schools should be doing to foster belonging to the country. I am curious what they actually do, under current policies. And what experiences immigrant youth are having. Perhaps this will be one focus of my dissertation.

What do you feel you belong to? What, if anything, have your schooling experiences had to do with your feelings of belonging?

Education is multidisciplinary and as a result we end up knowing bits of things from many different disciplines. Anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, and myriad crossover disciplines like public policy. This can make it more difficult to figure out our intellectual identity in education, especially if we are more academic than practice-oriented.

Immigration studies is an interdisciplinary field as well, pulling from the traditional disciplines much like education. Most scholars have training in one of the traditional disciplines.

Where does someone trained in education fit in terms of disciplines? I struggle with this sometimes. Figuring out where my contribution will be.

An ongoing series of the New York Times on immigrants and their impact on institutions in the United States brings home how timely my project is. There’s so much to figure out about how social integration works, and the role of schools, and relations between different groups. Interesting how so much is happening in the suburbs now, rather than the cities. I wonder what this means for the social institutions like schools that serve immigrants and their children. And what about debates about language? What do all of these questions look like in Spain? What would a similar series of investigative reporting uncover?

Another article in the same series has a quote about teachers: ” Teachers set the tone. In their classrooms, some tiptoed around the immigration debate or avoided it altogether. Advisers to student groups created to examine pressing issues — including the school newspaper, the Model United Nations and the World of Difference Club — similarly ignored the matter. And the teachers for those learning English made little effort to organize activities that would bring them and mainstream students together.”

High school is especially difficult because it’s the gateway into college and the labor market, into being on one’s own. I’m reminded of the time I spent working with a newcomer program while I was at Stanford. The local high school was unprepared for so many newcomers, and created separate classes for them, as well as structures to support them in mainstream classes. Tension with native-born Mexican students was often high, as were relations with Black students. Many of the students were undocumented.

How can policy support these teachers, these students, these schools?