Immigrants, Schools and Social Integration
For my Language and Immigration Reading Group today we talked about the book “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration” by Richard Alba and Victor Nee. The scholarship in the book inspires us toward being better scholars ourselves, and our conversation pushes my intellectual borders more than many other experiences at Berkeley so far.
What would it look like to apply the ideas about assimilation and social integration to education? How might the (sociological) theory in the book be a tool for studying what happens to immigrants in schools? How can studying schools relate to the broader ideas Alba and Nee present? In the real world, people still expect immigrants to assimilate in the old way, adjusting to the dominant culture. In Spain, right now, people don’t want or expect their own culture to change as a result of immigration. In fact, they are resentful of immigrants’ efforts to change schools to incorporate their own cultures. But change of the receiving culture is a fact of migration.
How can these broad theoretical interests and basic questions about the problem of integration in societies with large numbers of immigrants be fashioned into a set of research questions based in education?