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.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• citizenship education
• immigrant youth
• immigration
• secondary school
• teachers
• undocumented

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank additional members of the research team, especially Mee Joo Kim, as well as the work of Cristian Soraida Ramon, Michelle Hur, Elizabeth Castro, and Jennifer Charoni for data collection and transcription. We also thank Terence Beck, Walter Parker, and Lisa Sibbett for their valuable feedback on drafts. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting in 2016. We thank our discussant, Kathy Bickmore, and our session chair, Judy Pace, for helpful comments. All errors and oversights are our own. Most of all, we thank the teachers in our study and their students, from whom we learned a great deal.

Notes

¹ Immigrants fall into a range of legal status categories. Historically, the drawing of boundaries around immigrants’ “legality” or “illegality” has been tied to larger American racial dilemmas as well as to the struggles involved in realizing a more pluralistic democracy (D. King, 2000; Ngai, 2004). With respect to our terminology, we refer to those born abroad as immigrants and, following Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001), we refer to both immigrants and their children as immigrant-origin. We refer to immigrants who migrated as adults as first generation, immigrants who migrated prior to adolescence as generation 1.5, and the children of immigrants as second generation. Undocumented and immigrant rights organizations make the case that using language such as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants” when referring to people is dehumanizing and should be avoided. While actions may be illegal, humans in and of themselves are not. Instead, we use the term “undocumented” (see Jefferies & Dabach, 2014).

² As Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964), argued, we must distinguish what is moral from what is current law.

³ All participant and place names are pseudonyms. We also note that we are intentionally vague when reporting on demographics. While generally in research it is common practice to provide extensive information on research sites, within research on undocumented populations there are additional layers of protection that are needed to protect human subjects. We avoid percentages of demographic breakdowns and other information that would allow people to more easily identify the sites.

⁴ Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from interviews.

⁵ DACA is an immigration policy (via executive order) enacted during the Obama administration in 2012. It protects undocumented youth (those who came to the country before they were 16 years old) from deportation and authorizes work permits for them (Gonzales et al., 2017). The Trump administration “rescinded” the program on September 6, 2017, charging Congress with enacting a legal remedy to the dilemma DACA beneficiaries face (Gelatt, 2017).

⁶ For more analysis on classroom interactions that took place when Ms. Aguilar openly discussed the impact of immigration detention and deportation in local communities, see Dabach (2015a).

⁷ The DREAM Act failed narrowly in 2010. Currently some states have their own versions that afford rights to a sub-section of the undocumented youth population. However, state-level DREAM Acts cannot provide a pathway to legal residence nor to citizenship, which is solely in jurisdiction of the federal government.

⁸ As noted earlier, Hayduk (2006) provides historical context on the status of noncitizen voting rights. Contemporary efforts at restoring nonvoting rights have also emerged (Astor, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by the Spencer Foundation and the University of Washington’s (UW) Research Royalty Fund (RRF). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the funding agencies. We thank the Spencer Foundation and the RRF for funds to conduct this research.