" We Don’t Look at Them as Any Different”

Abstract

As the population of students with at least one foreign-born parent increases in US schools, educators play key roles in supporting them. The anti-immigrant context during the Trump era has heightened the urgency for all US educators to understand the experiences of their immigrant-origin students and respond accordingly. Discourses about immigrant-origin students have profound implications on how their educators understand and support them. In this study, I explored the nature of the discourses educators privilege and perpetuate when working with immigrant-origin students. I studied two distinct contexts with varying community reflections of the national conversation during the Trump era. I proposed the following questions: How do educators in two different immigrant-serving districts make sense of their immigrant-origin students’ experiences in an anti-immigrant sociopolitical context? What larger discourses about immigrants and immigrant-origin students do educators reflect as they make sense of their immigrant-origin students’ experiences? Through a thematic analysis of 10 educator interviews from each district, I found that three key factors influenced educators’ sensemaking about their immigrant-origin students’ experiences: 1) comparison of immigrant-origin students to non-immigrant-origin peers, 2) responsibility towards deeply understanding immigrant-origin students’ experiences, and 3) personal and professional identity and experiences with immigrants and immigration. A critical discourse analysis of policy documents and language related to supporting immigrant-origin students surfaced different defining discourses about immigrant-origin students on federal, state, and district levels. The findings led to three key insights: 1) Educators made sense of their immigrant-origin students’ experiences through existing individual and collective mental models of immigrants and immigration, or lack thereof, 2) The location, student demographics, and sociopolitical backdrop of each district context heavily influenced individual educators’ discourse about immigrant-origin students’ experiences, and 3) Power can be shared between federal, state, and district-level entities in order to create more humanizing and culturally sustaining environments for immigrant-origin students. The conclusion includes implications related to these key insights.