Students protest against banning critical race theory in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in 2022. Such bans could further limit education about immigrants.
When it comes to immigration, this country is facing a dangerous and rapidly growing threat.
However, the threat is not what is depicted in most media coverage. It’s not related to jobs in this country, the safety of our citizens or even the caravans of people flooding the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, this threat has humbler roots: it’s in our classrooms, and it’s causing us to view immigrants through a warped and distorted lens.
Despite the integral roles they play in nearly every aspect of American life, immigrants are relegated to minimal coverage in kindergarten through 12-grade curriculum. Perhaps worse, the few instances that students do learn about immigrants, they are primarily depicted as a part of our past. From the moment children enter kindergarten until they graduate 13 years later, students will primarily learn about immigrants fleetingly in U.S. and world history.
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The History–Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, for example, mentions immigration and immigrants only 21 times across the K-12 framework. A third of those instances show up in 11th grade U.S. history and include a focus on industrialization, the Immigration Act of 1965 and “the expanding religious pluralism … that resulted from large-scale immigration in the twentieth century.” These are important topics, but alone, they paint a picture of immigration as something in our hazy yester-year rather than acknowledging a diverse present and future.
Aside from being an inaccurate portrayal of current immigration trends, this curriculum causes harm.
When students come to understand immigration as exclusively a topic in the past, immigrants become grossly misunderstood and seen as exceptions to American exceptionalism. Because immigrants are not treated as living, breathing humans in schools, it is easy to foment disdain toward them. Scholarship on immigrant youth experiences in schools demonstrates how feelings of exclusion are experienced by students during their K-12 schooling and persist the rest of their lives.
It is little wonder, then, that the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump — have relied on xenophobic and dehumanizing language in recent weeks. Trump has made calling immigrants “animals” a cornerstone of his campaign. President Biden notably referred to “an illegal” during his State of the Union address. Biden has since expressed regret for the phase, but the language — intentional or not — demonstrates the lasting effects of learning to think of immigrants as inhuman in the present moment. Such bipartisan vagaries are made possible by a curriculum that renders immigrants either invisible or as unwelcome outsiders.
California’s demographics highlight the mismatch between politicized xenophobia and the reality of immigrant life today. Recent data from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that nearly a third of California’s population is foreign born and that half of the state’s children have an immigrant parent. It takes simply looking at an elementary school’s morning drop-off in the Bay Area to be reminded that immigrants are not a blip in America’s history. They are thriving and present.
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Placing narratives of immigration solely in America’s past is only one way that schools mitigate understanding who immigrants are. If immigrants are given short shrift in social studies contexts, they are all but invisible in other subject areas.
Further, many transnational youth come into this country speaking multiple languages. However, instead of celebrating the linguistic variety of our newcomer students, schools often frame multilingualism as a deficit. Placing the “English learner” label on these students can have deleterious effects on their long-term learning opportunities.
At seemingly every turn in a child’s education in this country, immigrants are cast to the dustbins of our history, framed as a linguistic inconvenience or ignored entirely. As a result, it is little wonder that our politicians are quick to cast immigrants in disparaging and dehumanizing light.
Sure, California may offer some relief for immigrant hardship, like access to Medi-Cal. However, until we treat immigrants as an integral and active part of our society, our paltry policy solutions are inadequate Band-Aids for a festering social wound.
Dehumanizing immigrants and erasing their present, positive contributions to this country can lead to violence and to cruel legislation. But there is a solution.
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Just as this is a quagmire of educational origins, so too might we work toward new forms of learning and instruction. English classrooms, for example, could be the spaces for developing empathy. Students could explore the rich tapestry of literature woven from immigrant narratives. Additionally, the diversity of immigrant voices that shape schools right now — including teachers, students and parents — could be drawn in for storytelling, bringing to life the present lives of immigrants. These practices can build understanding and humanize the abundance of immigrant experiences present in school communities. Likewise, AB101 mandates the teaching of ethnic studies in all California high schools by 2025. Instructional efforts in English and ethnic studies alleviate the burden of immigration-related learning from just social studies.
While politicians propose short-term solutions to the “problem” of immigration, the long-term damage is seen in shoddy immigration-related curriculum in schools. Through intentional teaching, we can begin unraveling the knots of xenophobia. We can learn a more humane and dignified approach to seeing and learning with one another.
Antero Garcia is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Alix Dick is a storyteller and filmmaker from Sinaloa, Mexico. They are co-editors of the substack “La Cuenta.”
How treating immigrants with dignity starts in the classroom
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03.04.2024
Students protest against banning critical race theory in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in 2022. Such bans could further limit education about immigrants.
When it comes to immigration, this country is facing a dangerous and rapidly growing threat.
However, the threat is not what is depicted in most media coverage. It’s not related to jobs in this country, the safety of our citizens or even the caravans of people flooding the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, this threat has humbler roots: it’s in our classrooms, and it’s causing us to view immigrants through a warped and distorted lens.
Despite the integral roles they play in nearly every aspect of American life, immigrants are relegated to minimal coverage in kindergarten through 12-grade curriculum. Perhaps worse, the few instances that students do learn about immigrants, they are primarily depicted as a part of our past. From the moment children enter kindergarten until they graduate 13 years later, students will primarily learn about immigrants fleetingly in U.S. and world history.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
The History–Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, for example, mentions immigration and immigrants only 21 times across the K-12 framework. A third of those instances show up in 11th grade U.S. history and include a focus on industrialization, the Immigration Act of 1965 and “the expanding religious pluralism … that resulted from large-scale immigration in the twentieth century.” These are important topics, but alone, they........
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