Coloniality and Education: Negotiating Discourses of Immigration in Schools and Communities Through Border Thinking

Abstract

In this article, we examine the discursive construction of knowledge about immigration in two geographic spaces whose “border” many students navigate: a school context meant to support English Language Learners and an out-of-school faith based organization serving immigrant communities. We draw on the concept of “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 18) to understand how colonial histories continue to influence contemporary educational contexts. Through examples from students’, community members’, and educators’ interactions with available discourses of immigration, we elaborate on the implications of community knowledge for revising school practices to represent a fuller complexity of immigration experiences.

Acknowledgments

We thank the editors and reviewers of Equity & Excellence in Education, Gregory Wolmart, and Robert LeBlanc for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.