Straddling Two Worlds: Immigrant Adolescents' Construction of Identities

Challenges Around Immigration And Education

Education is a challenge confronting immigrants in a country where they are perceived as cultural and linguistic outsiders. School becomes, for immigrant youth, the next most important societal institution to family, given that it is a powerful indicator of the child’s ongoing and future well-being. School also serves as a primary form of contact with mainstream society. However, schools of the majority culture become potential sites of dissent (Suarez-Orozco and Suarez Orozco, 2009). This may be because the school is not a neutral objective arena, as it has the goal of shaping people’s values, skills, and knowledge bases (Heath, 1983; Giroux, 1992; Foucault, 1980; Freire, 1970). In such a school context, where institutional ideology serves to control social practice, education is a challenge for immigrant children, as their practices at school are prone to be “judged problematic or inadequate” or even “inferior attempts” (Sheridan, Street & Bloome, 2000, p. 81). Moreover, immigrants in majority schools can be defined as motivated or unmotivated, introverted or extroverted, inhibited or uninhibited, without reflecting on their cultural and linguistic backgrounds; such affective factors are often socially constructed in unequal relations of power (Norton, 2013; 2015; 2016). In other words, the cultural background to which the children belong serves to include or exclude them from access to privileged discourses. The schools themselves often construct these inequalities between majority and minority children by validating what is mainstream and rejecting the little stories in educational settings, which contributes to the challenge posed by education.