Teaching and Learning amid Demographic Change: A Thematic Review of School Responses to Newcomer Students in the New Latinx Diaspora

ABSTRACT

Immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States has resulted in dramatic demographic changes in communities across the country since the early 1990s. Newcomers and longstanding residents make sense of and construct their shared society and the rules and norms by which they live alongside one another, and this construction of citizen identity is especially relevant to the work of schools. Schools in receiving communities in the New Latinx Diaspora (NLD)—new receiving sites in which Latinx newcomers have not traditionally settled—face the unique work of responding to and transforming (or not) in response to their new demographics. Framed by an overarching question of how newcomers construct citizen identities in school, three themes emerged from this thematic review of peer-reviewed scholarship exploring school responses to newcomers in the NLD: 1) the many ideological and practical challenges of the mismatch between schools’ longstanding policies and processes and newcomers’ realities, 2) the ways in which improvisation and ideologies limit newcomers’ access to equitable educational experiences, and 3) a handful of cautiously optimistic strategies and opportunities toward equity and inclusion for all students. Taken together, these themes reveal the problematic nature of the spaces in which newcomers construct citizen identities wherein they are regarded as a problem and in which their rights are qualified based on assimilation. However, they also demonstrate how newcomers assert citizen agency – through various forms of resistance and by claiming space – to transform the nature of their schools and communities and the notion of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• newcomer schooling
• New Latinx Diaspora
• school responses
• citizen identities
• demographic change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ “Hispanic” is a contested term (Oboler, 1995; Chomsky, 2007) with racialized connotations, but I use it here to reflect the demographic categories used by the United States Census Bureau (2010) and Pew Research Center (2015). “Latino/a” and/or “Latinx” is a more appropriate term to describe people of Latin American heritage (Oboler, 1995; Chomsky, 2007), although all ethnic and/or racial terminology is subject to debate.

² “White flight” is a phenomenon in which large numbers of White people migrate from a place that is experiencing a demographic change – especially in terms of racial make-up of the place – to a place that is predominantly White (see, for example, Henry & Hankins, 2012). Explicit reasons for the migration typically mask the implicit racial motivations and include better schools, jobs, and increased access to public goods. One relevant consequence of “White flight” is increased segregation – especially in schools (Henry & Hankins, 2012).

³ “Newcomers” here refers not only to people who are new to the country, but also those new to community or school.

⁴ I use the term “school” here in the institutional sense. While I appreciate the many contexts in which education happens, I refer to the institution of schooling as a public space for learning.

⁵ Two-way Immersion (TWI) is a highly regarded approach to bilingual education in which language-minority students (i.e., non-English speaking students) and native English speakers learn together in dual-language classrooms (Cervantes-Soon, 2014).

⁶ Translation refers to written work; interpretation is spoken work.