Educating for Social Justice in Early Childhood

Shirley A. Kessler, Beth Blue Swadener, Shirley A. Kessler, Beth Blue Swadener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367246983
• eBook ISBN: 9781000651096
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Bringing together scholarship and examples from practice, this book explores ways in which early childhood curriculum – including classroom practices and community contexts – can more actively engage with a range of social justice issues, democratic principles and anti-oppressive practices.

Featuring a stellar list of expert contributors, the chapters in this volume present a cross-section of contemporary issues in childhood education. The text highlights the voices of children, teachers and families as they reflect on everyday experiences related to issues of social justice, inclusion and oppression, as well as ways young children and their teachers engage in activism. Chapters explore curriculum and programs that address justice issues, particularly educating for democracy, and culminate in a focus on the future, offering examples of resistance and visions of hope and possibility.

Designed for practitioners, graduate students and researchers in early childhood, this book challenges readers to explore the ways in which early childhood education is – and can be – engaging with social justice and democratic practices.

PART I

Voices of Children, Teachers and Families

1

IMMIGRANT CHILDREN IN ARIZONA

Social Justice Implications for Education in the Borderlands

Angeles Maldonado, Beth Blue Swadener and Casey Khaleesi

Introduction

Arizona has long seen anti-immigrant policies that violate civil and human rights, including orchestrated tactics to generate a public spectacle and symbolic war against “illegal immigration.” One outcome of this hostile environment has been a vulnerable and criminalized community, traumatized under the incessant and real threat of deportation. Through public community resistance, we are aware that anti-immigrant policies have been and continue to affect immigrant families and children in serious ways. We are concerned and vigilant of changes in federal immigration laws and policies, deportation priorities, the separation of migrant children at the border, the conditions of deportation centers, and the treatment of newly arrived asylum seekers. We fear the increased militarization of the border and how nationally widespread nativist discourse is impacting children living in the borderlands. Our chapter draws from interviews with immigrant children in Arizona and situates their perspectives in Border Crit Theory. We discuss children’s trans-border identities, language, family, safety, visions for the future, and views of schooling. We conclude with concrete recommendations for supporting the well-being and education of immigrant children.

Living in the Borderlands: Background

I came to the United States at the age of eight. I left my home, my friends, my cousins, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, and my dog, Chiquitillo. My parents, like many immigrant families, wanted to provide their daughters with a future that they did not see available for us in Mexico. Growing up as an immigrant child, however, was far from easy. I often found myself questioning my identity, trying to make sense of my new geography but never quite feeling like it was home. This experience of straddling borders is the impetus for my interest in immigration. Living and growing up in Arizona provided me with an informal education about what it means to be an American, and what it means to belong or be seen in many ways as an outsider. “It is like living in a home without foundation, sin tierra para plantar nuestras raices” (Maldonado, 2013). Immigrant children continue to grow up straddling borders both through their physical bodies and through their language and culture; their identities can remain in liminality, which can impact their sense of agency in the world.

(Angeles Maldonado)

The border is a highly politicized geographical space in which the violation of human rights is justified and rationalized under the fabricated knowledge that the border is a place of danger. It delineates through walls and policies who gets to belong by strategically attacking the identities of those it seeks to exclude. It is imperative to understand the political climate of the borderlands as well as its geographical history, as it sheds light on the ways in which this context impacts people who live there. Historically, Arizona, for example, straddled two countries and is on indigenous land. Arizona was part of the state of Sonora, Mexico until 1848, when the United States took possession through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is ironic, therefore, that many regard Mexican migrants as outsiders. Still, the border region has been made to be a space of indistinction, where policies and laws exist and are intentionally designed to delineate and demarcate the land through the systemic criminalization and racialization of people of color while safeguarding White Supremacy.

The United States is experiencing an identity crisis. President Trump ran a campaign with the promise of building “a giant beautiful wall” and “Making America Great Again.” Beyond this problematic divisive nativist discourse, a series of laws and immigration policies, under the lie of concerns for public safety, have had the direct result of inciting fear (Toomey et al., 2014) and the deportation of families who have resided in Arizona for many years. Police and immigration agents target and criminalize migrant communities in the name of safety; yet immigrant families are the ones whose safety becomes jeopardized. The trauma inflicted upon families has only escalated during the Trump administration. On April 8, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance policy,” calling for the prosecution of all individuals who entered the United States “illegally.” This strict criminalization of migration resulted in heinous acts by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, including the unforgivable practice of separating children from their parents upon apprehension at the US/Mexico border. Immigrant families detained are crowded into cells known as hieleras (ice chests) due to intentionally set extremely cold temperatures. Children, some as young as three months old, are detained in facilities for children, some of which were discovered to be unlicensed, and reports of child neglect and physical and sexual abuse within these sites have been reported.

Living undocumented in the borderlands can also mean living in over-policed neighborhoods, where racial profiling and discrimination, criminalization, transient employment, low wage jobs, long work hours, employment insecurity, underpayment, underfunded schools, a lack of access to health-care and insurance, working under the table, and a heightened risk for injuries, health hazards, due to exposure to chemicals, and poor or dangerous working conditions exist (Panikkar et al., 2015). People may fear calling the police, where the police and other agencies are known to actively collaborate with ICE and may also restrict seeking public assistance or interacting with governmental agencies for other reasons (Toomey et al., 2014).

Another policy that directly affects immigrant children in Arizona is the Structured English Immersion (SEI) model, requiring all instruction, text, and work produced by students be in English only. This model has received backlash as to its validity regarding its effectiveness (Krashen, Rolstad, & MacSwan, 2007). The model has been criticized for its infringement on children’s civil rights (Rios-Auguilar, Gonzalez-Canche & Moll, 2010) via linguistic imperialism (Jimenez-Silva, Bernstein & Baca, 2016): an attempt “to capture the way one language dominates another, with Anglo centricity and professionalism … within a structure in which unequal power and resource allocation is affected and legitimated” (Phillipson, 1992, p. 54). The SEI model, as compared to bilingual models, strips away one of the most prevalent cultural identifiers immigrant children have, their native language.

Our Research

What does it mean to be an immigrant child in Arizona? How are identities and imagined futures impacted? What are the implications for social justice practices in early childhood contexts? These are questions our research sought to address. We conducted activity based conversational interviews with 23 children living in Arizona, examining their views and experiences on home, school, and community. We analyzed the interviews by applying Border Crit Theory (Maldonado, 2013), an emergent critical theory for understanding and contextualizing the experiences of people of color living in the borderlands. Our interviews underscored the significance of consulting and talking with children in immigrant families on issues that affect their lives. Themes of our conversations included discussions about identity, migration, notions of home, belonging, race, citizenship, status, bilingualism, family, community, neighborhood, education, schooling, friendship, and altruistic desires for the future.

Our work is also situated in a children’s rights-based framework, and we draw specifically from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Committee’s General Comment No. 12, “The Child’s Right to be Heard” (United Nations, 2009), which emphasized children’s right to participate in decisions affecting them and to have their views taken seriously: “The views expressed by children may add relevant perspectives and experiences and should be considered in decision-making, policy-making and preparation of laws and/or measures as well as their evaluation” (p. 5). We build on research that foregrounds younger people’s views (e.g. Pérez, Medellin & Rideaux, 2016; Lundy & Swadener, 2015; Soto & Swadener, 2005; Swadener, Peters & Gaches, 2012; MacNaughton, Hughes & Smith, 2008) that highlight the ways young children tell adults about their lives and experiences and the concerns that they have for people close to them and for their immediate environment. Here children are “rights bearers” and adults are “duty bearers” who are required to help children build the capacity to express views on issues affecting them.

Theoretical Framework

Critical Race Theory (CRT) was founded in response to Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and maintains that race and racism is endemic to everyday life (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000). Border Crit is inspired by CRT, and other critical theories such as Tribal Critical Race Theory (Tribal Crit) which sees colonization as endemic to everyday life (Brayboy, 2005) and Latino/a Critical Race Theory (Lat Crit) which “emphasizes issues that affect Latina/o people in everyday life” (Delgado Bernal, 2002; Espinoza & Harris, 1997; Hernandez-Truyol, 1997; Villalpando, 2003). Thus, Border Crit (Maldonado, 2013) maintains and recognizes not only race and colonization but also borders as endemic to everyday life and focuses on issues that directly impact and concern border communities. Border Crit recognizes the borderlands as a space that is historically, ideologically, and politically different than the rest of the country. Border Crit theory scholars seek to expose and name the racial ideologies behind the symbolic parade of laws and immigration enforcement practices that dominate the borderlands and foreground the voices of people of color living there. We see narratives and stories of border communities as legitimate though frequently undervalued sources of knowledge and maintain a social justice commitment to the communities we represent in research.

Conversations with Children

We conducted 23 activity-based conversational interviews (Tay-Lim & Lim, 2013) with children ages 5 to 9 years old in an elementary school, in their homes, and in a community center. We offered art supplies and paper and asked children to do a drawing of their home, school, or community. The interviews were approximately 30 minutes in length. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. We began with questions such as, “Tell me about your family,” or “How do you help at home?” We also asked about a typical day at school and about their teachers and classes. As we continued the interviews, we found ourselves rewording questions and providing examples. We used open-coding, a process of examining data and developing categories of information and interconnecting them (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), based on our research questions and discussed and analyzed the data collectively. We apply Border Crit Theory to analyze and unpack possible deeper meanings of children’s responses based on what we know in the literature about immigrant families, our existing knowledge of movements and communities, and through our own cultural understandings and experiences.

Trans-border Identities

Most children drew pictures of their families first. While they drew and colored, they discussed where their family was from, indicating a sense of multiple identities including family on both sides of the US/Mexico border. For example, one eight-year-old child reflected:

INTERVIEWER: Do you play outside? … Since you mentioned you don’t really have a neighborhood?

CHILD: … um … mostly when my cousins come from different places we usually play …

INTERVIEWER: Where are they coming from?

CHILD: I think we all come from Mexico, but we were born here … so we are Mexican slash American.

It seemed this boy had an understanding that though he was not physically born in Mexico, he still was theoretically born there. In stating, “We all come from Mexico,” it seems he is redefining identity to translate not only to where one is born but to where one shares connections. He went on to share with us about his grandparents:

INTERVIEWER: But your grandparents live in Mexico.

CHILD: Yeah, and my mom and dad lived in Mexico.

INTERVIEWER: Do you get to go down and see your grandparents very often?

CHILD: Nnno. Um, mostly we’re going to see one of ‘em cuz I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Cinthya Saavedra
• Acknowledgements
• Changing Images of Early Childhood
• Introduction
• PART I: Voices of Children, Teachers and Families
• PART II: Social Justice in the Classroom: Democratic and Anti-bias Practices
• PART III: Way Forward: Stories of Hope and Possibility
• Afterword
• Index