Dafney Blanca Dabach

“I Am Not a Shelter!”: Stigma and Social Boundaries in Teachers’ Accounts of Students’ Experience in Separate “Sheltered” English Learner Classrooms

This study investigates how teachers interact with immigrant-origin youth in school-based contexts of reception that mediate youths educational opportunities. One understudied context is sheltered instruction, where English learners (ELs) are placed into separate content-area courses to target their linguistic needs. This qualitative study highlights the unintended consequences of ELs’ placements by examining 3 teacher cases in depth. Teachers’ accounts reveal that EL content courses designed to increase access were, in fact, stigmatizing spaces where students made social distinctions and engaged in impression management to mitigate perceptions that they lacked intelligence because of their programmatic placements. Teachers also managed stigma in distinct ways, representing different orientations and communication strategies in response to students’ experiences of stigma. This investigation raises questions about the tensions embedded in how language status, race, and classification intersect with the very solutions intended to ameliorate inequalities, as well as teachers’ roles in the education of immigrant EL-designated youth.

Teacher Placement Into Immigrant English Learner Classrooms Limiting Access in Comprehensive High Schools

This qualitative study examined how secondary teachers were assigned to teach courses intended to expand English learners’ (ELs’) access to academic subjects. Theoretically, this research extends the “contexts of reception” framework from immigration studies into the educational realm by investigating how teachers—as one important contextual variable—entered into settings designed for immigrant-origin ELs. Analysis examined institutional processes, norms, and policies as well as participants’ practices. Findings suggest that novice teachers were most likely to be placed into separate EL content-area classrooms, unless more senior teachers requested these assignments or administrators intervened. Ultimately, this article uses teacher assignment processes to illustrate how contexts for immigrant-origin youth are constructed and contested and how ELs’ opportunities to learn were jeopardized in local settings.

Discourses of Exclusion: Immigrant-Origin Youth Responses to Immigration Debates in an Election Year

ABSTRACT Political discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Here, we seek to understand how those in liminal positions respond to political debates that raise issues of boundary maintenance. Drawing from Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as Gramsci’s concept of common sense, we analyzed how a superdiverse sample of 26 immigrant-origin adolescents (from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe) responded to video segments of presidential debates from the 2012 U.S. election. Youth’s responses to presidential video clips about undocumented immigration policies fell along a spectrum from inclusionary to exclusionary, with many voicing mixed responses to immigration policies. Half of the youth referenced their own family’s migration experience when discussing immigration policy, most frequently in empathetic ways; however, this did not preclude them from aligning with discourses of exclusion. The theme of fairness was prevalent in their responses, yet it emerged in distinct ways. This work highlights the need to interrogate common-sense discourses of exclusion.

Future Perfect?: Teachers' Expectations and Explanations of Their Latino Immigrant Students' Postsecondary Futures.

ABSTRACT Teacher expectancy research has demonstrated the greatest effects for members of racialized groups. Most research has focused on students’ near-term abilities; missing are understandings of how teachers perceive their students’ future trajectories. Drawing on social mirroring and attribution theories, this study investigates how 14 elementary, middle, and high school teachers of Latino immigrant students described and explained their students’ post-high school futures. Most teachers described their students as non-college-bound, with employment likely in the service sector. They attributed their students’ futures to family related explanations more often than to structural factors. The study’s implications emphasize the need to develop deeper understanding of structural inequalities that mediate students’ trajectories including schooling factors.

Teachers Navigating Civic Education When Students Are Undocumented: Building Case Knowledge

Abstract Currently, a knowledge gap exists at the intersection of immigration, citizenship, and education. We have little knowledge of how teachers teach about citizenship when they anticipate that some of their students are undocumented. Conceptually, we distinguish between formal and cultural citizenship and draw from immigrant political incorporation theories. We investigate how high school civics teachers navigated the tensions of teaching youth in settings meant to socialize them for future political participation when some students did not have formal citizenship rights. Based on 88 hours of observational and interview data, we analyze three cases of U.S. government teachers selected from a pool of 39 secondary social studies educators. We ask: How did skilled and experienced civics teachers who supported immigrants’ rights teach about elections in mixed-citizenship settings where some youth had formal citizenship rights and others did not? We argue that key features of teaching in mixed-citizenship classrooms were context, safety, and legitimacy. We also generate a set of propositions to be tested in future research. As scholars increasingly discuss what civic education should look like in light of immigration and globalization, we offer grounded perspectives about the situated roles of teachers in mixed-citizenship contexts. Understanding how skilled and experienced teachers address the possibilities of inclusion despite structural exclusions opens a window into how schools can be sites that defy the formal boundaries of citizenship.