Organizing Learning for Transformation in College Outreach Programmes

Abstract

A master narrative exists that operates to preclude Mexican migrant students from college access. By ethnographically examining the experiences of Mexican migrant students in the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Institute, I describe counterstories that show how Mexican migrant students disrupt the assumptions of the master narrative. Findings suggest that attending to the social organization of learning in college outreach programmes can afford transformative learning opportunities that fracture the master narrative, and provide for new potentialities to emerge in Mexican migrant students' struggles for educational opportunity. The UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Institute is used as an exemplary case showing how pedagogical interventions, such as college outreach programmes, can mediate college access for underrepresented students.

Notes

¹A “fracture” in this sense disrupts normative and expected social behaviour in micro, macro, and mezzo levels of analysis (see Weis & Fine, 2004).

²2001, U.S. Senate Bill 1545, The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act was a drafted federal legislation that sought to afford states the opportunity to extend in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students. It was originally introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives as HR 1918, The Student Adjustment Bill.

³2005, U.S. House Resolution 4437 was a drafted federal legislation that sought to revise current immigration law and further restrict the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

⁴One current version of the DREAM Act has been offered as an amendment to U.S. Senate Bill 1547, The Department of Defense authorization bill. In this amendment, undocumented immigrants could gain legal residency by participating in the U.S. Armed Forces (Justice for Immigrants, 2007).

⁵“That problem posing stuff” is a reference to Freire's Pedagogy of the oppressed (1973).