“Luckily, not everyone I encountered during my k-12 public school experience sought to silence and erase my culture. Not everyone demanded that I speak standard English. There were moments of relief.” (Prieto, 2005, p.4)

In The stings of social hierarchies Linda Prieto talks about her experience growing up Chicana and what her experience was in school. She talks about how many of her experiences in school in the US involved teachers telling her to only speak English and not speak Spanish and how her family, especially her mother, made sure that she didn’t loose her Mexican roots by speaking only Spanish in the house and keeping their traditions from Mexico strong. Because of her family, Prieto was able to become bilingual by keeping up with her Spanish in the home. However, unfortunately this is not always the case with first or second generation students or students who immigrate to the US at a young age. Continue reading Don’t “erase” minority cultures, foster them →

“Thus, because newcomer immigrant youth undergo profound shifts in their sense of self and are struggling to negotiate changing circumstances in relationships with parents and peers, positive school relationships can bridge the gap between home and school cultures and create important linguistic and cultural connections to the new society.” Page 63 of “Adolescents from Immigrant Families: Relationships and Adaptation in School” by Suarez-Orozco, Qin & Amthor.

As adolescents undergo immigration experiences they are divorced from aspects of the “predictable contexts” that defined their lives including, “community ties, jobs, customs, and (often) language,” as well as their many social relationships (p52). Immigrant students of adolescent age have begun the process of identity formation in response to these predictable contexts. Thus, the unpredictable contexts they experience in their receiving socio-cultural environment can be a jarring affront to the ongoing process of identity development. They become vulnerable to the many demands of these unpredictable contexts. Too often these demands center around assimilation, which is a subtractive approach to cultural adaptation demanding that an individual sacrifice important pieces of his identity. I see this manipulation of vulnerability toward assimilation as a social injustice and a crime against diversity.
In order to respond to this issue I offer the normative solution of implementing intercultural learning experiences at the high school level. Continue reading Intercultural Learning Experiences →

“In contrast, among immigrant minorities, academic achievement and adoption of cultural values for success typical of the dominant group are not perceived as giving up any part of one’s identity. Immigrants may even be more willing to suffer discrimination because they perceive these as a natural reaction to outsiders. Unlike involuntary minorities, immigrants perceive school as necessary to obtain good jobs and wages…School and school success are not perceived as the property of whites…” – Ethnic Identity and Schooling: The Experience of Haitian Immigrant Youth.
Continue reading Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: Can you be both? →

Lee, S. J. (2008). The impact of stereotyping on Asian American students. In M. Sadowski (Ed.), Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (2^nd Ed., pp. 75-84). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

“Teachers and other education professionals commonly evaluate Asian American students according to the standards of the model minority. While there is evidence that Asian Americans do well academically as a group, this lumping together of numerous Asian ethnic groups hides the variation in academic achievement across groups and among individuals. Students able to live up to the standards are held up as examples for others to follow, and those unable to meet them are deemed failed or substandard Asians. In my research on Hmong American students at a high school in the Midwest, I found educators identified many Southeast Asian American students as failing to achieve model minority performance. ‘An East Asian student might be number three in the class, going to Yale, but the Southeast Asians aren’t very motivated,’ one counselor said. Here, the ‘success’ of East Asian American (i.e., model minority) students is used against the Southeast Asian American youth to cast the latter as underachievers.”

I chose this passage because it serves as a great pivot point for my experiences with different populations of asian students, asian american students, and stereotypes about them. I found the counselor’s observation about Southeast Asian students very interesting because I’ve found it to be the opposite of the truth. I worked for two summers as an Upward Bound summer mentor. I was responsible for the health and happiness of high school students as they stayed in university dorms and took prep classes for 6 weeks. There is a good sized Hmong population in Northwest Arkansas where the camp took place and several of our students were Hmong. They were all hard working. But that’s not what they noticed. I noticed that despite several administrators’ attempts to somehow put these kids in the same category, their uniqueness defied it. They supported each other as immigrants or the children of immigrants in understanding differences in culture or social norms but outside of that each had their own group of friends, interests, and very different personalities. Since I’m friends with them on Facebook, I’ve gotten to watch them mature and reach their goal of going to college. They’re still united by their shared background but each has their own interest.

Before I went to Japan, I had an image of immaculately uniformed perfect students listening and quietly doing their work. Then I started my job and met class 2-2 at Toyotsu Junior High. I was warned about them but thought, how bad can they be? Think altered uniform jackets with purple silk linings and colorful buttons, dyed hair, piercing, short skirts, crazy patterned socks, sprawling desks and foul language. I walked in and they all yelled “DARE (WHO)?!?” My preconceptions were shattered. They were my favorite class. I learned a lot over the two years I spent with class 2-2. I credit them with my NSFW Japanese and a much needed reevaluation of how to approach people I don’t know anything about.

The best way is to approach them like I don’t know anything about them. Nothing. Reading this selection reminded me of that. Everyone is an individual. Cultural information can indeed be very useful, but it cannot describe or explain every individual. So every time I make a 2 second judgement a certain student pops into my mind. Chair pushed back, legs spread wide, scowling and asking who I am.

“By any measure, immigration is one of the most stressful events individuals can undergo, removing them from their predictable contexts-community ties, jobs, customs, and (often) language. Stripped of many of their significant relationships-extended family members, best friends, neighbors-immigrants are often disoriented and feel a keen sense of loss.” Suárez-Orozco, C., Qin, D. B., & Amthor, R. F. (2008). Relationships and adaptation in school. In M. Sadowski (Ed.), Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (2nd Ed,. Pp. 51-74). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Endurance: the most underappreciated trait of immigrants as they arrive and adapt to assimilated life in America. As educators, it is our duty to our students to empathize with their plights and lives so as to effectively tailor education toward their individual learning situations, thus optimizing achievement. With immigrants, in particular, many educators make the mistake of confining students to an assumed norm or stereotype generated from bias; many believe in false binaries, or teaching from/in deficits. This is detrimental to the education of immigrants, for it perpetuates a cycle of the student thinking that they are less than, thus enabling them to achieve to sub-standards. Continue reading Enduring Empathy: The Duty of an Educator →