Undocumented Educations: Everyday Educational Practices Of

UNDOCUMENTED EDUCATIONS: EVERYDAY EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES OF

RECENTLY IMMIGRATED YOUTH BEYOND INCLUSION/EXCLUSION

Jordan Corson

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Daniel Friedrich, Sponsor Professor Elsie Rockwell

Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education

Date 20 May 2020

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in Teachers College, Columbia University

2020

ABSTRACT

UNDOCUMENTED EDUCATIONS: EVERYDAY EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES OF

RECENTLY IMMIGRATED YOUTH BEYOND INCLUSION/EXCLUSION

Jordan Corson

Undocumented educations are those educational practices falling outside of legitimated educational institutions or appearing only in marginalized, liminal ways.

Through resisting, conflicting with, or simply not fitting into the grammar of school they do not “count” as education. Those educations, and thus the everyday lives of those who practice them, are routinely placed “at-risk.” Often, policymakers and educators propose reforms to this issue, aiming to more effectively include or ensure stronger academic outcomes for populations of students whose educational lives have been marked in precarious ways. Working with 9 recently immigrated youth in New York City, this project explores such undocumented educations in youth’s everyday lives in order to open new understandings of what counts, who counts, and in what ways, in educational

discourses. Rather than joining the chorus of reform efforts, I listen to the rigorous, wild, and ethereal educational practices already present in youth’s lives.

This project takes up entangled methods of an affective ethnography and a history of the present. Historical work explores prevalent discourses around the education of

“newcomer” youth to interrogate how this educational truth came to flourish as an intervention for newcomer youth. Affective ethnography, meanwhile, moves through many places exploring sensations, intensities, and encountering everyday educations and their relationship to the educational life of the school. An affective ethnography opens space to work with youth in exploring educations largely illegible to dominant discourses without submitting these educational practices to new forms of control.

Results suggest that linguistically and culturally affirmative schools emerge from understandings of how to better include and improve outcomes for newcomer youth. At the same time, political shifts require schools to constantly evolve to continue pursuing these ideas. Youths’ educational practices change and move through spaces like school or afterschool programs but also connect and flow in a borderless curriculum that challenges the supremacy of educational projects built dominantly on inclusion and success. Failure, daydreaming, and experimentation all play critical roles in youth’s everyday lives. The project ultimately concludes that listening to the already-present everyday educational practices of immigrant youth makes a radically different, ungoverned educational otherwise possible.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

After so much time and so much work, as I arrive here at the end, I find myself at a loss. I have thought about writing these acknowledgements from the first days of the doctorate, but I cannot seem to conjure or convey a thank you worthy of the people mentioned below. I will only say that nobody does anything alone. This project has been an intellectual adventure shaped and shared by many.

First and foremost, thank you to the school that so hospitably welcomed me and to the 9 participants who generously gave their time, shared their ideas, and opened themselves up for a year of their beautiful lives. I feel eternally grateful and hope that we share in intellectual adventures for years to come. QUE LO QUE!

To my committee: Pamela Koch offered her kindness and insight from the moment she joined the committee. María Paula Ghiso transitioned with ease from me lurking during office hours to ask her about immigration studies literature to a warm, thoughtful mentor.

Thank you for your inspirational work and guidance throughout this process. Elsie

Rockwell has long been one of the academics and activists I most admire in the world.

It’s still a bit surreal to have you on my committee. Taking a class with you pushed not only my thinking of anthropology and theories of the state but of my entire intellectual perspective. Your feedback and insight on my work routinely opens new modes of thought. Daniel Friedrich, my friend and mentor, I am not sure what to say. Without your inspiration and intellectual joy, I would not have pursued an academic career. Without your support and encouragement, I would have left early on. Without your friendship, I would have had to watch Batman vs. Superman alone. It has been such a pleasure to read, think, and laugh with you.

iii I would also like to thank Professor Thomas Hatch for ongoing collaborations and mentorship (and sharing his office for the last 5 years) and Professor Ansley Erickson for supportive and insightful comments on early versions of this project.

To so many folks at Teachers College and Columbia University, especially my coauthors and those thinking/feeling through many events with me: Jennifer Dauphinais, Tara

Schwitzman-Gerst, Sarah van den Berg, Tran Nguyen Templeton, Jenna Kamrass

Morvay, Cath Goulding, Katie Newhouse, and Lauren McCoy, thank you all! A particular thank you to Diana Rodríguez-Gómez and Andrea Lira, with whom I started this whole academia thing. We might be scattered across the world, but our time together in Monisha’s classes and our conversations about Deleuze and Beyoncé on the Low

Library steps both set the tone for and remain some of my favorite memories of grad school.

Thank you Atenea Rosado-Viurques, a friend in New York City, Mexico City (Tepito existe!), and now Philadelphia. You helped me with Spanish translations many times and welcomed me into so many places in your life.

The anarchist pedagogies reading group, particularly Nick Welna, inspired much of the thinking in this work. Nick, you are a political co-conspirator, Spanish practice and running partner, and an honorary truster of the process. I can’t believe we’ve only known each other for 3 years.

I would like to thank two friends who I love in many capacities, but who specifically welcomed me into the work of education. Emily Baskin essentially got me my first job as a para and has supported me every moment since. You are an amazing unicorn goddess.

iv Paul Shirk is a wonderful friend who introduced me to Freire and showed me that there’s more to this whole thing than kids sitting up straight in desks.

To our oldest and closest friends: Tyler Brown and Risheen Brown (and Leela and

Simran) as well as Sean Whiteman and Renée Betancourt (and Jude Betman and the memory of Will Pietro Betman, Laran and Uncle Jordan love you so so much). You hosted me during conferences, listened to me ramble about my work, grew with us from lame teenagers to adult-ish people, and cared for us when we most needed it. I love you all forever.

Thank you and all of my love to my in-laws the Kaplans who have always eagerly taken an interest in my research and encouraged my intellectual development, listening to summaries and diatribes over many meals and glasses of scotch.

My parents Michael Corson and Diana Corson believe in me way more than I believe in myself. It has often felt like the 3 of us against the world and I share every aspect of this work with you both. And to my Bubbe, Idell Corson. We’ll call soon, I promise!

One of the people I love most in this world, Stuart Duncan Brown, passed away shortly before I finished the dissertation. Thank you for your wildness, hugs, sense of humor, sincerity (but never earnestness), and compassionate way of living. I miss you so much.

Finally, to my spouse and partner of almost 20 years: Laran Kaplan has walked with me on almost every pathway of this journey. Whether debating an idea, providing feedback on writing, or sitting on the couch discussing very unfinished thoughts, you have loved and supported me in this process in ways I could never have imagined. You may routinely roll your eyes at affect theories or ethnography (and how they are not biological

v research), but you always push my thinking and radiate care. This dissertation is one small part of our lives together, but I am so happy to share in this intellectual adventure with you. Also, to our cats Minnie Rosalind Franklin and Pinter, for both accompanying me throughout and trying to prevent me from completing this thing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I - ON WHOSE AND WHICH MARGINS? ...... 1 Prologue, An Ongoing Story ...... 1 Framing Research ...... 5 Overview ...... 10 Statement of Problem...... 14 Purpose of Study ...... 20 Research Questions ...... 22 Rationales...... 23 Rationale for Working in a Newcomer School with Newcomer Youth ...... 24 Rationale for Methodologies ...... 25 Theoretical Framework ...... 27 Significance of Study ...... 31 Some Terms, Clarified ...... 34 Newcomer Youth “At-risk” ...... 34 Education and Everyday Educations ...... 35 Assumptions and Limitations ...... 37 Conclusion ...... 39 Chapter II - A PLURALITY OF BEST ANSWERS ...... 40 Introduction ...... 40 Research Questions ...... 41 Early and General Considerations of Educating Immigrants ...... 42 Content Factors ...... 45 English Language Learners/Emergent Bilinguals ...... 45 Students with Interrupted Formal Education ...... 48 Sociocultural Factors ...... 51 Race/culture/language...... 56 Other Factors...... 57 Newcomer Schools ...... 59 Out-of-School Education ...... 62 Popular Education ...... 63 Non/Informal Education ...... 65 Public Pedagogies ...... 68 Outside-of-School and School-Related Interventions for and With Recently Arrived Immigrant Youth...... 70 Conclusion ...... 72 Chapter III - METHODS ...... 74 Introduction ...... 74 Research Questions ...... 74 Research Design ...... 75 Site and Recruitment ...... 75 The Problem of Including/Excluding Participants ...... 77 Ethnographic Research ...... 78

vii

Interviews...... 79 Participant observation in school...... 81 Afterschool/nonformal education programs...... 83 Walks, commutes, and events in everyday life...... 84 Ethnographic archives of education...... 87 Failed/refused ethnographic work...... 88 Historical Research ...... 89 Positions ...... 90 Affective Work ...... 92 Working Affectively in Ethnography ...... 94 Working Affectively in History ...... 98 Ethnography’s Historical Situatedness ...... 99 Data Plan (Messing Around with Sticky Things) ...... 100 Data Analysis ...... 102 Ethnographic data analysis...... 102 Historical data analysis...... 105 Dangers and Limitations ...... 106 Unsettled Validity ...... 108 Conclusion ...... 111 Chapter IV - SURVIVE AND SUCCEED: THE MAKING OF AND EDUCATION FOR NEWCOMER YOUTH AT WISH ...... 112 Introduction ...... 112 A Brief, Incomplete History of Schooling and Immigrants in the U.S...... 114 Specific Approaches to Educating Immigrants Before the Whole-School Model ..... 117 English-only programs...... 118 ESL classes...... 119 Bilingual schooling...... 121 Beyond ESL/bilingual education...... 124 Whole school models...... 124 A Brief Note on the Educational Landscape During Bloomberg ...... 129 A Genealogical Sketch of “Newcomer” Educable Subjects ...... 130 The Birth of “Newcomers” ...... 131 Newcomers as Formed/Forming People ...... 133 Newcomers as (in-need) Seekers ...... 134 Newcomers as Liminal Subjects ...... 137 Survival and Success: The Life of WISH ...... 139 What is WISH Exactly? ...... 139 Inclusion...... 142 WISH vs Everybody ...... 144 Inclusion into…?...... 147 Welcoming and Supporting “Risky” Students...... 148 Success/Exito ...... 150 WISH Is Here, Not Elsewhere ...... 151 Status of Success ...... 152 Survive to Provide This Space: Making Do at WISH ...... 153 “Caught in Politics” ...... 153

viii

The Cost of Public Schools ...... 155 Negotiating Demands ...... 156 Conclusion ...... 157 Chapter V - EDUCATIONS IN/OF/WITH/THROUGH SPACE ...... 158 Introduction ...... 158 And Now, In No Particular Order, Briefly Introducing… ...... 160 Miguel ...... 161 Mateo ...... 162 Sofia ...... 163 Leo ...... 164 Matias...... 165 Ximena ...... 166 Felipe ...... 167 Luna ...... 167 Pablo ...... 169 Educations, Catalogued, Tracked, Categorized ...... 169 School ...... 171 Nonformal Education ...... 176 Unstructured Time ...... 180 Conclusion ...... 184 Chapter VI - A BORDERLESS CURRICULUM ...... 185 Introduction ...... 185 Entangled and Moving Educational Practices ...... 186 Legitimate Education Is Something to Access ...... 186 School and Outside Are Distinct Educational Spaces ...... 190 Assembling School ...... 193 Borderless Constellations of Learning ...... 198 Education and Opportunity ...... 202 School As One Educational Opportunity Among Others ...... 203 School as Disruptive of Opportunity ...... 205 Equality/Opportunity/Education ...... 206 Undocumented Educations ...... 210 Subjugated Knowledge ...... 210 Culturally Relevant Teaching to Demands ...... 212 Educations, Undocumented ...... 214 Conclusion ...... 221 Chapter VII - SCHOOL AS A WILD DAYDREAM ...... 222 Introduction ...... 222 Wild Practices ...... 225 What Are They? ...... 225 Wild Educations, Expressed ...... 228 Daydreams ...... 232 Daydreams as Acts of Parrhesia ...... 234 Daydreaming Impractical Educations ...... 236 The School of Otherwise ...... 239

Teaching In the School of Otherwise ...... 243 Educational Leaderlessship and Policymaking ...... 244 Conclusion: The Schools of Otherwise, Realized ...... 246 REFERENCES ...... 248 APPENDICES ...... 267 Appendix A: Recruitment Script and Questionnaire ...... 267 Appendix B: Interview Script ...... 270 Appendix C: Observation Protocol ...... 271

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Poster hung in school ...... 113 Figure 2: Organizer ...... 170

xi 1

Chapter I

ON WHOSE AND WHICH MARGINS?

Prologue, An Ongoing Story

If Matias arrived in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, one of the few

Dominicans to do so in these years, he would likely have entered with few questions from immigration officials.1 As he settled, Matias would enroll in a public school near his home. That is not to say that teachers, employers, or community members would welcome Matias. Racism, xenophobia, and even military occupation of the Dominican

Republic spilled through daily life in New York City. At school, joining a district made up of a majority of immigrant students, mostly from Europe, he would be expected to take classes in English. Perhaps a “steamer class,” where teachers offered English-only direct language instruction would help him transition into the school. Otherwise, school would make no mention of his race, country of origin, immigration status (as no such thing existed in the U.S. at that time), or his language beyond a need to “Americanize.”

With little institutional support or recognition, Matias could transition into one of the city’s few vocational programs, claw his way toward graduation, or fall through the cracks of the educational system. Even if he fell through the cracks of schooling, at this

1 For narrative purposes, I do not use citations here. The information here draws on ethnographic research with Matias and commonly available information on the history of immigration, both of which I explore in detail throughout the dissertation.

2 time, Matias could join the millions of people in the U.S. entering the workforce without graduating high school.

Were Matias to arrive in the U.S. in the 1960s, joining the waves of immigrants arriving to New York City from the Dominican Republic after the death of dictator

Rafael Trujillo, he may have been fortunate enough to enroll in a bilingual education program, programs potentially recognizing Matias’ cultural background and teaching him in Spanish and English as he transitioned toward general education classes. Entering the

U.S. without documents, he also may have had to pay for school. Outside of this program, Matias’ schooling would still emphasize a general need to assimilate and join dominant culture. If he struggled in school, a few additional programs may have been available in the community, but he could also, like the majority of Dominican students at this time, ultimately leave school before graduating. At home in Washington Heights,

Matias would have found a burgeoning community of people also arriving from the

Dominican Republic; a neighborhood bustling with educational life in churches, on the streets, and in homes. Without graduating, he might still pursue educational endeavors in these places.

As it so happens, Matias only recently arrived to the United States. Coming from the Dominican Republic at age 15, he joined his mother, little brother, and stepfather on

Christmas Eve of 2016. Scared out of his mind, he roamed an unfamiliar landscape of

Washington Heights amidst foreign weather. A week after Christmas, at the recommendation of a family friend, Matias and his stepfather entered a placement center, looking for a school for Matias. Matias spoke only a few words of English. He valued his

Dominican heritage. He had attended school regularly in the Dominican Republic but

3 said that the schools did not teach him much. After a brief conversation and sharing incomplete transcripts, the person helping Matias recommended he enroll at WISH

(Welcome Immigrants, Succeed Here) Academy, a school specifically designed for students who had recently immigrated. The person hinted to Matias that he would likely have failed in other schools, but here, at this “newcomer” school, he would be included, welcomed almost entirely without qualifications, and he would succeed.

Matias instantly found some success. He formed bonds with teachers, began learning English, and cultivated a passion for music. At WISH, he felt safe and cared for.

Outside of WISH, though, Matias found his life to be increasingly difficult. He met some kids who he believed to be a bad influence, but it was difficult to avoid them. His mom and stepdad fought all the time, eventually separating. He had to take care of his little brother. Money was an ever-present issue. He was desperate for a job. These problems soon crept into his school life. He had already been enrolled in specific ESL classes for students at WISH who were in the very early stages of learning English. New supports and care also rushed in to help Matias succeed. Teachers met with him after class. He spoke to a counselor. Teachers met with each other to develop a plan of action that would help him in school. Yet, after a year in the U.S. and at WISH, teachers and administrators had labeled Matias “at-risk” of failing out of school.

When Matias and I met at the start of his senior year, he had been in New York for over 18 months. He still felt like school was a struggle. He wanted to be ahead of where he was with his English. He often ended up hanging out on the 8th floor rather than attending classes in the afternoon. In many ways, the “at-risk” label was congealing around him. Outside of school, he felt similar struggles. His mom kicked him out of the

4 house a few times. He talked about how people on the street or subway didn’t see him as a person but as a threat. At the same time, Matias continued learning, creating, playing, and daydreaming. He talked about dreams of supporting his brother and playing in the

NBA and becoming a rapper and starting a family and living somewhere else and returning to the Dominican Republic. Sometimes, these dreams were just dreams. Other times, friends taught him how to shoot a basketball. He listened to conversations and learned to begin rapping in Spanish and English. WISH never discounted these ideas, but they never quite fit into the everyday curriculum. His English test scores improved in school, but walking down a New York City street, speaking Spanglish, Matias was funny and caring in ways that never seemed to appear in school. Even as his educational life did not quite align with schooling, Matias expressed himself educationally throughout his everyday life.

********

In the course of this research, I have encountered many texts on education, equality, youth, citizenship, and migration. These works paint complex stories of immigration and education. They offer histories, interventions, actions, and reflections on immigration and education. Creating a picture of how issues will be addressed, many of these works begin with an anecdote, an educational story of recent immigrant youth.

Other times, they begin with a statistic, something to mark immigrants’ positions in educational terms. These introductions span a range of emotions and interests, showing the struggles, successes, aspirations, and navigations of recently immigrated youth experiencing education in the United States. There are so many stories and the use of stories is so common that they can form a genre. Yet, each story I have read carries a

5 sense of something unique and visceral. They paint dynamic images of immigrant youth and educational lives. I too have begun with a story, not only of what a school has or has not done, but of what is, was, and may yet become.

If nothing else, this work joins a broad collection, ongoing and infinite stories of immigration and education. I hope that a different kind of educational story is taken up in this project. The stories told here do not begin with entry to the U.S. They do not end with graduation or dropping out. The stories pass through institutions, structures, labels, and categories that immigrant youth encounter in education in the U.S. I ask what kind of educational stories are taken up, and what educational stories are obscured. Participants in this study share stories that are not liberated from struggle but deviate from notions of

“despite,” “grit,” or “endure” that all too often frame immigrant stories and end in definite terms of success or failure. Instead, the stories told here are ongoing and unqualified, offering small parts of big lives, revealing educational practices that are not about “achievement but a magical ecstatic performance” of beautiful everyday lives

(Halberstam, 2014, n.p.).

Framing Research

As Matias’ stories indicate, the ever-evolving relationship between schools and immigrant populations extends deep into U.S. history. Turning to the 1980s, a new wave of immigrants began arriving to New York City from the Dominican Republic. At this time, the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision determined that U.S. public schools are not permitted to ask students their citizenship or limit access to school based on documentation status. Public schools are thus, legally speaking, for the youth who arrive

at the school door. And yet, as Mangual Figueroa (2012) notes,2 those recently immigrated families labeled undocumented face resistance in even enrolling in schools.

Similarly, recently immigrated families who can provide documentation also frequently face challenges in enrolling in school (Hirschman, 2001). Once children physically access the school, recently arrived immigrant students instantly face new challenges.

Beyond persistent societal issues of how people in the U.S. consider and treat immigrant populations, recently arrived immigrants demographically face challenges such as low attendance and high attrition rates (Gibson & Bejinez, 2002).

To combat such risks, schools in recent decades have designed for immigrated students, often known as “newcomers,” a series of labels and interventions. As newcomers first arrive at school, for example, they may predominantly speak a language other than English. From observation and testing, this student might be given a label like

English Language Learner (ELL) or Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Students marked as ELLs might then be offered specific classes or classrooms to help them learn English and stay in school. In New York City, ELLs can receive instruction in multiple languages, in a Dual Language program, where 50 percent of instruction occurs in

English and 50 percent in another language, or in Freestanding English as New Language programs (New York City Department of Education, 2016). The purpose of these programs is to move ELLs toward “traditional” schooling.

Often attached to ELL, students identified as missing skills beyond the acquisition of English might be labeled Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE). SIFE might “attend [pull-out] classes that integrate English as a second language (ESL)

2 For a further discussion of this ruling, Mangual Figueroa (2012) also discusses the Plyler v. Doe case in more general terms.

7 instruction, academic skills development, literacy, and content-area support” or a push-in model, that “exposes students to the mainstream curriculum...when an ESL teacher or bilingual paraprofessional assists the students in mainstream classes” (DeCapua,

Smathers, & Tang, 2007, p. 42). The SIFE label opens a new battery of interventions to solidify a students’ place in school and improve their educational outcomes. Once more, these interventions aim at their own eradication. The bent of these programs strives to move students with such labels toward the general school population on their way toward graduation.

“ELL” or “SIFE” might account for what might be considered technical aspects of educating recent immigrant students. Yet, what happens when students struggle in environments such as a pullout ESL class? What if, even if educators and policymakers execute interventions almost perfectly, students still struggle? Short of systemic responses to racism or socioeconomic inequality, do schools need further support structures for recently immigrated youth? As Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2013) note, “Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose” (np). Combating both language issues and broader social and cultural issues, a type of school designed specifically for recently immigrated youth, often called a newcomer school, has arisen as a fuller mechanism to help students access and succeed in school and U.S. society.

Targeted to recently arrived immigrants at the secondary level, these schools offer a comprehensive educational model that aims to seal up some of the cracks other programs could not fill.

There is a great diversity in how these schools look and what they offer, but scholars, policymakers, and educators often frame the newcomer school as a path to educational success for recently arrived immigrants. They offer both curricula targeted for ELLs and culturally responsive education for the different cultures represented in their schools. These schools reflect the famous research of Moll et al. (1992) who suggest that the cultural life of youth, particularly immigrant youth, may not be a deficit for teachers to overcome but an active asset in building curriculum. Newcomer schools such as the one at the center of this project operate as public schools in the U.S., but also partner with afterschool and community-based organizations to stretch beyond school borders for those struggling during the regular school day. Using an array of metrics, from graduation rates or attendance to test scores, many of these schools act as powerful answers to problems newcomers face in entering and staying in school and receiving a quality education.

For all these interventions, we still find recent immigrant students who struggle and drop out of school. As I detail below, WISH Academy does not generically label individual students as “at-risk” but teachers and administrators do identify students struggling in school. In more general terms, struggles immigrant students encounter have been noted in academic literature. Portes and Rumbaut (2006), for instance, point out many factors within and exceeding school (e.g. length of time in country or U.S. immigration policy toward particular nationalities) that contribute to problems in education. Even in the most academically successful newcomer schools, where the graduation rate exceeds 90% for 7-year cohorts (especially compared with a 50% dropout rate for ELLs nationwide) (Sylvan, 2008), some students still fall to the educational

9 margins. All too often in academic research and educational discourses, “at-risk” or marginalized is where the story ends. The newcomer school sits on the horizon of interventions to help youth access and receive a quality education. Students often arrive there directly from placement centers, where the newcomer school is viewed as the best possible option for success. If the newcomer school or one of its partner community- based organizations cannot help students access and reach the finish line of a quality education, risk marks the narrative endpoint.

Whether in popular culture or academic literature, the immigrant “at-risk” is a common story. Given the frequency with which this narrative appears, I have some questions. If this grand narrative is so familiar, why have scholars, educators, and activists not “solved” these problems? Is it simply a matter of funding and educating teachers for ELL-related programs? Do we simply need to expand or tweak the newcomer model toward perfection? Is it necessary to pile new interventions atop old ones? Also, why does the writing of these stories so often end, specifically at points of success or failure, inclusion or exclusion, in or out of school? In other words, the story of immigrants and education in the U.S. is dominantly framed as either the successful movement through the various structures and categories made by school or as the persistent failure of systems meeting the needs of immigrants. At times (e.g. Chang,

2016), the story might be one of success despite institutional intervention. Regardless, the stories told of education have a difficult time moving from the school doors.

What if there is another story? What if there is a story of education that does not stop and start with interventions for immigrants? In fact, it is a story without end and without any kind of program or “best practice.” Yet, it is a story that can, potentially,

10 speak back to those practices at a site like a newcomer school. Those immigrants who teachers, administrators, or standardized metrics notice struggling in school walk through the hallways, leave the school, go to work, spend time with friends and at home sensing or experiencing education and engaging it in productive, creative ways. It may be an education resistant, unrecognized, or unusable in schools, but they are constantly learning and playing, figuring out ways to make do on an everyday basis. These youth may not even be aware of the power of these educations. In short, the story does not end in risk or intervention. It travels, through people, places, and things without end. What might such an educational story say to schools and programs designed for recent immigrants and to those who write about these topics? What might it say about knowledge and what counts in the work of education? What might it say about the equality of people and groups?

Overview

This dissertation explores the everyday educational practices of a group of recently immigrated youth considered to be struggling3 in a school specifically designed for the cultural and linguistic needs of recently immigrated students. In harsher terms, it is an examination of the education of those the school has marked “at-risk” in an educational setting built specifically to respond to the risk this population of students would face in other settings. Within this general conception, the dissertation pursues two entangled lines of inquiry. First, it asks how the school emerged as a thinkable and practicable intervention for recent immigrants. In doing so, I look at the schools’ history, structure, trajectory, and objectives as well as related efforts by the Department of

3 Struggling or “at-risk” is here broadly defined, as described in more detail in the methods Chapter.

Education (DOE), community organizations, and other educational efforts to include immigrant students in schools. As elaborated in the methods Chapter, this line of inquiry entails interviews and drawing on documents from the school and the New York DOE.

Second, I look at the educational lives of 9 students in this school. I look at how they encounter sensations of success and how they engage educations that they find useful in their everyday lives. In my conception, everyday educations include school and nonformal education programs with which the students interact, but exceed them as well.

Pollock and Levinson (2011) point out that anthropologies of education often undertake projects that consider schooling as “just a subset of the education that occurs throughout everyday life” (p. 4). Everyday educations see education as an ongoing practice of learning, creating, and doing throughout life, regardless of institutional involvement. I expand on this way of looking at education later in this Chapter. I aim to see youth not exclusively defined through categories or as participating in education through implemented programs, but as already educating themselves and engaged in educational practices throughout their everyday lives in ways that might offer new insights about how educational researchers think about education.

To frame a perspective from which I can challenge these problems, I outline a framework that draws on poststructural theories, notions of equality as a practice

(Rancière, 1991), anti-racist and anti-colonial work that disrupts essentialist categorization (Halberstam & Nyong’o, 2018; Hartman, 2019), and theories of the everyday. Particularly, the research aims to see education and interventions for those seen as struggling within schools in a different way. By depicting such education at work, I hope to affect the learning trajectories (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2010) of the youth

12 who participate in the research, work toward educational emancipation (Rancière, 1991), and enter into dialogues with those who write on immigration and schooling in the U.S.

Having introduced the overall objectives of this research, I turn to bodies of literature on these issues, beginning with examining literature on newcomer schools and other educational interventions for recently immigrated youth (e.g. Bartlett & García,

2011; Patel, 2013). I focus on two areas newcomer schools identify as crucial in the schooling of recently arrived immigrants. First, I look at literature on the role of language and the teaching of English, exploring different approaches across time and space.

Second, I examine scholarship on understandings of cultural needs in schooling and how scholarship and newcomer schools have undertaken affirmative approaches to welcoming cultural identities in schools.

Moving from literature on schooling, which dominantly focuses on inclusion/exclusion or academic success, I turn to previous studies on education outside of or on the margins of school as a way to show how others have suggested education’s potential beyond schooling. Such work includes public pedagogy, informal education, and popular education. While this dissertation does not intend to critique public schooling, I bring in work that frames education outside of school in ways that at times run in opposition to schooling. At times, I even encounter educations within the school that run counter to the “official curriculum” (a la Willis, 1977). It is here that I begin to develop my distinction between outside-of-school research and a notion of everyday educations. I return to my theoretical framework to describe educational events and encounters occurring in everyday life. Relatedly, I expand on an important distinction between this work and often-investigated lines of research on funds of knowledge (Moll

13 et al., 1992). Though it takes up educational life outside of school, this theory seeks to use cultural identity to prop up schooling structures. Everyday educations, meanwhile, explores educational practices that not only occur outside of schools but also move outside the very logics of schooling.

Methodologically, I work ethnographically with youth from the school site, exploring their educational lives in school, in nonformal educational spaces, and in their everyday lives. In articulating a methodology, I describe what an affective ethnography looks like and what it offers in this line of research. Bringing everyday educations to the forefront, I perform an ethnography that fuses affects to everyday educations of this group of students. School is still a part of the ethnographic work, as I examine how schooling interacts with educational forces for participants. Yet, the ethnography follows participants through many different educational spaces, be they home, work, or neighborhood. Moreover, educational practices take on different forms and offer different ways of knowing and being. Participants describe, remember, and practice educations that are relevant to their everyday life (or that they feel will lead to something relevant to their everyday lives) and where they feel sensations of success in educational experiences.

Simultaneously, I situate the ethnographic work and look historically at the newcomer school as a model, examining what conditions and factors led to its creation and evolution. I look at the discourses that made possible a whole-school model designed specifically for recent immigrants. Then, I examine what this model suggests as a broad intervention. The research does not aim to evaluate the school as a successful/failing approach to educating recent immigrants. Rather, I look to see how it emerged and has

14 been used as a model as well as what that approach implies for other educational efforts or ideas.

Ultimately, as seen in the analysis Chapters, the dissertation is about opening education to something other than access and outcomes. It is about working against the adversity and oppressions that participants face, but also about celebrating their wild, uncategorizable knowledge, their creative and playful practices, their thoughtful ways of learning and being, and their ongoing stories. It is about seeing education at work regardless of any programmatic intervention, but also about seeing how new educational possibilities emerge from listening to everyday educations and seeing how they speak back to the making and doing of schooling with immigrant youth.

Statement of Problem

This is not the problem at hand, but it helps frame the problems addressed in this dissertation: Many immigrant youth leave school in the U.S. without graduating (Lopez,

Passel, & Rohal, 2015). The New York Immigration Coalition (2020), an advocacy group for immigrant rights, dubs this problem the “ELL Dropout Crisis” or a “crisis among newcomer immigrants.” Certainly, racism, xenophobia, epistemic supremacism, deficit mindsets, economic inequity, and drastic underfunding contribute to this issue. Even in affirmative settings that specifically target factors that impact schooling experiences and outcomes for newcomers, some students still struggle in school, at times failing or dropping out. The Immigration Coalition points out that this crisis is framed through

ELLs having “the highest dropout rate of any population in the city” (New York City

Immigration Coalition, 2020). In pointing to the success of a prominent network of newcomer schools, a persistent question is asked of “how the school achieves such

15 outstanding academic success with a population of immigrant students who typically exit high school prior to graduation” (Fine, Stoudt, & Futch, 2005, p. 3). Such high graduation rates seem a wonderous anomaly amidst this dropout crisis. So, recently arrived immigrants of certain geographies and socioeconomic statuses enter educational institutions in the U.S. already statistically “at-risk” in educational (and other) terms.

Their educational successes come about “surprisingly” or “despite” mountains of adversity. The newcomer school has often been framed as a profound response to this issue, but the problem permeates the educational lives of recent immigrants in its school.

Participants in this study find themselves embedded in discourses of the “ELL dropout crisis.”

These issues occur just as recently arrived immigrants are told school is an increasing necessity. “American education matters more than ever. While a hundred years ago immigrant youth could (and routinely did) drop out of school without hampering their futures, today the costs of doing so are substantial” (Suárez-Orozco,

Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2010, p. 88). Nienhusser (2013) similarly writes

(specifically about undocumented immigrants) that “education is the gateway to prosperity for undocumented youth…however…nearly half of undocumented students in the United States do not complete high school” (p. 3). Schooling is framed as the pathway to anything from economic stability to uncovering and nurturing identity.

Leaving school before graduation is thus a related problem, but more directly relevant to this project is the notion that school is a necessary path toward a meaningful life as an educated person. Without schooling success, recently immigrated youth are not truly educated subjects. Allen (2016) posits this positioning of schooling as a “durable societal

16 obsession with ‘education’ and ‘equality’” (p. 1). Allen here argues that a narrative has prospered that basic equality in the U.S., especially for those marked on the margins, is dominantly achieved through schooling.

At the same time, statistically speaking more and more students use schooling’s pathways. In New York City, graduation rates have steadily improved in recent years, moving from just over 50% at the turn of the 21st century to over 70% by the 2010s

(Zimmerman & Disare, 2017). Despite incremental changes, and despite the impactful work of many newcomer schools and other programs, immigrant students still drop out each year. Furthermore, this progressive narrative allows for a kind of complacency and masking of those not succeeding in school. As Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2014) describe, newcomer schools “serve as islands of opportunity for their immigrant origin students” (p. 3). In New York City, the citywide graduation rate for students labeled

English learners stands below 30% (Zimmerman & Disare, 2017). Immigrant origin students would fail elsewhere, with the newcomer school as the most viable opportunity for success. In this conception, youth who drop out or become “at-risk” are essentially made into victims of progress, left to the side on the march toward better education systems and the praise of a fantastic schooling model. One day, it may be possible. Right now, however, it would be unreasonable to think that every student’s education will succeed.

I do not want to ignore the positive work of these schools or the powerful outcomes for individual students. The point here is that short of forced attrition or simply falsifying statistics, schools do not reach 100% of anything. Margins are made and remade, always appearing in some form. Furthermore, a metric like graduation rate is

17 simply a statistic that points out that margins still quantitatively appear. These data say nothing of other persistent exclusions. Even as schools in the U.S. continue to “tinker toward utopia” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) of equality within and through education, youth still fall to the margins. In praising high graduation rates or individual educational success stories, other lives, other understandings of education, and other ways of knowing and being are left as undesirable islands. In a progressive march toward utopia, those youths still marked outside the twin boundaries of inclusion/success become victims of progress, accepted statistics that cannot be included until new reforms find undiscovered routes toward inclusion and success. Framing the necessity of school and these “islands of success” also acts to entrench school’s supremacy (or even exclusiveness, suggesting that schools is the place where education happens) and pushes aside other educational practices.

In the focus on inclusion/exclusion, another problem arises. Both New York City policy and academic literature dominantly focus on issues of access to and outcomes of schooling. Academic research similarly focuses on immigration through the lens of schooling, occasionally examining the role of family life in education (Gibson &

Koyama, 2011; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010). As I will expand on in the literature review, some programs look to educational lives of recent immigrants outside of school, but research primarily focuses on school as the solitary mechanism of education and the sole method for recent immigrants to reap education’s benefits. Even non-school interventions still present school-like programs that can parallel or compliment schooling. Patel (2013) describes this emphasis as how educational research “is very fond of models and examples of ‘best practices’” (p. 5). Once more, such an approach pushes aside other

18 modes of research and other educational practices. The pursuit of better and more equitable public schools is a complex and noble task, but it is not the only question out there. If the only work left to do were to incrementally do better what is already done in the name of improving outcomes, the one issue to resolve in this dissertation would be to wedge a path of more effective inclusion or figure out a way to tweak and scale newcomer schools. It would be, after Foucault (1972), to become an education bureaucrat who makes sure all of inclusion’s papers are in order.

Allen (2016) suggests that “in focusing as consistently as we do on these topics, we have actually lost our ability to see other features of education that are relevant to the topic of equality” (p. 4). This narrowing of the purposes of education, or the making of education and schooling as synonymous (Dussel, 2013; Varenne, 2009), obscures other educations. Such educations might be valuable both in ways suggested above by Suárez-

Orozco et al. (2010) and in unknown ways. It is not that those not in school or struggling in school have no education. Nor is it the opposite, that they do not need school. Instead, those falling to the margins of schools are educated and educate themselves in ways that may be unread, unauthorized, and otherwise not taken up in schools. Such educations may be marked as deviant (Dixon-Román, 2014) or may simply be lost, with school devouring other ways of knowing and being. I suggest that this emphasis on access and outcomes, even when they are culturally relevant, risks what is already present. It might even turn the educations of those on the margins of margins into a kind of educational homo sacer (Agamben, 1995). Metaphorically speaking, their educational lives can be killed without consequence. Generally speaking, those on the margins of schooling are told that they need schooling education more than ever and are also told that they do not

19 have it. They are only valued (a la funds of knowledge) insofar as these educations can be incorporated into “islands of opportunity.”

When educational lives become disposable and understanding that marginalization appears over and over, one response has been to remind that schooling sits within larger social and structural forces (e.g. Bowles & Gintis, 1974). Inequality in schooling cannot be solved, the thinking goes, until the societies in which schools sit solve racism and poverty. In the U.S., improvements can be made, but any changes sit within an economically divided settler-colonial state. A question lingers, though, of how to respond to this feeling of stasis. Students falling to school’s margins essentially become utopia’s sacrifice. They are the acceptable number of marginalized educational lives on a path toward utopia. The problem here is the question of what to do beyond

“solving” schools or waiting for better possibilities for future generations. The task, I suggest, is not to simply pursue the promise of universal education built into the foundations of U.S. schooling but to challenge the very logics of categorization and schooling, making new understandings of education possible.

Here, another problem arises. Trying to open new spaces and possibilities entails closing off other possibilities. As I will return to throughout this project, the task is not only to widen the path and welcome in new voices. Inclusion is a powerful aspect of making equal schooling conditions. Yet, once more, margins always pop up. Popkewitz

(2009) describes the double gesture wherein every act of inclusion draws a new boundary, a new line to describe who or what is included. Therefore, a simultaneous exclusion occurs, casting out all those who fall outside the boundary line. The task, then, is not to simply look to and include and show success in youth’s lives outside of school,

20 but to resist codification, to welcome education in what Halberstam (2017), responding to

Foucault, calls the “disorder of things.”

Purpose of Study

This dissertation first proposes to listen and illuminate the educational stories of its participants. The purpose here is to make legible new forms of education and reveal in people who have been labeled on the educational margins an active engagement in educational life beyond predefined terms. The project sets out to show what is obscured, left to the side, or subjugated. The trick within this objective is to make legible without submitting to new controls. Furthermore, this dissertation’s purpose is to quite explicitly move away from old, entrenched, anthropological tendencies. I do not want to catalogue and produce new truths about immigrants’ lives. The purpose is instead to destabilize prevailing truths while opening new understandings and new possibilities.

Additionally, the project intends to positively impact the educational trajectories of the 9 participants. Supporting schooling, I hope that schooling outcomes may be impacted. Improving the chances that my participants graduate is not, however, a primary focus. By impacting educational trajectories, I suggest that encountering and exploring everyday educations carry emancipatory potential. Emancipation here is not the freeing of the oppressed by an enlightened outsider but, through listening and laying bare what is already present, a practice of equality in itself. “Emancipation is the consciousness of that equality, of that reciprocity that alone permits intelligence to be realized by verification”

(Rancière, 1991, p. 39). My purpose here is to provoke an awareness with participants that an education they are told they do not yet have actually exists in useful and fulfilling ways. And, educational experiences so often framed in riskiness and failure actually

21 include sensations of success. Those whose relationship with education has been framed as tenuous or absent are actually engaged in educational practices all the time.

Within fields of education, I aim to engage the dominant ways schooling and academic research approach questions of immigration and education. I pose that participants do not have to wait to have their truth told. Instead, they can and do tell this truth through everyday work. Looking at education in this manner also reveals education where it may be undervalued and less visible. Certainly, out-of-school educations are explored in academic literature. Similarly, authors have also explored the everyday lives of recent immigrants as a way to make them safely and productively visible (Galindo,

2012). Yet, as I elaborate further in the literature review, immigration and education are all too often seen as questions of how youth can access or succeed in schooling.

Likewise, as Varenne (2009) points out, school overwhelms education, making the terms interchangeable. Looking to everyday life seeks to address similar problems that others have seen in students falling to the margins but in a different way than Tyack’s (1974) refrain that “old reforms need to be reformed anew” (p. 291). I argue that schools cannot simply expand into infinity. Instead of finding a prescription or writing a new intervention, the purpose here is to see what these everyday educations do in opening new ways of thinking about education.

This work is, therefore, a critical engagement with funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and related culturally affirmative approaches. The purpose of engaging this body of literature is not to reject it or deny its impact for immigrants in schools. Rather, I challenge the stable, inclusive framework of these approaches in favor of challenging what counts and who counts in education and research. Culturally affirmative approaches

22 can work. And so do other educational practices. In doing so, I aim to rethink the relationship among education, equality, and immigrant populations. I do so not in abstract or simply descriptive terms but in ways that can speak back to understandings of and the makings of schools.

Finally, this dissertation seeks a dialogue between the everyday educations of those on the margins of school and the educations found in school. Many newcomer schools already succeed at valuing student identity and seeing culture as an asset (Suárez-

Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2014). One shift would be to therefore consider how to take up the educational practices that do not seem to fit in schools that already incorporate a funds of knowledge-type approach. A conversation between these everyday educations and school would help schools learn more about students’ lives but in a way that reshapes their micro grammars or internal logics. Such a conversation might even open a radically democratic “right to the school” (Harvey, 2012; Lefebvre, 1991), where even youth and anyone else involved in the school could forge a place within it in the process of making and constantly reinventing the school.

Research Questions

1) How did WISH emerge as a practicable intervention for recently immigrated youth in

New York City public schools?

a. In what ways does this school relate to other educational mechanisms of inclusion

for recently arrived immigrants in public schools in New York City since the 1980s?

b. What is unique about WISH as an educational intervention?

2) How do the everyday educational practices of a group of recently arrived immigrants

at this school relate to the curriculum and pedagogy they encounter in WISH?

3) What educational practices do research participants take up in their everyday lives?

a. What possibilities and understandings of education emerge from encountering

these practices?

Rationales

This study occurs at a specific historical moment of precariousness on top of the ongoing precariousness that immigrant populations and public schools face. Through the writing and research of this project, families have been torn apart, children have been locked in cages, and policies to physically and emotionally lock out immigrant populations (walls, travel bans, etc.) thrive. In one way, working in collaboration with (or conspiring with) recently immigrated youth in ways that increase their visibility without exposing them to increased dangers may seem timelier than in recent decades. In a general sense, looking at how schools approach educating or including groups and how exclusions emerge and continue would be possible with any number of socially produced populations. From this perspective, this type of study is embedded in the broad work of exploring and working with youth marked as precarious in both schooling and societal terms. I could, for example, focus this study with youth in the foster care system.

Working with marginalized populations challenges the derogatory rhetoric filling much of the political climate. It explores the complex successes of a public school and suggests that, even in those marginal spaces, youth practice education in relevant and productive ways.

For a few reasons, though, working with recently arrived immigrant youth in this study is quite untimely. This dissertation aims to produce kinds of difficult knowledge

(Britzman, 1998), presenting some irresolvable tensions and some proposals that may not

24 directly speak to the outcome-based interventions that can have an immediate and broad impact in the current political landscape. As previously stated, I am not searching for a

“best practice” to implement. And, the study occurs as concrete interventions and specific outcomes are increasingly useful and immigrant communities continue to demand them.

Untimeliness, though, does not run counter to these needs. Contributing in a hopefully new way, imagining an educational otherwise will always be possible and always a bit untimely when considering people’s immediate, material needs.

Rationale for Working in a Newcomer School with Newcomer Youth

This study aims to look at the dominant discourses of how immigrant youth are best educated. The newcomer school is perhaps the most overt and successful approach, particularly within New York City. Where other programs use supplemental interventions scattered through a school day, newcomer schools use a whole school model to respond to perceived educational needs of immigrant youth. These schools are also not merely all- encompassing language programs. They aim to educate immigrate youth through their cultural identities as immigrants. Immigration and education scholars commonly praise the newcomer school as a model (e.g. Bartlett & García, 2011; Jaffe-Walter, 2008). The schools are a worthwhile focus simply to offer further exposure and investigation into their workings. Conversely, these successes show how the margins keep appearing even in such affirming environments. Students are still marginalized and considered at-risk within these schools. Programmatic changes might lead to different metrics, but the examination of everyday education holds true. It is possible to look to education beyond the structure and logics of schooling, even when that schooling is seen as successful.

These schools pedagogically address a specific populational category, the newcomer. I do not intend to study people included in this category but work with individuals and study the category itself. By placing the newcomer into a historical context with other immigrant populations, the study can explore and challenge how the participants in this study have been racialized, classed, and treated in educational terms.

In doing so, I can further explore how the youth participating in this study take up and resist this subjectivity that centrally defines their schooling.

Rationale for Methodologies

A history of the present (Foucault, 1979) explores the historical forces that have led to the newcomer and the newcomer school. It looks to how this category and this form of schooling have come to flourish in order to destabilize the truths that have been produced. Consequently, a history of the present opens space for new ideas and new ways of considering newcomer youth, specifically beyond the boundaries of categorization. A history of the present also entangles with ethnographic approaches as I explore the liminal spaces between discourses valued regarding education and immigration and those practiced and valued in everyday life.

Since I aim to write about youth in their everyday lives, spending time with them and listening to them allows their educations to drive this work. While this broad approach explains ethnography as a method, an affective ethnography gives a sense of everyday educations without dictating some transcendent truth based on ethnographic encounters and reaches toward voices that are of an “ontological unit no longer that of an individual human being” (Mazzei, 2016, p. 1). That is, affect moves beyond individuals

(such as anthropologists) rationally representing a group (such as newcomer youth) that

26 might create an essentialized image of that group. It instead approaches something more complex and often moving before consciousness. Affect disrupts the single, stable identity capable of reporting on the True experiences of rigidly defined subjects. It also lives in and welcomes those stuck moments where participants pause and say “I don’t know how to say it” (in English or Spanish).

A comparative example may be found in Shedd’s (2015) Unequal City. Shedd undertakes a somewhat structurally similar project, building an ethnography of education that moves in and out of school. She works with “marginalized minorities…by delving into the realities of their worlds” (p. 18), writing about Chicago youth passing through boundaries of school, neighborhood, and other spaces. While Shedd’s ethnographic and education work captures everyday life, an affective ethnographic approach offers something distinct in this type of study. Shedd’s work engages students as unitary, stable individuals. A student moves through the day, perhaps shifting identity or attitude depending on the situation, but generally staying the same. Even ethnographic work such as Wortham (2005), who looks at how identities emerge over a “timescale,” frames subjects as stable, linear, and observable. Students can take on different identities through causal development, but there is still an essence they can articulate and ethnographers can observe in studying and describing their identities and educations.

An affective ethnography, in contrast, finds participants reverberating through places and spaces, being many things at once with no definite consistency. This approach moves beyond shifting but unitary analysis. It decenters researcher, subject, and research itself and considers the influence of other actants such as space and place in research.

Massumi (1995) frames affect as a “nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic

27 remainder” (p. 85). The remainder is what is always left over, unable to fit into a tightly described work and confined to definitive understandings. That remainder, though, is not necessarily discarded, left to the ethnographic margins. An affective engagement with everyday educations thus welcomes other ways of deep hanging out (Geertz, 1997) and exploring education that go beyond direct and rational description. Additionally, this method does not ask participants to fit their education into existing frameworks.

Ultimately, an affective ethnography opens new spaces and ways of engaging education and exploring how that education operates. It also invites the shifting positions of those who are marked in shifting ways (whether they be through risky status in school or transnational identities).

Theoretical Framework

This dissertation’s frameworks wade through theories often broadly associated with poststructuralism as well as a number of intersecting notions of how equality and education operate in everyday life. Embedded in the poststructural framework are ideas of truth as unfixed and competitive (Foucault’s “regimes of truth,” 1978a), and meaning as emergent and interpretive. Certain discourses become institutionalized and privileged, but they are not predetermined or transcendent. Similarly, the categories and positions subjects come to occupy and move through are not given identity markers but classifications that come about through discursive work. Disrupting roles and classifications does not mean that they do not have real effects. Troubling the categories of newcomer or undocumented does not aim to ignore the material impact these classifications have on people. Instead, taking up poststructuralism in this way allows for

28 a counter-discourse of resistance. Though these categories cannot be undone, they can be contested.

In looking at everyday educational practices, I use Rancière’s (1991) notion of equality. For Rancière, equality is not a goal or status to be implemented into the social order. Equality is already present. Everyone, he suggests, is equal to everyone else. With equality as a starting point, my position as a researcher and the role of this dissertation acts as a “gap between accreditation and act” to show that “I must teach…that I have nothing to teach” (Rancière, 1991, p. 15). Even as participants carry different forms of credit (ranging from documents to educatedness), their practices make visible their inherent equality. I work with participants specifically to dig at educational practices of equality. Contrast this notion with a passive equality, which Rancière sees as the distribution of equality (through rights, schooling, etc.). Through powerful schooling interventions, for instance, marginalized students can become equal. Rancièrean equality, meanwhile, is a matter of politics, not the participation of structuring a governing system, but an “activity” which “turns on equality as its principle” (Rancière, 1999, p. ix) in a way that stops the clockwork of dominant social systems. The practice or verification of equality occurs “when…these mechanisms [passive equality and the social order] are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition…the equality of anyone and everyone” (Rancière, as cited in May, 2008, p. 40). This “stopping in their tracks” happens in moments when people act to verify their equality. After momentary ruptures, the social order re-forms. But, the verification of equality changes something, makes possible something in a single moment that ripples outward that had not been possible before. In education, equality is learning that seems unthinkable, creativity that is

29 unauthorized, moments of practice where education should not be practiced, acts of being that confound, and many things that contest the passive equality so often undertaken in education projects. This framework does not suggest that newcomer youth or others do not need school. School can be one site among many to verify equality. It simply suggests that even as conditions have been made unequal, an inherent equality is already present. And, the everyday exercising of that equality is under-explored.

A focus on such specific moments suggests a framework built on theories of the everyday rather than on macro, structural challenges to systems. Everyday events are explored as a way to examine educational practices, repertoires (Dixon-Román, 2014), pedagogical encounters (Friedrich, 2011), or events (Biesta, 2013) that occur in moments.

Within theories of everyday life are ways to disrupt ritual and the general status quo

(Lefebvre, 1991; Scott, 1985). I also undertake a perspective of the everyday where people tactically play with (de Certeau, 2011) systems and orders that on the everyday scale are never fully determined. de Certeau explores tactics as the micro navigations and disruptions by which “common people” enact “practices which introduce artistic tricks”

(p. 29) into daily life. Studying the everyday helps “bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’” (pp. xiv-xv). The everyday educations of newcomer youth may not revolutionize schooling, but can show how participants “make do” in playing with malleable materials and structures. Crary (2014) also reminds that everyday life has historically been viewed in social science as a less governed place, part of “times, behaviors, and sites that effectively constituted layers of unadministered life” (p. 68, emphasis in original). At the same time, using a Deleuzian framework, Crary shows how

30 controls have become unbound, operating everywhere at all times without gaps or margins. The everyday educational practices in which participants in this study engage are not liberated from social forces but do challenge the totalizing nature of a “control society.” They show that everyday life is brimming with resistance to such controls.

The everyday is not a scrapbook of isolated events but entangling constellations of moments. Reflecting this idea, I take up Leander, Phillips, and Taylor’s (2010) notion of learning trajectories and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of lines of flight to see how everyday educational practices emerge, travel, and what they make possible.

Learning trajectories are “histories of identification and/or learning processes over multiple events” (p. 342). Lines of flight are similar movements across time and space, but follow a far less linear path. They are multiplicities that shift or change and connect with other multiplicities. Used in an affective ethnographic study of everyday educations, these movements offer a study of how education takes place in learning processes and sudden events occurring across time and space.

It is not simply a general, ahistorical notion of everyday education that I aim to explore but educational practices in relation to an anti-coloniality of education (after

Wynter’s (2003) notion of a coloniality of being). To do so, I take up a loose collection of theories that help explore questions of who gets to learn, in what ways, how certain forms of education are made fugitive, discarded, or refused. These works include Halberstam’s

(2014; Halberstam & Nyong’o, 2018) ongoing project on studying wildness as an

“unrestrained, uncivilized, disorderly, and ferocious, anti-colonial relationship to thought and being” (Halberstam, 2014, n.p.). I similarly take up Moten and Harney’s (2013) work on fugitivity (see also Patel, 2016), specifically drawing on their notions of study in

31 worlds of education. The undercommons interrogates the routes away and beyond the policies that aim to fix and govern. Finally, Hartman’s (2019) study of waywardness most directly relates to this dissertation project. She theorizes waywardness while looking historically at the practices of those who refuse to be governed. These divergent theories have roots in, among other fields, black studies and queer theory, but all of them contend with a resistance to governance. I do not want to frame participants as dangerous or unruly but show how they practice wild forms of education that refuse categorization and the predetermined aims and logics of schooling. Though this study works with newcomer youth, I return to a Rancièrian politics to suggest that these educational practices are possible for anyone and forge new ways of thinking and being.

Significance of Study

In her frequently cited book, Valenzuela (1999) examines “subtractive” schooling and the youth who “oppose a schooling process that disrespects them; they oppose not education but schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 5). Following this study, Bartlett and

García (2011) undertake an examination of a newcomer school that is “additive.” They look at the learning trajectories of students in a newcomer school that affirms student culture and responds to their educational needs. The present study takes up Bartlett and

García’s examination of additive schooling, but examines recently immigrated youth in a similarly “additive” setting who also do not oppose education and yet have not fit into the additive schooling structure. Moreover, the project moves to look productively at the educational lives of participants that is neither negatively (subtractive) or positively

(additive) defined but instead autonomously created.

In producing marginalized populations, educational researchers can find how inequality is made and understood. Previous work has explored cultural productions of statuses dividing those who have and can use education and those considered uneducated

(Levinson & Holland, 1996). Similar research has shown the production and reproduction of marginalized education through schooling and everyday practices (Willis, 1977). Other work has pushed back against unequal educations with studies of school and outside-of- school life for recent immigrants (Patel, 2013) or improvements in school outcomes for newcomer, refugee, or undocumented youth (Bartlett & García, 2011; Chang, 2015;

Nespor, 1997; Nienhusser, 2013). Adding to this work, this study pushes against the idea that those whose education is not fully included in schooling are not educated or educable. I argue that with education as an ever-present, productive force those who have been marked on the margins of education are not only waiting for an intervention yet to come. Or rather, that intervention is not only found in school or some other policy or program. This work then first offers a different perspective on how education relates to equality by considering a broad understanding of education and seeing how it operates on an everyday basis.

I thus engage bodies of research that challenge persistent and sometimes deafening deficit narratives. This work’s significance challenges such narratives of newcomer youth. Yet, where other critiques take expressions of deficit and flip them to infuse asset-based thinking, this project resists inversion. I am not in search of assets that can prop up the school but in asking why everyday educations are at times divided from schools, even those founded on asset-based thinking. Furthermore, the study questions why certain assets are labeled as such while others may be left to the side. Resisting

33 asset-based thinking allows for an emergent understanding of educations that youth feel are useful or create sensations of success, even if these educations appear problematic or seem to reinforce deficits.

Additionally, this project suggests that this way of thinking may engage in a dialogue with schooling and other educational interventions. Many projects look outside of school and challenge the supremacy of schooling or critique the function of schools within societies (e.g. Illich, 1970). As previously described, education programs do so as a way to inform school or still implement a program, though less formally (e.g. Gutiérrez,

2008). Perhaps unique in this work is a call for those working in education and schools to take up a Rancièrean notion of equality in order to explore what exists beyond the boundaries of access and outcomes. It speaks back to school but not to reinforce or improve it but fundamentally alter its logics. In doing so, the dissertation aims to offer possibilities of showing school not as a bounded place to access but as a porous, aesthetic network. That is, this work aims to push at school’s margins to infuse different types of knowledge and make more flexible the institutional borders that always produce a margin.

Ultimately, the project’s significance limits itself to everyday work. While I aim for broader conversations with scholars of immigration and those concerned with the education of such populations, the most explicit significance of this work is the impact it aims to have on the participants’ educational lives. We spend significant time delving into and exploring the educations that participants engage in every day. Educational lives narrated as “at-risk” are here challenged and instead expressed as desirous, complex, ever-present, and often successful. At the same time, exploring participants’ educational

34 lives wanders into unknown places. I start from the assumption that these educations are present, but when we started working together, I did not know what new things could be made possible by the potential for educational emancipation. Emancipation makes possible something that cannot be systematized or packaged into a usable algorithm. It moves the social order so that something previously unthinkable becomes suddenly possible. A final significance of this work is thus the localized, unplanned emergences of the research.

Some Terms, Clarified

Newcomer Youth “At-risk”

The term newcomer relies on the criteria often used for enrolling in a newcomer school. The Internationals Network for Public School, a network of schools specifically designed for recently immigrated students uses the criteria of youth identified as ELLs and who have arrived in the U.S. within the last four years and score in the bottom quartile of an English proficiency exam (Internationals Network for Public Schools,

2019a). Many subpopulations fit within the newcomer category. Though I never inquired about immigration status, several participants self-identified as undocumented students.

Undocumented may point to a legal status, but neither undocumented nor refugee, another population of students represented in WISH, are simply technical designations. I attend to the attachments that come from terms like immigrant and the treatments that emerge with that categorization. In terms of schooling, these categories are often

“embodied in a series of ‘dispositions’ that differentiate those who are educable from those who are not” (Popkewitz, 1998, p. 38). At present, immigrant youth are considered

35 in ways that are racialized, gendered, and classed. These terms are furthermore not simply stereotyped but ways of thinking about how to treat populations.

WISH does not specifically use the label of “at-risk,” but as I describe in greater detail in the methods section, routine meetings identify students in need of specific services. Additionally, I problematize the category in several ways, including in terms of asking “at-risk” of what. Some students faced legal risks while others risked dropping out of school. 7 of the 9 participants took ESL courses of various intensities and were, according to teacher leaders, commonly discussed in weekly teacher meetings. All of the participants identified risk as something with which they contend on a daily basis.

Education and Everyday Educations

Education is everywhere. It is in everything. I would even argue that there is no outside to education. Mostly, though, education is a creative thing. The creativity of education brings something forward that had not previously existed. Within that conception, this study frames education in four ways. First, education includes processes and outcomes of learning. Learning is a complex mixture of developing skills and knowledge. As newcomer youth learn English or learn the social practices of their neighborhood and school, these processes are educative. Second, education entails formation. It is the becoming or making of things, a coalescing that never quite solidifies.

This facet of education might include subject making, as participants form and play with identities and are made into groups with recognizable ways of being. Third, education is pursuit. Much like study (Moten & Harney, 2013), education is an engagement with knowledge or ideas themselves rather than seeking some kind of specific outcome. It is a move toward the new, the unknown, the obscured, the uncertain. Fourth, education works

36 as resistance. It is forming oneself against an identity, possibly unlearning. Resistance pushes against the adaptive qualities of education. From these three aspects, I return to a notion that education is creative. Even in rote learning, where something is acquired, new possibilities emerge from this process.

What, then, are everyday educations? If, as I assert, education is everywhere and burrows into everything, that does not mean that it is interchangeable with the living of life. The aspects of education I have outlined can happen anywhere. Everyday education is then simply the ways that these things happen in the course of living, without any institutional pedagogical implementation. It is the pursuit of one’s understanding of the world, the learning of a skill with friends, the valuing of ideas important to one’s community. At the same time, school is part of everyday life, which leads me to place schooling educations into conversation with educations occurring in different times, places, and taking on different frameworks.

Scholars have studied education in everyday life in any number of ways including the learning of language (Heath, 1983) or everyday experience and knowledge as subject making (Villenas, Godinez, Delgado Bernal, & Elenes, 2006). Everyday education might also be considered the trope of the “education of the streets.” In this dissertation, I focus these themes through participants identifying educational practices that they value, find useful, or that stir sensations of success for them. Rancière (1991) considers an education that verifies equality as one that leaves students alone with a thing (he uses the example of a text). This approach similarly leaves students alone but in the world, “propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of the situation” (p. 12). Their work with things, people, and places in everyday life drives this work.

Assumptions and Limitations

Once more, this dissertation begins with the assumption that education is linked to equality and that education and equality are already-present forces rather than externalities to develop or attain. I assume that schooling has been made the central location and mechanism for education but that this perspective should be challenged.

Therefore, a central assumption of this work is that education occurs beyond school walls in ways that can run counter to schooling but still serve the interests of equality and justice. Participants want to do more than exclusively find better ways to adapt to schooling structures or find something more than ways to access school curriculum.

Additionally, I assume that the various categories and positions entering and crossing the research (from undocumented or “at-risk” to that of researcher) are unfixed. I recognize the impact of these categories and how they may be (positively or negatively) deployed but assume that participants and I welcome challenges to them.

Given these assumptions, I am limited in a number of ways. First, while a certain aspect of this work aims to directly alter learning trajectories, I am limited in an ability to create prescriptive paths toward “success” for participants. Looking at what ways of being become possible in school, Youdell (2006) writes that an “analysis of the discursive foundations of inclusion/exclusion begins to indicate the possible limits of a transformatory inclusion project” (p. 31). My work with participants hopes for but does not aim to raise grades or attendance, alter socioeconomic status, or offer any kind of silver bullets for inclusion in schools. By troubling inclusion rather than working directly for its achievement, the project is thus limited in its causal outcomes. Additionally, though emancipation is not a binary of success/failure, I cannot guarantee that

38 participants will always see their educational practices as productive and as the verification of equality. There will likely be moments of awareness and agreement about educational moments and other moments of discarding or disagreeing about such moments.

Second, while I am making a more general claim about the possibilities of education and schooling, the work is highly situated. Any outcomes emerge from research grounded in the people, places, and things participating in the research. There is nothing to suggest that whatever happens in this dissertation could be replicable or scalable. Though a goal of this work is to create provocative ideas that others can take up in fields of education, I believe that research findings will be bound to the times and places in which research occurs with participants. In fact, I make the assumption that whatever comes out of the ethnography cannot be folded into a program. It can only offer lessons by example and idea.

Third, I am limited in my abilities as a researcher and educator. Just as Lave

(2011) describes, I am only now beginning the craft of research. Even if I were an advanced, expert researcher, I cannot see all educations. Some may be obscured given my subject position; others impossible to observe simply because I consider education to be so big. I am thus limited to education as I have outlined it and as participants encounter and express it within the frames of research. My pedagogical practices are also not perfect. I am limited in my ability to resolve educational struggles even as I make myself available to work with participants.

Conclusion

Without pursuing reform and yet rejecting stasis, where does this dissertation stand? I suggest that if we can peel back the “partition of the sensible” (Rancière, 2001), that boundary of police, which divides up and maintains the social order, so that we can peek in on educations not intelligible (or at least not present for some reason) in schools, not to categorize and tame them but to show that such educations can thrust an explosive contestation into how educational lives are shaped and considered, perhaps educational researchers and educators can disrupt the notion that those “at-risk” or on the margins only need better reforms. Perhaps, we might even find a way to prolong such a disruption. The partition may not be destroyed, but different understandings of education may flow.

The goal here is to explore possibilities that might have conversations with schooling and general conceptions of newcomers. It is a way of collaborating with recently immigrated youth to alter their educational trajectories and engage the emancipatory potential of their everyday educations. Maybe, the participants and I can suggest that if education is already happening, and those educations offer something to reconceptualize education, places like school can be places not only designed for individuals and populations in systems, but places for anyone, without any particular qualification, to verify their equality. The members of educational communities can construct places of breathing, hospitable boundaries, and ones that offer particular potentialities and trajectories for those who participate. Ultimately, for participants and for ways of understanding immigration and education within educational research, this study works toward an emergent otherwise.

Chapter II

A PLURALITY OF BEST ANSWERS

Introduction

In The One Best System, Tyack (1974) explores the gradual centralization of urban school systems. He writes about a shift toward a singular systemic model for urban education—a one best system. This literature review considers scholarship on the multiple interventions used for recent immigrants to include them in this system. Where

Tyack writes about formalization or institutionalization as a response to including the disadvantaged, I now turn to literature that shows the multiple and competing interventions flourishing in their approaches to including newcomer youth in schools throughout the U.S. Interventions arise from and take place in schools or informal school- like settings. Ultimately, though, these diverse approaches show the same impulse as

Tyack tracks, inclusion in an overall bureaucratized schooling system.

In this Chapter, I first outline how academic literature considers the education of newcomer youth in recent decades. Within this section, I briefly touch on historical examples of schooling for immigrants but distinguish newcomer youth from earlier groups of immigrant students. I then turn to two broad themes. First, I review work on specific contemporary interventions, noting their frequent success for students’ academic outcomes. I frame this section through language and culture as well as how broader school policies have been framed around these issues. Looking increasingly to the

41 margins of schooling, I also review additional inclusion programs that carry loose associations with schools. This section concludes with reviewing scholarship directly on whole school models for “newcomers.”

Second, having examined writing on mechanisms to include (or more fully include) recently immigrated students, I shift to look at writing on outside-of-school education. This section does not specifically focus on recently arrived immigrants but broadly explores how education outside of school responds to inclusion/exclusion in schooling. The literature or “movements” on which I focus directly respond to schooling with either outright rejections or deep challenges to schooling’s logics. Specifically, I review literature on nonformal/informal education, public pedagogy, and popular education. From here, I link the two overarching sections, exploring out-of-school education literature focused on programs with immigrant youth. The review concludes with a call to explore the thin, not-often-visited gap between out-of-school education and programs aimed at including recent immigrants. I begin by returning to the research questions.

Research Questions

1) How did WISH emerge as a practicable intervention for recently immigrated youth in

New York City public schools?

a. In what ways does this school relate to other educational mechanisms of inclusion

for recently arrived immigrants in public schools in New York City since the 1980s?

b. What is unique about WISH as an educational intervention?

2) How do the everyday educational practices of a group of recently arrived immigrants

at this school relate to the curriculum and pedagogy they encounter in WISH?

3) What educational practices do research participants take up in their everyday lives?

a. What possibilities and understandings of education emerge from encountering

these practices?

Early and General Considerations of Educating Immigrants

Educators and policymakers thinking about how to educate immigrants in the

U.S. are as old as the common school. For example, Reese (2005) recounts a minister praising a harsh form of inclusion during the common school era. “‘children go into the schools,’ he said, ‘English, Scottish, Irish, German, Danish, Norwegian, French—and all come out American” (p. 51). Acts of inclusion were instantly bound to assimilation.

Immigrant children would be welcomed to school, and some accommodations could even be made, but generally speaking, immigrant youth had to adapt to schools as they already existed. The assimilationist impulse also followed through the early 20th century.

School people did make adjustments in the system to fit immigrants’ children in certain ways: steamer classes for older children who did not speak English, a new stress on hygiene and civics, new opportunities for after-school recreation and continuation schooling, for example. But by and large they believed that the child had to fit the system. (Tyack, 1974, p. 254)

Similar concerns persist in contemporary schooling as scholars and educators take up different understandings and approaches to issues of immigration and education.

These interventions can be linked to notions of populational reasoning. “Populational reasoning is not only about assigning children to groups. It individualizes the general attributes of populations to particular children in school through a hierarchy that ascribes a ‘nature’ to students” (Popkewitz, 1998, p. 46). That is, in order to figure out how to best intervene on behalf of recently arrived immigrants, districts, schools, and other

“discursive formations” (Foucault, 1972) come to produce populations with particular

43 traits in need of specific interventions. The category of immigrant, for all its internal diversity, comes to be a stable identification for individuals who index certain characteristics and needs that schools and other educational institutions can act upon.

Scholars often describe the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, which capped the number of visas from certain countries, as marking a new era of immigration rooted in issues of legality and citizenship (Massey et al., 1993; cf. Ngai, 2004). A further demographic identification of “new” immigrant populations arose with waves of immigrants from Asia and Latin America arriving to urban centers starting around 1990

(Logan & Turner, 2013). This review specifically identifies the emergence of the populational category “newcomer” as a demarcation point for new educational logics in treating immigrant students. Though discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 of this dissertation, the historical moment when newcomer immigrants emerged as educable subjects may be considered from the 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision, which gave a legal guarantee to school regardless of immigration status.

Immigrant groups are not only described based on the period in which they arrived but are identified in nationalized, classed, and racialized ways. They are also frequently characterized through deficit. “A growing number of new immigrant populations in the United States are disadvantaged on many of the standard measures of family socioeconomic status and social resources” (Hirschman, 2001, p. 334) Specifically writing about Latinx immigrants, Carlson (2009) posits that students are subjected to “the overclassification and labeling of…Latino youth as developmental laggards characterized as ‘at risk,’ suffering from” a range of disabilities in a way that reconstitutes these students as in need of special interventions and “reproduc[es] a hegemonic racial order in

America” (p. 274). Valenzuela (1999) argues that schools function as a key site for the making of a “minority status” for immigrants, which is marked through “deficiencies” (p.

4). She describes emerging images of immigrants as uneducated and not valuing education, a characteristic that distinguishes recent immigrants from previous immigrant groups who used schooling as a mechanism for upward social mobility.

Newcomer schools have not created this category of a new type of immigrant who is of a racial minority, a low socioeconomic status, and has not properly assimilated or used school as a mechanism to learn a language and move up the social ladder. Yet, it is into these discourses that the schools must respond to the educational needs of recently arrived immigrant youth. One network of particularly well-known newcomer schools describes a situation where “English language learners are struggling to perform in existing educational environments” and where “a high school diploma can help graduates avoid cycles of poverty and underemployment” (Internationals Network for Public

Schools, 2019a). Once more, I do not want to suggest that they these schools educate students through deficit lenses. I rather point out these framings to show that discourses of racial and linguistic minorities are presented as already “at-risk.” And, educators and students must contend with these discourses.

Throughout reviewing literature on ways of educating immigrant students in the

U.S., several clear themes emerged. Particularly as it relates to WISH, literature dominantly focuses on issues of language acquisition and time in school as well as more general cultural factors. A plethora of scholarship addresses specific school subjects such as science vocabulary (e.g. Ardasheva & Tretter, 2017). Other work explores issues such as gender (Oikonomidoy, 2009) or mental health (Sugarman, 2017). Participants in this

45 study all wrestled with these issues. The following section, however, interrogates the most prominent general themes when considering education and immigration in this context.

Content Factors

English Language Learners/Emergent Bilinguals

ELL status is often both the entry point and a point of departure from schools for recent immigrants. In other words, language is often cited as a primary barrier to inclusion and maintaining enrollment. The first qualification for admission to newcomer schools is language. Many of these schools welcome students once they have been given the specific ELL label. Some schools for newcomer youth specify that students must score in the bottom quartile of English language tests when entering high school

(Internationals Network for Public Schools, 2019a). A central method of including students in schools and society is therefore grounded in language and language acquisition.

As the population of immigrant youth continues to grow, schools are seeing an influx of ELLs (Bartlett & García, 2011). ELL students account for about 15% of all New

York City students (New York City Department of Education, 2019). For immigrant youth, the ELL label comes with interventions to help students move toward “typical” education. “Most ESL and transitional bilingual education models conceive of English language acquisition as individual phenomena that ‘mainstream’ children into ‘regular’ classes once they have achieved target language native-speaker characteristics” (Bartlett

& García, 2011, p. 13). Within this pathway, students labeled ELLs face adversities and discriminations rooted in issues ranging from class to race (Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, &

Martin, 2009). These factors contribute to the high risk of ELLs dropping out of school

(Sheng et al., 2011).

Newcomer ELLs, particularly those who arrive in high school, face a difficult path to the kind of language acquisition seen as necessary in schools. Lee (2012) points to evidence of mastering academic English taking 4 to 7 years, a fact that makes graduation for recently arrived immigrant youth in high schools difficult. This notion certainly relates to Portes and Zhou’s (1993) contention that immigrant “success” can be linked to length of time spent in-country. Pedagogical interventions for this issue are underexplored in academic literature. “What does exist often debates the benefits of particular educational models, such as transitional bilingual education, structured immersion, etc.,” approaches that “ignore the critically important social processes at work in schooling multilingual youth” (Brisk, as cited in Bartlett, 2007a, p. 216).

Considerations of educating newcomer ELLs are often limited to figuring out outcome- based strategies. Teaching ELLs essentially amounts to instructional tips and tricks. Even as social and cultural factors come to play a part, educating ELLs centers language acquisition.

As seen in greater detail in Chapter 4, a host of approaches to educating ELLs seeks a “best practice” in responding to newcomer students’ linguistic needs.

Conversations around immersion vs. pull-out classes, for instance, have been ongoing for decades. Yet, developing language skills is not simply a matter of classroom strategies or time. “City schools in states experiencing a new influx of migrant ELLs, lack understanding of how best to work with ELLs who are newcomers and do not have administrative and pedagogical structures to support their academic achievement”

(Nevárez La-Torre, 2011, p. 13). A lack of plans for or understanding of ways to include newcomers or the resources to develop and institute potential interventions extends to entire school systems tasked with their inclusion. Fine et al. (2007) look beyond schools and districts to the impact of national policies such as high-stakes standardized testing on

ELL students. They find that, though students create sites of resistance, these policies foster approaches that further exclude ELLs.

Dynamic and thorough challenges to such exclusion appear throughout literature on ELLs and newcomers. At the same time, other lines of scholarship depict positive outcomes and strategies to support newcomer ELLs (e.g. Araujo, 2009; Goldenberg,

2008). Authors address general interventions such as teacher education. Sheng et al.

(2011), for example, suggest “specialized support programs (with necessary funding) geared toward this population have the potential to provide teachers with unique skills for teaching ELL students” (p. 102). These authors also point to a study that suggests steps such as instruction building on skills and abilities and holding high expectations. Others take up Bartlett’s (2007a) call to further theorize ELL education and consider approaches beyond technical pedagogical techniques. For example, Choi (2013) tracks a social studies classroom teaching newcomer ELLs using culturally relevant pedagogy, thinking through the position of cultural identity in ELL education. Choi concludes that culturally relevant pedagogy draws on ELLs’ diversity and has a deep impact on student engagement and learning of social studies while furthering language skills. I return to the productive approaches to newcomer ELL students in the section below on literature about newcomer schools, but it is important to note that scholarship does not frame ELL status as something solely rooted in language.

In recent years, critiques have emerged concerning the very use of the term ELL.

García (2009) describes the use of the term emergent bilingual as preferable to ELL because “emergent bilinguals refers to the children’s potential in developing their bilingualism; it does not suggest a limitation or a problem in comparison to those who speak English. As such, bilingualism is recognized as a potential resource, both cognitively and socially (p. 322). These critiques suggest a shift in discourse, but do not suggest a rigid set of pedagogical practices. For instance, García, Flores, and Chu (2011) examine schools with distinctly different pedagogical approaches who still “create language education policy through a collaborative process that incorporates bilingual students’ hybrid practices and gives students agency in negotiating their linguistic repertoires” (p. 1). Similarly, and once more something discussed in greater detail in

Chapter 4, García and Sylvan (2011) point to the fact that bilingualism, particularly as it is considered additive or dynamic, builds on students’ identities. It does not try to replace and assimilate their language to dominant norms. Yet, the term ELL persists, with it being the primary term used to refer to students at WISH.

Students with Interrupted Formal Education

Educating students for language acquisition is also not divorced from previous educational and schooling experiences. Highlighting both the need to study recently immigrated Latinx students and their educational vulnerability, Bartlett and García

(2011) suggest that these prior experiences “may impede their [immigrant youth] retention and attainment” in schools (p. 5). Freeman et al. (2002) offer the concept of

SIFE as a distinct category from ELL but with shared experiences and needs. The term

SIFE often operates as part of a hyphenated category of SIFE-ELL. As part of its

49 resources for ELLs, the New York City DOE maintains a website for SIFE, defining the category as students with no or limited literacy ability in their first language and a general lack of academic knowledge (New York State Department of Education, 2019). DeCapua et al. (2007) and DeCapua and Marshall (2009) similarly characterize challenges for

SLIFE (they add and “L” for limited) as a “lack of English proficiency, limited or no native language literacy; and limited or no formal education…specially tailored programs have been developed to meet their language, literacy, and academic needs” (p. 160).

Newcomer students with the SIFE label are viewed, in a way, as newcomers to schooling in general. As with the ELL label, identifying students as SIFE brings a range of interventions to include these students in schools and improve their learning outcomes.

DeCapua and Marshall (2009) point to common and general interventions for

SIFE such as small group instruction or differentiated instruction. Research on specific skill building for SIFE suggests that teaching discrete skills such as reading strategies help SIFE build vocabulary and progress in reading levels (Montero et al., 2014). Though

DeCapua and Marshall do not critique these strategies, the authors suggest that many

SIFE come from countries where learning paradigms are not centered on the abstract and future-oriented approach used in U.S. schools. Hos (2016) describes this fact as SIFE not having the cultural capital of students with extensive experiences in U.S. schools, which would allow them to use the U.S. education system to further learning outcomes and life trajectories. As such, Hos suggests a pedagogical approach based on connections to students’ cultural lives in order to “create a classroom learning environment that accommodates SLIFE, assisting them in making the paradigm shift” (169). The cultural

50 connection both invests students in classroom life and situates them in the kind of cultural language of U.S. classrooms.

SIFE is not, however, typically a temporary interruption schools can combat through extra coursework or other programs. Hos (2016) describes refugee students labeled as SIFE as not only in need of academic but also psychological and emotional support. Additionally, many of the students from Hos’s ethnographic project cited jobs and other responsibilities as limiting factors to their academic success. “Refugee and immigrant students have more family responsibilities than do their peers, which may affect their academic success in schools” (p. 15). These challenges piled upon challenges suggest SIFE enter and progress through schooling always “at-risk.”

Fry (2005) points to consistency in formal education as a leading indicator of dropout rate. He shows that as of 2000, over 70% of recently arrived students in secondary school identified as having some interruption to their formal education drop out of high school. These data carry to general conceptions of students with breaks in their schooling or language learners. Sullivan (2011) looks at the “disproportionate” number of ELLs in special education classrooms, suggesting that “it is unlikely that most have educational disabilities” (p. 329). Instead, a battery of factors including language support and teacher education contribute to this overrepresentation. Bartlett (2007a) points out that the SIFE label stands in for “students who are considered to have too many learning problems to have a chance for success” (p. 221). She suggests that though the SIFE label can be used to enforce deficit models of students, many students find ways to navigate schooling with and against the label. It is not simply teacher or school

51 interventions that allow for SIFE to find success in school. Their own ways of making do can thus impact their learning trajectories.

Sociocultural Factors

Where newcomer school populations’ education is constructed around linguistic needs, their approach is grounded in culturally relevant practices (e.g. Choi, 2013). As the

Internationals Network for Public Schools (2019b) puts it, “Differences among students and faculty are cherished, and students are continually encouraged to celebrate their cultural and linguistic individuality while embracing their new home.” The diversity of cultures in schools designed for recently immigrated youth is viewed as a central asset in constructing a successful school with positive academic outcomes. A direct focus on infusing cultural life into the schools relates to scholarship that links approaches that include students’ cultural identities in schools with positive outcomes ranging from increased graduation rates to feelings of belonging in schools.

Valenzuela (2005) ethnographically describes how schools have approached this issue, examining a schooling “process of ‘de-Mexicanization,’ or subtracting students’ language and culture, which is consequential to their achievements and orientations toward school” (p. 83). Academic success here becomes linked to racial, linguistic, and cultural norms. Those falling outside this norm need to subtract their cultural identity to succeed. Essentially, the subtractive school model presents a curriculum that takes

(certain forms of) cultural identity out of education. It is a way that “schools themselves perpetuate inequality” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 16). As with other approaches to educating immigrant youth, this form of schooling reaches back to the very roots of U.S. schooling.

Adams (1995) posits that the last “Indian War” was fought through acculturating

52 education that sought to move American Indian students toward “American” ways of thinking and living. That is not to say that this form of schooling immigrant youth directly comes from the American Indian Residential Schools. Rather, they share a form of cultural erasure and “othering” visible throughout the history of U.S. schooling. In addition to erasure, Suárez-Orozco et al. (2010) conclude that this subtractive approach, which continues in many school settings, can contribute to a sense of exclusion and limit participation and success in school.

On a personal scale, Chang (2016) suggests that her strong academic performance in high school allowed her to “overcome” or mask her undocumented status. She describes an implicit message from her own schooling that doing well in school presented a feeling of protection from the precariousness of citizenship status. Yet, her political identity stood in conflict with schooling success. Success for immigrant youth is supposed to come through resilience and against great adversity (e.g. Conchas, 2016).

That is not to say that the research on which Valenzuela and others draw suggest that schools universally actively and completely exclude immigrant students. Instead, students are only supposed to care about school in a “technical fashion” (Valenzuela,

2005) without teachers caring for their cultural lives. Summarizing Valenzuela (1999),

Bartlett and García (2011) describe the impact of subtractive schooling: “the school failed to provide a culturally appropriate pedagogy of high expectations and strong support for the students…an approach that turned cultural and linguistic difference into deficit rather than asset” (p. 21). Consequently, academic outcomes can be negatively affected and students can come to feel detached from school.

Challenging this notion, a number of authors present ideas where students’ culture and identity act as positive resources to fill a school’s curriculum. Perhaps most famous here is the idea from Moll et al. (1992) that “by capitalizing on household and other community resources, we can organize classroom instruction that far exceeds in quality the rote-like instruction these children commonly encounter in schools” (p. 132).

Families and other aspects of community life act as “funds of knowledge” that teachers can use to construct a bridge between relevant curriculum and schooling experiences and immigrant students’ world. While funds of knowledge has since been taken up in more general contexts than immigrant students (see, for example, Andrews & Yee (2006), who use funds of knowledge to study “minority ethnic children” in the U.K., including their out of school mathematics education), this notion is still directly applied to the education of recently immigrated youth.

Bartlett and García (2011) study bilingual education at a newcomer school that heavily focuses on students’ cultural lives. The authors invert Valenzuela’s subtractive schooling to show an additive schooling model born of the school’s attention to students’ cultural lives. The simple appearance of students’ cultures does not, however, guarantee improvements in schooling experiences or academics. Ogbu (1982) adds complexity to this notion, pointing out that certain “cultural discontinuities” exist between schooling and home or community life for all students, but other, “secondary discontinuities” exist for subordinated minority students. When these cultural discontinuities arise, they create stratifications in schooling experiences and outcomes.

A focus on students’ lives and identities impacts a range of schooling factors.

Suárez-Orozco et al. (2009) show how “connections to [one's] cultural heritage,” can help

“propel [one] to a highly successful academic outcome” (p. 174). Suárez-Orozco et al.

(2010) specifically focus on how fostering positive relationships and engaging families in schools (though Lowenhaupt (2014) points out the need to welcome different types of engagement from immigrant families) contribute to retention for immigrant students.

Bartlett and García (2011) further this idea, framing the “additive culture” of the school through its promotion of “familial relationship between students and teachers and strong, positive peer pressure toward achievement” (p. 21). These studies show how both personal engagements from teachers and creating spaces for families to be involved creates opportunities for better schooling outcomes.

Conversely, though she shows the prevalence of academic research on students’ funds of knowledge, Rios-Aguilar (2010) determines that “there remains a need to study the relationship between funds of knowledge and Latina/o students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes” (p. 2211). She suggests that a gap exists between a general understanding that including culture can help immigrant students and what those outcomes might be. As described in the newcomer schools section below, work exists on the links between specific outcomes and a funds of knowledge-type approach.

Examining one such metric, Perreira et al. (2006) suggest that graduation rate directly relates to an ability to use cultural and social capital for recent immigrants.

Though the authors do not specifically write about the structuring of schools to include immigrant student identity, this notion certainly implies that in educational spaces that include immigrant students’ cultural identities, students will have increased social and cultural capital. Trueba (2002) theorizes a “new cultural capital” for recent immigrants.

Having experienced prolonged adversity and having crossed physical and metaphoric

55 borders, immigrant youth develop a capital born of, once more, resiliency. Trueba does not discount the idea that additive schooling or funds of knowledge can help students, but argues that immigrant students’ experiences “create the psychological flexibility necessary to assume different identities in order to survive” (pp. 7-8). Even in subtractive-type spaces, this new cultural capital allows students to survive.

Similar to Trueba, scholars explore the role of students’ identities and cultures in schools beyond the top-down implementation of curricula or school structures. Campano and Ghiso (2011) describe the “epistemic privilege” of students whose knowledge is

“derived from familiarity with multiple and often contrasting settings” (p. 166). Such a perspective contributes to students becoming “cosmopolitan intellectuals.” In a similar vein, a movement of students proclaiming themselves “undocumented and unafraid” has begun to course through schools in ways that positively impact these students’ schooling experiences (Galindo, 2012; Negrón-Gonzales, 2014). In these proclamations, students assert their position as students called undocumented at the same time as they remind us of their right to belonging in schools. Galindo (2012) considers this campaign as example of Rancièrean politics, rooting their actions in the Plyler decision in order to “make visible the gap between belonging/inclusion and non-belonging/exclusion” (p. 594).

Students performing these acts of belonging may not see their cultures reflected elsewhere in schools, but they wedge their political identity into the school in a way that demands their inclusion through (rather than despite) their identities.

Whether through individual or group acts or the structuring of school, including cultural identities thus becomes a way to welcome immigrant students. Harushimana and

Awokoya (2011) argue for a multicultural education that includes positive representations

56 of Africa as a way for “African-born immigrant students to affirm their cultural knowledge and experiences in their new learning context” (p. 37). In the act of affirming cultural life as an asset in schools, students generate a sense of belonging in that school.

Abu El-Haj (2015) makes a similar call, though she does so through a slightly different lens. In an ethnographic study of Palestinian American youth, students with transnational identities are often asked to suppress their Palestinian identity. Yet, she suggests that even when educators acknowledge these students’ cultural lives, they do so in essentialist ways. The product is students feelings an “unsettled belonging” in the school. So, while attention to students’ culture and lives outside of schools holds potential for making a place for them, a broad and generalized application of doing so does not necessarily lead to new forms of inclusion or increased academic outcomes.

Race/culture/language. Culture is a broad term, but for immigrant youth in the

21st century, it is dominantly bound up with race. Where previous generations of immigrants mainly arrived from Europe. Immigrants arriving starting in the 1990s “are mainly from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America” (Foner, 2001, p. 2). Writing about

“new” immigrants not only focuses on countries of origin but how these groups are racialized and classed, and how these treatments link to educational understandings of immigrant populations. Suárez-Orozco et al. (2009) find that “immigrant origin children face challenges…including high levels of poverty…experiences of racism and discrimination” (p. 152). Though not divorced from previous ways of racializing immigrant populations, this treatment of “new” immigrant populations arrived with a distinct level of deficit.

Students identified as ELLs, for instance, are both overrepresented in special edu cation classrooms and often misclassified as having learning disabilities (Ortiz et al., 2011).

Returning to the role of language in immigrant students’ education, Rosa and Flores

(2017) offer the notion of “raciolinguistics.” Here, race and language are not separate categories but “co-naturalized,” understanding how certain racial and linguistic positions are co-constructed and come to structurally legitimate whiteness (particularly within the

U.S. context). In doing so, racially minoritized groups are stigmatized through their linguistic practices.

Other Factors

Of course, scholars see many issues contributing to schooling success that relate to but go beyond sustained attendance, language acquisition, and culture. It is worth noting how topics such as stereotyping, safety, or physical access factor into recent immigrants and subpopulations’ inclusion and success in schools. For instance, Patel

(2013) describes undocumented students’ feelings of anticipation and fear in school and beyond. Though schools are technically marked as safe zones from immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), students do not necessarily trust these institutions or specifically know laws about schooling and access to schools for immigrants and citizenship status. When one’s presence has been marked as illegal and positioned precariously, we see “the transformation of mundane activities--such as working, driving, or traveling--into illicit acts, related to compounded legal intelligibility” (de Genova,

2002, p. 427). As a result, undocumented students face social exclusions and dehumanization as they move toward the shadows in search of safety (Galindo, 2012). As

Galindo demonstrates, however, undocumented students lack of safety in schools disarm them of their agency, it merely makes their actions and activism riskier.

Refugee students, another subpopulation of students in newcomer schools, face similar feelings of a lack of safety. For students labeled as refugees, scholars dominantly focus on their psychosocial well-being. In a comprehensive review of literature on educational needs and barriers of refugee students, McBrien (2005) finds an emphasis on the traumatic situations of “the refugee experience” (p. 329). She concludes that since trauma is a central factor in refugees’ experiences, teachers and administrators must strive to understand these experiences and consequent behaviors in order to help refugee students succeed. Mendenhall et al. (2017) use a case study of an International High

School to add that as refugees’ experience issues such as trauma, they must simultaneously navigate discrimination, social alienation, and other challenges that impact their academic success. These findings relate to the notion that schools must attend to newcomers’ socioemotional needs in order to both center belonging and normalize bilingualism (Martin & Suárez-Orozco, 2018).

Taking up themes of safety and inclusion for immigrant students through a lens that looks at other populations of students, Garver and Noguera (2015) write about the separation of immigrant students into a newcomer academy within a shared school building. They describe how the inclusion of cultural and linguistic support for ELLs in one school comes at the expense of other students (in this study, a predominately African

American student population) in the same building. While the newcomer academy they study aims to address the academic needs of ELLs, the authors find that this segregation perpetuates negative stereotypes of African Americans and preserves “educational

59 structures that undermine school safety” (p. 335). Ultimately, they find that the “efforts made to support ELLs academically may be hindering their performance indirectly through a threat to school safety” (p. 339). The welcoming of immigrant students and focus on their social-emotional well-being, even when conducted in a separate school, can still be attached to the broader, hierarchical structuring of schools and approaches to other populations of students. With these notions of connected networks, I now turn to specific scholarship on newcomer schools.

Newcomer Schools

Bringing together these aforementioned issues, scholars have examined the newcomer school in a number of ways. Emerging in recent decades, the newcomer schools exist throughout the United States. These schools serve recently immigrated students identified as having linguistic and cultural needs discussed throughout this review. Unlike other interventions, which I explore in detail throughout Chapter 4, the newcomer school generates a whole school model to serve immigrant youth and their identified educational needs. Newcomer schools most often serve students who “had limited or no proficiency in English…had been in the United States from under a year to two to three years…had low literacy skills in home language…or had experienced limited or interrupted schooling in their home countries” (Bartlett & García, 2011, p. 8). Short

(2002) further characterizes newcomer programs as those serving urban populations at the secondary level. The newcomer school goes beyond traditional “bilingual education programs…in part, because at the secondary level, the curricula and materials are predicated on the belief that students have literacy skills and are acculturated to school”

(p. 174). The design and intentions of newcomer schools varies a great deal.

For all the newcomer schools scattered about the country, the Internationals

Network for Public Schools, a network of newcomer schools, is the most visible and prominent. The International High School, founded in 1985 to address high dropout rates and language barriers among recent immigrants. The first school, set on the campus of

LaGuardia Community College, aimed to provide a transcultural experience and address the needs of students “while supporting students native language” (Fine et al., 2005, p. 3).

Maintaining the mission from the first school, the International High Schools continued expanding, eventually forming a network of 4 schools in 2004. The network has expanded to over a dozen schools in New York City, several schools in other states, and a number of “academies” in cities where opening new schools is not possible. Across the

U.S., Fine et al. (2005) find that these schools are “a rich site in which to witness the everyday negotiations of education, linguistic and immigration policy in lives of urban adolescents” (p. 7). More, they are seen as schools “that defy the accelerating patterns of educational exclusion” (Jaffe-Walter, 2008, p. 2041).

Research on the Internationals Network takes a prominent place within academic literature on newcomer schools, but it is far from universal. Bartlett and García (2011) explore the efforts of Gregorio Luperón, a newcomer school building an additive environment. Patel (2013) works with youth connected to a newcomer school, but focuses more on their life experiences than on the school itself. Beyond specific case studies, Boyson and Short (2003) provide a general review of newcomer programs available at the beginning of the 21st century. Short and Boyson (2012) also continue this project with a more recent review that includes both a survey of newcomer programs and recommendations to support newcomers.

Scholarship on newcomer schools takes up themes such as responding to external pressures of education policies like accountability and standardization (Jaffe-Walter,

2008) or the teaching of interdisciplinary units and topics such as American Studies and immigration (Lee, 2012). These studies emphasize the success of newcomer schools in general. The authors point to diverse metrics such as graduation rate or college acceptance, which are much higher for immigrants in newcomer schools than other schools (Bartlett & García, 2011; Fine et al., 2005; Martin & Suárez-Orozco, 2018).

Beyond policy or pedagogy, newcomer schools are often viewed as a solution to the previously mentioned “ELL dropout crisis.” Through positive inclusion and successful academic outcomes these schools become what Fine et al. (2007) refer to as

“sites of possibilities.” At the same time, newcomer schools are not a panacea for all educational issues immigrant students face. They are also not free of critique. A recent

Atlantic article, for instance, details family and community members’ concerns over a new Internationals Network school opening in the Washington D.C. (Gross, 2017).

Furthermore, some (including the local NAACP chapter) expressed concern over the separation of the population of the proposed school from other students and the fact that

“the schools’ model did not include a plan to transition students out of the program once they become proficient in English” (np). Feinberg (2000) engages the complexity of this issue, showing the social factors that can make newcomers schools either “salvations” or

“segregated oblivion.” Other scholars and activists have pushed back on this critique, suggesting the productive and non-exclusionary possibility of such a setting. Jaffe-Walter

(2018), for instance, looks at how school leaders in the International Network work against segregating practices through networks of support.

Despite many metrics of success, and beyond these critiques, a fact remains that even in the most successful newcomer schools students still struggle and still drop out.

Newcomer schools respond to the identification and treatment of risk in different ways.

But, scholarship explores educational possibilities for those marked on the margins in ways that go beyond succeeding in school and in fact go beyond schooling altogether.

Out-of-School Education

In addition to initiatives and policies to include youth, groups of scholars focus on issues of marginalization with responses that fall outside of schooling’s traditional framework. This body of literature takes many shapes and responds to schooling or broad conceptions of education in dynamic ways. Here, I focus on three types of literature on education occurring outside (or on the margins of) schools that approach education as a response to issues of marginalization or exclusion. Though I conclude with a focus on this literature in relation to immigrant youth, this section begins by interrogating these fields more generally. First, popular education is an overarching model for education and its uses for social justice. It may be found in schools in some iterations but always subverts dominant schooling structures. Second, non/informal education is closely related to popular education and is made up of a loosely linked set of projects that look at ways of considering semi-structured education occurring outside of or adjacent to schooling.

Nonformal education may include community-based organizations, afterschool programs, or the educational work of cultural institutions. It may also be the structuring of educational practices falling outside of institutions such as apprenticeships. Third, and mostly closely related to my conception of everyday educational practices, scholarship on public pedagogy investigates education occurring outside of schools, but moves further

63 away from the understanding of education through formal processes and designs seen in framings of nonformal education. It is important to note that numerous out of school education projects address inclusion and marginalization. Deschooling, for instance, contends that the “institutional care” of school simply adds “a new dimension” to the helplessness of the poor (Illich, 1970, p. 3). Deschooling suggests radical alterations and reforms that run counter to schooling in the pursuit of a more equitable society. The literature reviewed here, though, most directly relates to issues of inclusion in schooling and everyday education.

Popular Education

Popular education explicitly undertakes a political agenda “rooted in the real struggles of ordinary people” (Crowther et al., 2005, p. 2). It aims to be an education of the people for a directly liberatory force. This education makes essential the overcoming of “the real and systematic inequalities and injustices that currently exclude many people” by “listening to and articulating those voices which have been silenced and excluded” (Crowther et al., 2005, p. 3). Bartlett (2007b) frames popular education in contrast to a “conventional” or “traditional” schooling program that promotes aspects of education like “literacy acquisition as a universal, cognitive process involving the mastery of progressively more complex skills,” whereas popular education promotes “a more communal vision of human development: schooling, directed at marginalised populations, critises inequity, promotes social, rather than individual, explanations for lack and encourages political action” (p. 154). From this perspective, popular education rejects a notion that those on the margins of school need a better way of being included in

64 relatively predetermined systems. It proposes an education emerging from the margins and based on lived experiences that challenge entire social and economic systems.

Such an educational framework is frequently situated in Latin America and

Freirean principles of critical pedagogy or liberatory education with “radical opposition to state-controlled schooling and proposal of conscientizacion” (Rockwell, 2011a, p. 33).

That does not mean that popular education cannot take place in classrooms. Its scope simply functions “within a wider optic than classroom teaching,” taking “place in community settings” (McLaren, 2016, p. 231). Popular education is thus born of the community in processes of becoming aware of oppressive forces and taking action against them. These notions place popular education as an overall “philosophy of praxis”

(McLaren, 2016) for education, uniting theory and general practice, but scholars have also studied popular education in dynamic ways and diverse settings

1 rooted in specific educational projects. For example, popular education scholarship examines projects such as an NGO’s adult literacy campaign in Portugal (Guimãraes &

Sancho, 2005) or the opening of a school in a worker-controlled factory in Argentina

(Visacovsky et al., 2004).

Many scholars suggest popular education’s power and potential as a way to include marginalized populations in movements and within schools, where “popular forces might appropriate the democratic ideology of schools, elements of existing school knowledges, and on the basis of these, find the possibility of accumulating power within the school” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985, p. 6). Other authors describe problems faced in implementing popular education projects. Guimãraes and Sancho (2005) point out that

1 Most often outside of the U.S., though Bartlett (2005) points out that very similar U.S. work is organized under the broader notion of critical pedagogy.

65 popular education movements in Portugal opened a space for state institutions to ignore educational needs, assuming that civil society would fill the empty space. Writing on a more micro scale, Bartlett (2005) explores literacy programs for two NGOs in Brazil. She shows education work with an overemphasis on issues of social justice and structural inequalities, leaving to the side other Freirean themes such as developing specific literacy skills.

A central theme of popular education, and its relation to those on the margins of schooling, is that those concerned with pursing and practicing popular education see education as a direct challenge to the very roots of the social order. It sees a transformative potential in education to alter the lives of those who have been marginalized and, through critical consciousness, change society on a structural level.

Popular education models disrupt school, and often take informal formations, but popular education is still directly planned with particular ideas and ends in mind.

Non/Informal Education2

Coughlin et al. (2011) refer to informal education as “all education that takes place outside of schools” (p. 360). Informal education can, in one sense, simply be a blanket term for educational projects occurring in everyday life. It is simply education that takes place “in context” rather than the removed, suspended space of schooling

(Strauss, 1984). More specifically, nonformal education is taken up as structured educational repertoires outside of school. Scholarship on non/informal education places it in opposition to schooling. Whereas “school represents a specialized set of educational

2 I alternate between informal and nonformal here, favoring nonformal but switching based on the language used by the authors I am citing. Among others, Strauss (1984) takes up the debate in how these terms are used.

66 experiences which are discontinuous from those encountered in everyday life,” this type of education “is called informal because it occurs in the course of mundane adult activities in which the young take part according to their abilities. There is no activity set aside solely to ‘educate the child’” (Scribner & Cole, 1973, pp. 554-555). Informal or nonformal education may not exclusively deal with exclusions or schooling, but see how groups and organizations take up education in various settings. In practice, however, authors who write about education in this way commonly focus research on institutional practices of education that focus on the margins of schooling.

For instance, Saxe (1988) looks at the mathematical skills of children selling gum on the streets of Brazil, showing that “what comes out of the accumulating research on out-of-school practices is the view that mathematics learning is not limited to acquisition of the formal algorithmic procedures passed down by mathematicians to individuals via school” (Saxe, 1988, p. 14, emphasis added). He draws a direct contrast between schooling education and out-of-schooling education to demonstrate that those considered

“excluded” are actually immersed in complex learning that is taught in schools. Even as

Saxe looks entirely outside of school, the logic here, of formalized, comparative assessment and mastery of skills, greatly reflects that of schooling. Others look to the margins of formal schooling to show similar contrasts, where informal education creates

“a space for difference” (Vadeboncoeur et al., 2011, p. 344, emphasis in original). Nocon and Cole (2006) examine shifts in after-school programs. They suggest that informal education can be such a space, but that schooling logics colonize these places.

Additionally, they do so in ways that push out students benefitting from the aims of the afterschool project. School encroaches on out of school spaces, but informal education’s

“value…is located in [its] traditionally open, informal, and tenuously institutionalized nature” (p. 117). Rather than supplementing school, Nocon and Cole argue that these programs should function with relative distinction and autonomy from schooling. They should offer something unique from the logics and ideas of schooling.

Yet, nonformal education scholars do not simply oppose schooling in favor of these out-of-school education programs. “Schools and other learning contexts are not always dichotomous, discontinuous, and disconnected” (Vadeboncoeur et al., 2011, p.

343). Scholars such as Leander, Phillips, and Taylor (2010) have looked at how education moves into and out of schools as it maps over time scales and spaces. It is here less distinct spheres and more flowing networks. On a more specific scale, Smith (2006) looks at the growth of informal educators working in and around schools, though he concludes that this work often comes to be packaged in a way that does not challenge but reinforces hegemonic schooling environments. Despite these challenges, Smith argues that informal education “with its emphasis on conversation and association can make a significant contribution to the development of a more convivial public life” (p. 10). In this line of work, nonformal education does not prop up schooling, but schooling and other types of education are deeply intertwined.

Other authors describe more autonomous possibilities for nonformal education.

Heath (2012) and Lave (2011) study learning practices in a way that shows education

“going over and around the walls of an institution” (Heath, 2012, p. 19). Where research such as Saxe’s engages a comparative study of “excluded” students, Lave looks at those not enrolled in school engaged in complex educational pursuits. She replaces “that residual term ‘non-schooled’ with a specific, local, complex educational practice”

(Gibson, 2011, p. x). This work generally shows education as not contingent upon but still not independent from schooling. Heath (1983), for instance, examines children learning to use language through everyday living, both at home and at school. The work deeply situates learning practices within specific communities and cultures. Similarly,

Rogoff (1994) proposes a “community of learners” that emerges as people engage in shared endeavors. Learning occurs simply through participation in situated practices with other learners in the community. While everyday education is related to these concepts, it is less bounded to specific processes (such as learning to master a craft) and diverts from the roots of informal education that draw on psychological theories to test competencies and see education as developmental and a process of acquisition.

Public Pedagogies

In their vast and thorough literature review of public pedagogy, Sandlin et al.

(2011) describe the long history of the term, where public pedagogy “has been largely constructed as a concept focusing on various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning occurring beyond formal schooling and is distinct from hidden and explicit curricula” (p. 338). It responds to “the necessary and neglected need to focus on curriculum, both implicit and explicit, in many kinds of educational situations” (Schubert,

2010, p. 10). From this framing, public pedagogy shares much with nonformal education and popular education. Sandlin et al. offer categories (which inform the organization of this section) that suggest public pedagogy may operate as a broad umbrella, housing other out-of-school educations. Yet, from the consideration of how this line of scholarship with questions of marginality or justice, public pedagogy involves a deeper theorization and questioning of what counts as education, who counts in education, how education

69 operates in space, and what education does. It is also worth noting a distinction with nonformal education. Where that field carries roots in psychology (e.g. Scribner & Cole,

1973), much of public pedagogy comes from theorizing and studying curriculum.

As public pedagogy coalesced into a field of research, scholars considered the political workings of popular culture and everyday life in educational terms. Giroux

(2000) uses a Gramscian notion of hegemony as intrinsically bound up in education in order to look at the ideologies of popular culture texts. Beyond analyzing and interpreting texts, Giroux uses public pedagogy to push back against dominance, specifically capitalist ideologies. Relating to the shared nature of popular culture texts, Biesta (2012) looks at a pedagogy “of” and “for” the public of the public sphere.

Where Biesta examines public spaces generally, other scholars look at specific educational sites to show a complexity of educational possibility that would be hard to find in formal schooling. This line of work is not an exploration of the programming or structuring of museum education but a politically rooted understanding of the pedagogical possibilities of certain spaces. Ellsworth (2002) analyzes the U.S. holocaust museum as a “scene of pedagogical address.” Ellsworth turns back to formal schooling to see how the museum “reveals concrete instances of how the paradoxes of teaching and learning can be productive, and can assist teachers and students in accessing moral imperatives without absolutes” (p. 14). Friedrich (2011) looks at the unresolvable tension and pedagogical possibilities encountered in memorial museums that commemorate the disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship. He shows how the pedagogical possibilities of these sites run counter to the specific goals and assumed “lessons learned” so often present in education, even nonformal museum education.

In addition to considering the pedagogy of sites and texts, public pedagogy takes up education as a thing encountered, experienced, and expressed (something I deeply interrogate in Chapter 5). Ellsworth (2005) takes on sites of learning, but does so specifically to engage notions of the self as intricately involved in the process of knowledge production in the making. Taken together, such work moves to interrogate not just the things learned outside of school but the ways that structuring outside of school can provoke new educational possibilities for those who encounter them.

Outside-of-School and School-Related Interventions for and With Recently Arrived

Immigrant Youth

Combining these dynamic fields of literature, a body of research examines education and immigration in ways that exceed schooling. Some work centers on schools but follows youth through other institutions and through their everyday lives (Abu El-

Haj, 2015; Patel, 2013). In a similar vein, projects such as the previously-mentioned

Rancièrean look at DREAMers activism investigates immigrants in school settings but does not explicitly focus on educational issues (Galindo, 2012).

Certain writing, though, looks directly at nonformal or out of school education.

Orellana (2016) studies the linguistic and cultural interactions of immigrant youth in an afterschool program, though does use the study to inform schooling practices. Looking at nonformal education programs, Gutiérrez (2008) offers a view of learning in what she calls “collective third space” (contrasting her earlier notion of thirdspace (Guitierrez,

1993), which is the contested terrain on which talk and interaction in classrooms occurs), describing a non-school writing project as part of a migrant leadership institute. This collective third space is a setting in which educational processes occur. It is an intentional

71 non-school arena that does some of what school intends but liberates it from what

Gutiérrez sees as school’s sometimes exclusionary practices.

Mendenhall and Bartlett (2018) describe the work of teachers and other educators working with refugee students in extracurricular programs in schools from the

Internationals Network. Focusing on student experiences, they offer a number of

“promising practices” in suggesting how education programming in afterschool and extracurricular settings can offer “important and meaningful opportunities for refugee youth to be exposed to, and engage in, social, civic, cultural, and sports activities, all of which have the potential to contribute to building their self-confidence, and their interpersonal and leadership skills” (p. 113). Bajaj and Suresh (2018) likewise look at the wrap-around services of an International High School, seeing how community partnerships and connections to family and homelife generate deep engagement and support for the educational needs of immigrant and refugee students.

Others explore similar topics while moving further outside of school as a central reference point. Gutiérrez (2016a) calls for “new systems” and “radical shifts in our views of learning and in our perceptions of youth from non-dominant communities” (p.

187). One way she provokes this move is to examine family life for Latinx children using new media as part of an afterschool program (Gutiérrez, 2016b). Beyond a focus on how the program supports the school’s work, Gutiérrez observes “everyday ingenuity” in ways that reshaped their educations beyond schooling. Such scholarship takes up everyday lives of immigrant youth but does so to infuse a sociocultural focus into education. Using the notion of thirdspace, Ghiso (2016) takes up a similar investigation of first grade Latinx emergent bilingual students’ literacy practices (as seen through

72 writing and photography) in community sites such as a laundromat. She finds that within

“community spaces such as the Laundromat, children participated in literacies that displayed an ethics of care, were attentive to social inequality, and situated transnational experiences as an epistemic resource” (p. 3). Using a cultural-historical approach,

Pacheco (2012) turns to home and community spaces as places generating (and generated by) “everyday resistance,” seeing these practices as potentially serving “as thinking and analytic tools for learning in school contexts” (p. 121). Even as this line of research informs schooling, it moves toward seeing educational practices emerging within everyday life.

Conclusion

Scholarship on immigration and education is substantial and transdisciplinary.

Yet, research still dominantly looks exclusively at issues of failure and exclusion or how to foster better mechanisms of inclusion and improve schooling outcomes for immigrant youth. A gap emerges at points of historical consideration of what discourses made possible something like the newcomer school as a mechanism of educational inclusion.

Similarly, while educational research moves beyond schools’ borders, it does so infrequently in the examination of immigrant youths’ education in ways independent of, or even running counter to, the logics of schooling. The supremacy of schooling as a form of education, the division of educational spaces, and considerations of who and what counts in educational projects is often under-theorized and under-historicized. The examination of policies, practices, and general ways of thinking that led to the newcomer school as a thinkable and practicable intervention and an exploration of immigrant

73 youths’ everyday educations warrants further research. To expand on these two strands, I now move toward articulating my methodologies.

Chapter III

METHODS

Introduction

This Chapter offers an overview of my two entangled methodologies, (affective) ethnography and history, specifically a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1979). Having outlined the goals and framework of this project, and situated the work within the field, I now turn to describe how I pursued the research. I begin the Chapter by presenting a chronological overview of the research process, which includes how I identified the research site and recruited and engaged participants. I then point to my positionality within the research sites and in working with my participants. I conduct brief literature reviews for the two methods and describe how I take up these methods in the dissertation.

Additionally, I present some dangers and limitations of using these methods. Finally, I describe an affective approach to both the research and data analysis. Considering the data analysis, I conclude by propelling the work into the research phase of the dissertation.

Research Questions

1) How did WISH emerge as a practicable intervention for recently immigrated youth in

New York City public schools?

a. In what ways does this school relate to other educational mechanisms of inclusion

for recently arrived immigrants in public schools in New York City since the 1980s?

b. What is unique about WISH as an educational intervention?

2) How do the everyday educational practices of a group of recently arrived immigrants

at this school relate to the curriculum and pedagogy they encounter in WISH?

3) What educational practices do research participants take up in their everyday lives?

a. What possibilities and understandings of education emerge from encountering

these practices?

Beyond the research questions, I pose some methodological queries: How can researchers engage absences ethnographically? In working with participants, how do I enter research about exclusion without reinforcing narratives of exclusion? What responsibilities do I owe to participants throughout and after research? How do I work with and not speak for my research participants? How do I share ideas of affective work and other theoretical concepts with participants? Finally, how will I both entangle and distinguish historical and ethnographic methods as I deploy them?

Research Design

Site and Recruitment

In May of 2018, I began emailing with the school’s principal1 about potentially working with the school. Throughout the summer, we emailed back and forth, outlining goals, procedures, and expectations for my research. In August of 2018, I twice met with the principal and two assistant principals. We further discussed what the research project would look like, including how I would identify and recruit participants and how much time I would spend in the school each week.

1 In the interest of disclosure, I both have a friend who works at the school. I also worked at the school as a student teacher supervisor for Hunter College in 2018. Both of these connections contributed to working with this school site.

From here, I began spending 3 days a week at the school site. For much of

September, I sat in the back of classrooms, wandered the hallways, chatted with teachers in the break room, and struck up conversations with students in the school. The majority of this work focused on becoming a recognizable presence in the school rather than recruiting participants. In chatting with students, I introduced myself as a researcher and former teacher, but focused on general questions and random topics such as what students were reading. I also asked to join various afterschool activities such as the fantasy basketball league that a history teacher started.

After a few weeks, I asked teachers if I could make a brief announcement, explaining who I am and outlining my project. In ESL classrooms, I used a bullet-pointed script to outline the project and ask if any students were interested in joining.2 I explained that I was a researcher interested in the special work of this school. At the same time, I suggested that school was only part of the picture in students’ educational lives. The project would look at what students learned and did inside of school, but also looked at the things they learn, value, and do in other places as well. I concluded by saying that the reason for doing this project was to expand the stories that are told about immigration and education. After taking questions, a few students approached me about participating.

After school in the following days, I sat down with those students to outline what their participation would look like (outlined in detail in the sections below). Once we completed these discussions, I distributed parental consent forms.3

Having made the announcement in 2 classrooms, I initially distributed 10 consent forms. Between October and November, 6 students returned the forms. Before these

2 See appendix 3 IRB New York City DOE #2037; Teachers College, Columbia University #18-191

77 students joined the study, we reviewed an assent form together, especially focusing on protecting their identities and limiting risks through their participation. Using a kind of accidental snowball sampling, where participants told other students about the project, 4 other students approached me and directly asked to join the project. For instance, Sofia heard about the project from her boyfriend, asked if she could join, and promptly returned a consent form. I ultimately proceeded with 9 participants, with ethnographic research beginning as participants signed their forms between October and December.

The Problem of Including/Excluding Participants

I entered this project aiming to work with “at-risk” youth. In terms of recruitment,

I initially suggested that students had to be over 16 in 10th grade or over 17 in 11th grade.

I also initially only recruited in ESL classrooms, aiming to work with students that WISH placed in lower level ESL classrooms. Even as I suggested that the goal here was to combat deficit narratives and challenge the very notion of “at-risk,” both students and teachers pushed back against this framing. One day after school, Jason, the history teacher, asked about this design. He returned to the old question of “at-risk” of what. He said that some of the students who had requested consent forms could end up being the valedictorians in 2020. But, in terms of “roughest homelife,” students exceling academically may be more “at-risk” than some of the students “at-risk” of failing out.

Reflecting on this question, I realized that even as I aimed to challenge the binaries of success/failure or inclusion/exclusion, I was reinforcing them through my recruitment practices. If I aimed to do more than simply invert the narrative (though showing success remained a goal), I would need to search outside these limiting frameworks. Ultimately, 3 of the 9 students in the study were seen as “succeeding” or at

78 least “passing” academically. Though the school considered the majority of my participants “at-risk” of not graduating or of dropping out, and though my recruitment of participants was still limited by who knew about the research project, I shifted to welcome anyone within the school who wanted to join. Participants still fit within the school and DOE classifications of “emergent bilingual” and “newcomer,” but did not need any other qualification to participate other than attending WISH.

Additionally, I encountered a problem of gender parity in my recruitment. The students requesting consent forms and approaching me in the hallway were, almost universally, boys. By the time I had 6 participants, the distribution was 5 boys and 1 girl.

My position and movements in the school certainly played a large part in this issue.

Hoping to at least somewhat address the disparity, I ultimately turned away 3 to 4 boys who asked to join and welcomed in 2 additional girls to the project.

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic research lasted from September of 2018 (including recruitment) through August of 2019. I staggered the starting and stopping of research with participants based on when they joined and how far we had proceeded through the research process. Ethnographic research essentially contained 3 phases. First, I traveled with participants through various parts of their school day. From here, I began spending time with participants in various third spaces (Gutiérrez, 2008), including afterschool clubs or community organizations. Finally, I worked with participants in their everyday lives, including going for walks after school, taking the subway with them, and attending events that they invited me to (ranging from pickup basketball games to community cookouts).

Interviews. I conducted 3 semi-structured interviews of 30-45 minutes with each participant, roughly corresponding to these phases. I audio recorded each of these interviews. The first interview occurred as soon as the research participant joined the project. In this first interview, we spoke about educational histories, interests, and how participants understand and define education (using both the English word and including

Spanish terms educación, aprendizaje, and conocimiento). After covering these topics, I asked the participants to describe their everyday life in school. I prompted discussions about feelings, enjoyments, frustrations, and so on in relation to academic and social life.

From here, I asked them about their education outside of school. As some participants hesitated to answer this question, I offered examples of learning a sport, an instrument, a responsibility, and so on. I also pointed out that some of the knowledge they have outside of school or even their way of learning something (a language, for example) may differ from what occurs in school. In the first interview, the participants and I spent much of the interview getting to know one another. In these interviews, I also asked participants if they preferred English or Spanish. The first interview, as with most of the other interviews, proceeded in English with Spanish and Spanglish to clarify points or convey specific ideas. However, 3 of the participants switched to Spanish throughout the first interview4.

The second interview occurred after about 3 months of working together and at least 5-6 events of participant observation within the school. This interview also coincided with starting to look at nonformal and outside-of-school educations. Before the interview, I listened to our first interview, taking notes and adding specific questions. In

4 See appendix B for interview protocol

80 this interview, I asked about dreams, educational ambitions and urges, and other thoughts of both the present and future. Within dreams, I asked questions about what types of knowledge, what values, or what learnings participants would pursue if all barriers and expectations were removed. Participants often spoke about their hopes for future careers, but I pushed them to think about education as something that relates to aspects beyond just getting a job. As such, the interviews turned toward family life, responsibilities, and everyday pleasures and struggles. Having developed a relationship with participants, I also listened as they guided the conversation more in this interview. With the framework of looking at everyday educational lives, within and beyond schooling, participants spoke more openly about issues and topics exceeding my loose interview protocol.

The third interview concluded our work together, reflecting on the past year and asking about the future. I asked about how the person interviewed at that moment was different from and similar to the person I interviewed at the start of our work together.

Then, I asked what role education played in these changes. I asked about what we would discuss and what it would be like if we come back and conduct the interview again in 5 years. Though we touched on the topic in the first two interviews and in casual conversations, we more directly mapped education in this third interview. I asked a number of questions about how knowledge or values in one place linked to or created a disjuncture with other places. For instance, Mateo described a clear difference in the way it operated in his job, but noted a definite similarity in using teamwork without a teacher guiding the work while playing basketball and creating group presentations in history and science classes.

The first two interviews occurred in a conference room or classroom at the school site, but the third interview took place outside of the school (since summer break had begun), at a place of the participant’s choosing. I suggested that we find a place with privacy or where they would be comfortable chatting about these topics. Third interview settings ranged from cafes or libraries to parks or basketball courts. At the conclusion of the interviews, I gave them a small gift. In each of the interviews, I concluded with a question of what I was not asking, what was missing, or what they wanted to ask me.

Before turning off the recorder, I answered lingering questions or listened to participants discuss what was left unexplored.

Participant observation in school. At the end of the first interview, I asked if I could come hang out in a class. I had already spent time in classrooms with students during recruitment, but I asked if they would invite me to specific classes. For the first classroom participant observation event, I asked participants to invite me to a class where they felt excited, confused, engaged, bored, etc., listing adjectives until they cut me off. I then visited a class, attending to the general topic of the class, the participants’ interactions with notebooks, other students, the teacher, and the classroom itself. Beyond these issues, I looked to posture and movement, not necessarily in a detailed kinesthetic analysis but in a sensing of affects described below.

As the class ended, I asked the participant if I could walk with them to their next class and discuss the class. In a brief chat, I asked why they had wanted me to come to that class specifically, what their thoughts or reflections were, and how those related to that class in general and other work they were doing. For example, Pablo told me that he wanted to be a musician and asked me to come to his music class. So, I asked how

82 practicing rhythm on a violin related to the reggaeton music he made. During these chats,

I proposed a few ideas, hoping to briefly member check some initial observations. As we concluded our hallway chats, I asked the participants to then invite me to a class where they felt differently. If they invited me to a class where they felt bored, I wanted to come to their most exciting class (or at least the one they found to be closest to exciting). If they felt confused, I wanted to come to a class where they felt utter clarity. Of course, I recognize the daily shifts in a school and mentioned that they might be math superstars but be confused on a particular day. The point was to see participants interacting with a range of curriculum, pedagogy, and feelings.

Classroom participant observations continued throughout the year, even as I gradually moved outside of the school. I ultimately conducted a minimum of 5 different

45-minute periods of direct classroom participant observation events with each participant. That is, I saw at least 5 periods in the day for each participant. For most participants, I observed one class many times. I spent time with Matias in his ESL class and Miguel in his history class at least a dozen times. Given that WISH is a small school

(around 300 students), when one participant invited me to a class, I would often encounter other participants. In these situations, I focused on one participant but noticed the others as well. Within these participant observation events, I variously sat at the back of the room as an observer, joined table groups, and even, with the teacher’s permission, helped students with projects. The mode of my engagement depended on the development of my relationship with the teacher and participant and my reading of the appropriateness in a given situation.

I infrequently took notes during these observations but did keep a notebook for scratch notes. Mostly, I came home and recorded detailed reflections (described in the data plan section). The in-school participant observation work also covered in-school events, informal interactions in the hallways, and lunchtime chats. Most of these in- school events included brief check-ins and general questions about a participants’ day.

Where the classroom visits were more intentional, non-class interactions were mostly unplanned and informal. However, there were many times when I sought out a participant to check in about a life event, whether issues at home or asking about a performance.

Additionally, I joined 3 school field trips and spent time with the participants who attended these trips. Similarly, I attended school assemblies and, at participants’ invitation, class performances/presentations.

Afterschool/nonformal education programs. Once we built some familiarity with each other and I had spent time with participants in their school life, I asked them about other educational programs and structured learning time occurring outside of the school day. The participants and I seemed to instantly share an understanding of nonformal education. It was planned programs, with set times and identities, but operating outside the school day. I still put loose boundaries on this work, suggesting that structured time outside the realm of schooling such as jobs would not be part of nonformal learning. Ultimately, 6 participants identified programs or afterschool clubs in which they participated. Of those participants, 4 invited me to spend time in afterschool spaces. With 2 of the participants, we spoke in detail about the structure, goals, and content of these nonformal programs, but I did not visit them in person. I joined participants for photography club; an arts/advertising program in partnership with

Facebook, which included afterschool time at the school site, at the Facebook offices, and a year-end presentation of their work; a police training program run by the NYPD; and science labs related to science class. Working with participants in these spaces proceeded similarly to participant observation in the school but also attended to the less structured nature of the time and space. Along with these observations, I often walked with participants from the program to the bus or subway, chatting about the program or club along the way.

Walks, commutes, and events in everyday life. In the last 5 months of our work together, I began to work with participants in their everyday educational lives outside of school. Using the loose definition of education that they identified in their first interview, I asked participants if we could spend time together in educational spaces or as they engaged education outside of school. In these scheduled events, I asked participants to either show or describe educational work that they value, enjoy, find relevant to their lives or dreams, or simply use on a routine basis. Before starting this phase of the research, participants and I held a number of chats about what it would look like. I first wanted to ensure their comfort and safety. I asked participants to make sure that they were not altering their daily routine. Furthermore, on several occasions, I pushed back against what participants wanted to explore. I agreed that education might be present in certain places but questioned its role in the research project. For instance, one participant mentioned me joining him at parties. I personally did not feel comfortable attending a high school party in the course of this research, even though developing new knowledge, performing new ways of being, or simply learning how to occupy and defy one’s social position can all occur in a space such as this. The participants and I discussed how the

85 project would exclude parts of their everyday educational lives, even ones where they might feel most successful. Given constraints of appropriateness, discomfort, time, and positionality, the ethnographic picture we conjured would always be partial. Yet, the goal here was not to use positivism to observe an entire curriculum and generate a completed educational picture of immigrant education outside of schools. The goal, once more, was to use everyday educational practices to share their stories and to offer an unfinished map with many connections that poses new ways of looking at education and immigration and asks those working with youth to think about them in new ways.

In actual participant observation events, I listened to participants, observed their educational processes and performances of knowledge, and asked plenty of questions.

For instance, on several occasions Miguel asked me to join him in a park as he took photos. We casually chatted as he went about the work of taking photos. Amidst our chat about his friend and potential summer job, I asked him about why he took one photograph in the position he did. When he explained something about framing, I asked him where he learned about that aspect of photography Conversely, Ximena shared some of her recycled and found art projects as already finished products. She preferred to talk less about the process and how she learned to make the pieces and allow the work to simply be. I was thus not just looking at everyday education as the learning processes happening outside of school. Ximena allowed me to see what came out of educational practices and that it informed ways of being and expressing. In general, in these participant observations we spoke about knowledge, values, process, feelings, and about these everyday educational practices related to other education work and educational

86 spaces, especially school. I also attended to spaces and, often in my fieldnotes afterward, reflected on acts of creativity, playfulness, and even relationships to social expectations.

I created a checklist for participants. I wanted to make sure that I spent time with them in dynamic ways. Though I did not set a quantitative minimum, I made sure to encounter multiple events of the following: in-school free time, different classes, hallway/transition, afterschool clubs, in-school group event (such as assembly or performance), afterschool free time, walking together outside of school, everyday educational practices. For everyday educational practices, I aimed to direct these events to encounter an array of practices. Ultimately, however, I left the checklist at simply making sure that I spent some time outside of school with participants, encountering their everyday educational lives. This open framework resulted from the difficulty of meeting up with participants and making sure to allow them to direct our time together when outside of school and in less structured spaces.

Toward the end of the school year, I met with each participant to informally outline different educational practices and participant observation events. I created a sheet5 with 3 columns (school, structured afterschool, and outside of school) and filled them with what we already discussed. I then met with each participant during lunch to look at this sheet. I asked what was missing, what we still had to discuss and explore, and where we noticed connections. As we mapped different aspects of their educational lives, the last steps of the research came into focus.

5 See Chapter 5 and appendix for sample

Ultimately, I spent just short of 100 days6 over the course of one year conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Some days involved exclusively classroom participant observation. On other days, I never went to the school site, only meeting participants to take a walk or spend time with them as they took photographs. Ethnographic work concluded with the 3rd interview, but I have remained in close contact with several of the participants. Even though signing the assent form might be considered a formal entry into the field, it is thus difficult to say when I ended my work with participants.

Ethnographic archives of education. As part of the everyday educational work, participants not only shared educational practices, but shared education work that helped construct an educational archive. The archive ranged from their artwork or songs posted to YouTube to fashion choices and plenty of in-progress work. Rather than seeing these contributions to the archive as finished products that show the product of learning, I approached them affectively and fluidly. The archive was something living that could

“jump from ideal to matter and back again” and could “fuse a dream world to the world of ordinary things. Objects settle into scenes of life and stand as traces of a past still resonant in things” (Stewart, 2007, p. 56). The archive grew and bubbled and changed throughout the work. It also never stood separately from the ethnographic work. For instance, in the middle of a walk to a basketball court one day, Matias broke a silence by singing. I soon recognized the lyrics as at least partially from the video I had watched many times. The archive, here and elsewhere, pierced our everyday work together.

6 I do not offer a specific number of days as I spent a number of days at the school site not collecting data. For instance, I spent several hours afterschool both doing a fantasy basketball and fantasy baseball draft. Though I spoke with participants on these days, and though these experiences informed the work, I did not take fieldnotes and consider those times more about building relationships than collecting data.

Failed/refused ethnographic work. In the initial research design, I proposed a monthly or biweekly focus group with all of the participants. The idea was to share ideas about education, explore existing discourses about education and immigration, and present possibilities for and questions about the project. Once all 9 participants joined the project, I gathered them for a first focus group shortly after the school’s winter break.

The participants all new each other and knew that they were all participating in the study.

During the school lunch period, we held a 45-minute open discussion on the category of

“immigrant” or “newcomer.” Participants veered the conversation to discuss problems for themselves and other recently immigrated students in terms of education. Due to field trips and other scheduling issues, we were not able to reconvene until March. At this time, several participants decided to not join us. In this second conversation, we explored dreams and desires, especially focusing on identity and becoming. By the third group chat, only 3 participants joined, and they told me they only joined because I (a vegan, by the way) brought Popeyes. At this point, I checked in individually with some of the participants. It was clear that they preferred to keep the work more informally organized, especially in terms of social groupings. Thus, I often joined 2-4 participants as they walked from school or between classes, but I abandoned the idea of ongoing group chats with all participants.

Similarly, as ethnographic work moved outside of school I began considering how this work could force others to see the participants in new ways. In other words, I asked how the Rancièrian framework I generated could be put to use or enacted through the study. A concept emerged of conducting playful experiments in equality. I started by asking participants what teachers or people on the street did not know about them that

89 they wished they could share. Participants identified that people may not realize their worth, their respectfulness, their ideas, or generally that they are good people and hard workers. As I asked some of the participants how they might share that with others, they hesitated. I even broached the topic with a participant who loves music, asking if he would consider making songs around the issue. I read these hesitations as both disinterest and dislike of the idea. Hoping to keep the participants leading the directions and flows of our work together, I also eventually left this idea aside.

Historical Research

Historical research proceeded concurrently with ethnographic research. This aspect of the research project included single interviews with 3 school leaders who spoke about the school’s founding, mission, policies, and trajectory. These school leaders also provided me with documents of school policies and parts of the new school application from its founding. Additionally, I analyzed national and New York City documents from

1982 to present—using the Plyler v. Doe decision as a historical marking point—that articulate perspectives on the educational needs of recently immigrated youth. The documents I selected heavily focus on DOE policy guidelines, programmatic offerings, or resources for ELLs, immigrant youth, SIFE, LEP, or other categorizations for recently immigrated students. These documents range from overviews for teachers about the experiences of immigrant students to overviews of different programs for ELLs. I also included legal documents about immigrant students’ educational rights.

Beyond these institutional documents, I gathered opinion pieces in newspapers, reports of public events, and postings from places like online reviews of newcomers schools, also using the range of 1982 to present. Searches for these documents followed a

90 rhizomatic path, often seeing a reference in a New York Times opinion piece that led to pieces on public meetings. Ultimately, I gathered dozens of documents from diverse sources. These documents feed the study’s affective design. I looked at public feelings of needs, deservingness, and hopes for education and immigration. Taken together, these documents inform how publics view the educational needs of immigrant youth and how best to serve these students. This approach suggests that the school certainly emerged from a time and place of new schools, but also reveals how other forces influence the school’s shape and trajectory. Overall, historical work informed how a school such as

WISH emerged and evolved within New York City’s educational landscape. It does so through a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1978a). As Talburt and Lesko (2012) point out, a history of the present “problematizes the very terms and concepts through which we know and understand a topic” (p. 11). A history of the present is thus not an accounting of the history of immigration and schooling in New York City. It unsettles the foundations of how policy and practice interprets and approaches schooling those labeled newcomers. This historical analysis also places the school into the context of how policy and public sentiment construct an ideal education to include immigrant youth and help them succeed academically.

Positions

Throughout research, I found myself as “one who affects and one who is affected”

(Skoggard & Waterston, 2015, p. 111). My presence changed behavior, events, and conversations. Likewise, participants deeply affected and moved me and the shape of the research. That is not to suggest that some course correction could or should have dulled the effects and affects of my presence, or that I might wipe my body of affects in order to

91 encounter through objective eyes. I thus instantly recognize that I never operated as what

Foucault calls the “’universal intellectual,’ a free spirit, ‘the spokesman of the universal,’

‘speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice’” (as cited in Gutting, 1990, p.

328). Instead, I became an active participant in doing and making research. That is not to say that I welcomed everything into the research unproblematically. As seen in the following Chapters, there were plenty of times when I wish I had tempered my political perspectives (e.g. asking Ximena and Leo about the nationalist perspective of the

Museum of American History only to be told “yeah, that’s kinda the point”) or checked my emotions (e.g. not tearing up in front of participants during our last interview).

Within affective understandings, it is important to point out a few specific positions. First and foremost, my whiteness deeply impacted the research. I walk around as a person in their mid-30s, extremely tall, and speaking English and Spanish with a certain kind of northeast U.S. accent. But, my whiteness dominated in our everyday work. More than a few times, I noticed strange looks as I walked along the street with participants. I asked more than a few times if participants were comfortable with me joining for a walk or on their commute. I also made sure to create certain barriers for safety. For instance, one student wanted me to ride the train and then walk to his apartment with him. I told him that while I appreciate the invitation, I would go to his stop but that I did not think it was appropriate for me to visit his home.

Additionally, though I tried to push back against certain power relations, I also came to accept them in some ways. Hoping to distance myself from a teacher-esque position and reinforce that all forms of participation in the study were entirely voluntary,

I always insisted on participants taking the lead with research. I would support them and

92 help frame the event, but I wanted them to suggest the next moment of participant observation. I also insisted on use using first names. Yet, over and over I noticed participants waiting for my signal and calling me “sir” or “Mr. Corson.” Eventually, we settled into a rhythm where I welcomed whatever form of communication made the participants most comfortable.

These positions infused distance between the participants and I. Of course, any position will do so, but entering research as a white man from the U.S. created a particular kind of distance with which the participants and I always had to reckon. I challenged that distance by both accepting it and simply aiming to develop relationships built on transparency, flexibility, and availability. Furthermore, in each moment of work with participants, I hoped to lead with inquiry and safety.

Affective Work

Affect surged and surges throughout the research and writing of this study.

Affect is a dynamic concept with no unified meaning (Thrift, 2004). It resists definitional practices but allows a tracing of its effects in ways that might be used ethnographically and historically. Affect runs against Cartesian dualism, seeing mind and body not as distinct but as inseparable. Similarly, affect does not look for directly causal or linear actions or events. It flows rhizomatically (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2011). It vibrates through intensities that produce potentialities (Massumi, 2002). In other words, in an educational event, something might occur that is not quite understood (by myself or participants); it is unable to be expressed with words or actions because it is not quite conscious for us. Yet, it remains in the air. We sense something that affects the work, even as we struggle to name it. So, affect is the thing in between, the extra, the spilling

93 over of what is already established; it is a force that travels and sticks in unpredictable ways.

Yet, “affect does not reside in a subject, body, or sign as if it were an object possessed by a subject” (Ahmed, as cited in Anderson, 2006, p. 735). Intensities or forces of potentiality (the words used to describe affect) in one sense escape individuals. Affect moves in flows that slip from singular individual bodies. The participants and I carry affects, affect things and places, and are affected. Yet, affect is not just an attention to feelings and emotions in individuals. These theories “attune to how affects inhabit the passage between contexts through various processes of translocal movement” (Anderson,

2006, p. 736). Affect theory asks for a consideration of how contexts, places, events, and movements affect and are affected.

Working affectively opens new routes to attend to often obscured parts of education research. Particularly looking at contexts and events that are underexplored, it allows for different ways of looking at different things. Rather than observing and codifying these infrequently examined educational practices, affect theories live in messiness, wondrousness, and incomprehensibility. Affect does so in a way that responds to a major risk and concern of this study. It creates opportunities for new legibility but does so without submitting participants’ educational lives to new controls. It is a manner of working that welcomes different ways of being that are not simply then consumed by established systems of thought. Affect is an engagement with unruly things in a way that aims to stay unruly.

Working Affectively in Ethnography

After working with participants, I typically came home and recorded the day’s events in a fieldnotes/reflective journal document. This collection of a certain number of days, intentionally observed and written down for review and eventual coding, came to represent the “data.” Other times, say 3 a.m. on a random weekday, as I lay thinking about a conversation with Matias or woke up the next day to a confusing email from

Miguel, did not end up in the data. Yet, these moments, what Stewart (2007) calls “rogue intensities,” spilled into ethnographic work. My feelings, their feelings, confounding moments, many dreams about participants, and plenty of times in between all inform the ethnographic work. That is not to say that affective ethnography simply expands to include everything all of the time. It is, rather, a reminder of an inability to scientifically account for everything and yet a recognition that these slippery moments play a key role in the work.

More, it is about working with participants, during the collection of data in ways that resist strictly rational approaches. Ethnography is so often about making sense. It is the taking of “unwieldy fieldnotes” that seem “illogical” or “uncertain” and making sense of the whole thing (paraphrased from Emerson et al., 1995). Affective ethnography pushes back against that, still conducting participant observations, taking fieldnotes and coding data, but keeping the writing, the conversations, the interviews, and all aspects of the research, weird, uncertain, and unresolved. Affects operate on a broader scale than individual emotion, but they move through everyday life. Certainly, though, affect is an overturning of using ethnography to “get to the bottom” of things (Rutherford, 2016). In other words, affects looks “not to the demystification and well-known picture of the

95 world, but rather to speculation, curiosity.” Experimenting with affect “tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock.” It is “a something both animated and inhabitable” (Stewart, 2007, p. 3). Affect is thus here considered as uncertain and indeterminate forces that are living, bubble with potential, and whose effects leave remnants that are at least partially visible.

It is important to note that, despite this resistance to incorporating these educational practices into dominant logics of education, affective ethnography is not free from power relations, nor does it ignore them. It does, however, welcome a kind of indeterminacy in fieldwork and analysis. An affective ethnography offers ways of encountering education as it surges through boundaries and spills from stuck positions. It also finds people as agentive in some ways and simultaneously reads them as never fixed, particularly to populational or categorical markings. In ethnographic work, we can engage the learnings, play, creations, mistakes, and becomings that arise in situated and sensed ways, which are bound to contexts and yet slip from them.

Working affectively, I greatly rely on Stewart’s (2007) anthropological work on

“ordinary affects.” Though observing participants’ thoughts and actions in an ethnographic sense, Stewart presents these engagements as part of messy networks of attachments, senses, and forces moving through actants. She suggests an ethnographic project that “is written as an assemblage of disparate scenes” turning ethnographic observations into “a tangle of trajectories, connections, and disjunctures” (p. 5). That is, this type of ethnographic work does not accumulate objectively curated observations of defined moments and distill them into easily understandable descriptions. Rather, it takes possible vignettes and interweaves them in an open-ended manner. In walks and group

96 discussions, the participants and I “gaz[e], imagin[e], sens[e], tak[e] on, perfor[m], and asser[t] not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats)” that arise in ethnographic work (Stewart, 2007, p. 5). Stewart’s text opens ideas of descriptions of educational events and connections among educations without creating a packaged, closed analysis of participants’ educational lives.

Affect theories also informed specific ethnographic practices. Yi’En (2013) suggests that tools such as fieldnotes and recordings, especially when paired with practices like walking, help ethnographers attend to the affective rhythms, mundanity, and mobility of everyday life. Especially moving through different contexts (school to street to subway, for instance), participants and I listened to and explored the vibrations of context on conversation and education practices. Affective ethnography, like Lesko et al.’s (2018) reading of affective geography, “has to do with what bodies can do in space and the potentialities of relationality” (p. 19). To this spatial framing ethnography adds a more explicit concern with everyday actions, interactions, and movements. It looks at how education emerges from a time and place, but acts as gluey globules that pop up in other spaces in ways that go beyond linear, procedural learning. Thus, even in the more traditional or recognizable aspects of ethnographic work, I welcomed not only ideas of affect, but specifically affective modes of work.

To provide an example, as we walked, affects surged as participants and I discussed topics like how the practice of English moved through contexts. We explored formality, the learning process, and compared the use of English while walking through a neighborhood to an ESL class earlier in the day. While taking up these conversations, the walk opened space for different rhythms and modes of chat. At certain moments,

97 participants stuttered and sensed something. I often stopped to ask about these sensations.

Participants here and elsewhere often responded with silence of a kind of “I don’t know how to say it.” Switching to Spanish, we were equally confounded. Something felt on walks and in many conversations remained as unrefined sensations, only partially recognizable but pushing and pulling our experiences together.

In another example, affect “swarmed” through classroom participant observation events. Stewart (2007) writes that “we will follow any hint of energy, at least for a while.

When something happens, we swarm toward it, gaze at it, sniff it, absorb its force, pour over its details…” (Stewart, 2007, p. 70). Pablo, who often left school early or did not attend school, which made it difficult to find each other in classrooms, found me in the hallway one afternoon and asked me at the last minute to come to a math class. Having a rapport with the teacher, I checked in with her and sat down at the back of the room a few minutes before the bell. As students filed into the class, Pablo and the others moved their desks and prepared for an exam. Feeling like it would be inappropriate to stay, I began to excuse myself. Pablo gave me a look as though he wanted to know if I was leaving.

Simultaneously, the teacher made a motion that it was fine for me to sit there. I found myself at the back of a silent classroom watching Pablo and others hunched over paper and calculators for the next hour. Amidst this boredom, I noticed how my attention zoomed toward any sign of movement, any trace of energy popping up. Standing up to get a pencil, vigorously erasing an answer. I swarmed these micro events. Though

Pablo’s math test may be the most extreme example, I routinely swarmed toward the energy of moments that escaped some kind of boredom or stillness.

Throughout ethnographic work, affect shaped and moved the purposes and workings of ethnography. Rather than entering participant observation with expected outcomes or specific frameworks, hunches and urges drove the work. Drawing on Lesko et al. (2018), I asked for many stories (from childhood school stories to memories of learning to ride the subway or practice English when participants first arrived to New

York City), seeing storytelling as a way to open affective pathways that contest one- dimensional educational narratives. Rhizomatic movements pushed storytelling in many directions, leading to new moments and new, unconsidered questions. Ultimately, through some rather traditional ethnographic practices, affect breathed space and potentiality into our time together.

Working Affectively in History

Referring to Benjamin’s reflections on photography, Berlant and Greenwald

(2012) suggest that “the real work of commentary and politics after photography is not the image itself but the process of captioning” (p. 73). Again, very much in the tradition of a history of the present, historical work here does not aim to gather the facts into a coherent truth but trace ideas about “ideal” educations for immigrant youth. Working affectively in history invites archives, documents, or events to be breathing things that affect me as I encounter them. Following Berlant’s (2011) writing on episodes, events, and causality, history is not finished but a network of events whose ultimate shape is not yet known. Within affective historical work, I caption materials to frame sentiments and attitudes as both influencing current education work and still-becoming. Public feelings present in historical documents allow me to caption sentiments about immigrant educational needs.

In this vein, affect in historical research is not simply about arriving at understandings of the past. Writing about hope as an affective force, Anderson (2006) suggests that working affectively “enacts the future as open to difference” (p. 734). In this affective study, I find one way to challenge the totalizing discourses about immigrant youth and education. It is not that affects overcome exclusions or competing narratives.

This approach aims to explore these discourses and interrupt them to make a future of otherwise, specifically one that welcomes education in everyday life, possible.

Ethnography’s Historical Situatedness

Beyond and entangled with affective work, it is important to put ethnographic work itself in a historical context. I want to make explicit how ethnographic work is bound to both time and place. Situating ethnography within a historical context

is not simply that of adding a historical chapter on to a traditional ethnography. Rather, it is an attempt to comprehend precisely the ‘complex dialectic’ between central educational movements, such as hegemonic forms of schooling, and the diverse educational and cultural traditions that cross through and confront them on multiple space/time scales (Rockwell, 2011b, p. 66).

In a broad sense, this notion means connecting to or distinguishing WISH from other types of schooling initiatives or historically considering recently arrived immigrant youth subjectivities. In other words, WISH did not come out of thin air and the production and treatment of immigrant youth as a population has changed over space and time. All of those shifts contribute to and continue to inform the educations I encountered. As

Rockwell states, it is not just about affectively mining the school’s history and then proceeding with ethnographic work, but interrogating the relationship between the school’s emergence and forms and participants everyday educational practices. Historical work then comes to inform and entangle with ethnographic work.

100

Historical sources allowed me to re-examine my ethnographic work in ways that reveal complex relationships between everyday educational practices and schooling approaches. I occasionally asked participants about a language policy that struck me or a critique of newcomer schools I had read. Elsewhere, Rockwell (2007) describes the past as putting footprints on the logics and practices of schooling. Looking at these footprints or traces with participants helped further locate ethnographic work within specific contexts.

Data Plan (Messing Around with Sticky Things)

As outlined above, aspects of the research proceeded much like common ethnographic fieldwork. In the middle of participant observation, I sometimes used scratch notes. Each day, after time with participants, I recorded observations, feelings, and general reflections into an ongoing journal/fieldnotes document. In this giant document, I indicated the date, participants involved, and the location or locations.

Additionally, I audio recorded interviews with participants. For the work participants shared, I gathered photos, paintings, a few pieces of school work, and other artifacts into a giant living archive of everyday education. I gathered and kept historical documents in a separate folder. Beyond the single file of fieldnotes/journal reflections, I maintained a folder for each participant. I placed interviews, conceptual memos, and notes or questions about specific interactions in these folders. Similarly, I gathered all historical materials, including interviews with school leaders, into a single folder.

Throughout the process, I returned to these data over and over. I read through my fieldnotes/journal entries on a regular basis. Reviewing this writing, I recorded memos about specific moments of participant observation, select quotes from interviews or

101 general interactions, and potential next steps (referring back to the checklist about settings or environments in which I had not yet spent time with them). I read through the journals on a regular basis, using reflections to inform future days with participants. For instance, reviewing these materials I noticed that I had spent time with Sofia in classrooms and structured performances, but had not seen her in transitional spaces. In the following weeks, I chatted with her a number of times during transitions between periods, after school ended, and during her free periods.

For interviews, I decided to not transcribe the conversations. I wrote down quotes that glowed as I listened to the interviews and placed these extracted moments into a file in individual participants’ folders. Yet, something seemed to change when I began converting them to transcripts. The tone and timber of voices. The atmosphere around us.

These sounds that evoked nostalgia as I listened seemed to diminish in a transcript. As I aim more at affective interpretation rather than a deep linguistic analysis, I ultimately relied on listening to the audio file multiple times, specifically before the next interview and as I began coding data.

By the end of fieldwork, I had 2 folders on my laptop, one for history and one for ethnography. The history folder simply contained every document or file I intended to use in my historical analysis. The ethnography folder included all of my fieldnotes, memos, and subfolders filled with the previously mentioned notes and questions for each participant. Sitting a bit outside this organizing method, I kept small notes on my phone.

These notes ranged from specific questions for participants to broad ideas for revising the theoretical framework. I came to keep these notes as undesignated, open-ended ideas that popped up without specific place and that remained a sprawling, unorganized mess. They

102 offered an additional space to brainstorm and think through ideas. As I moved to coding data, however, the notes on my phone were incorporated into specific sections of the dissertation.

Data Analysis

As I shifted from fieldwork to primarily writing in July and August of 2019, I turned to the folder on my laptop marked fieldwork. It would seem that at this phase of the research I had turned to analyzing data. It is worth noting, however, that data analysis, as with many parts of the project, do not have such clear beginnings and ends. Data analysis was and is an ongoing and emergent engagement with messy ends. Entering and leaving fieldwork create unique issues of responsibility and answerability to participants and communities (Mangual Figueroa, 2014). As I coded data, I still texted and checked in with many of the participants. The data analysis occurred at a certain time and place, but I certainly analytically walked the halls on my first day of fieldwork. Likewise, ongoing conversations with participants impact and shape writing beyond the approach to data analysis that I present here.

Ethnographic data analysis. With fieldnotes, interviews, artifacts, and memos in hand, I reread, re-encountered, and re-experienced the data. I began with open coding, reading notes line by line to searching out linkages, themes, and patterns. In these readings, I attended to words participants used such as “community” or “success.” I teased out thematic commonalities such as borders and barriers of access appearing in many different places. Rather than creating categories based on these themes and turning to focused coding, I maintained a kind of master list of thematic ideas (e.g. “borders” or

“the presence of school everywhere”) as I continued to read notes, look at artifacts, and

103 listen to interviews. With a core list of themes and ideas, I then turned to exploring the data on an individual basis. I checked if themes appeared in my one-on-one work with participants. I noted themes that did not appear for specific participants.

I eventually turned to linking quotes, observations, or artifacts with specific themes. At the same time, I attempted to keep this process open, suggesting that a quote could attach to multiple themes. Here, I worked through the data once more, placing different sections into themes and seeing if new themes emerged. Finally, I turned to integrating the data through notes and memos that placed different themes into conversation. Much of this writing contributed to writing the analysis Chapters.

Mixed into this process, I took up a kind of rhizoanalysis. Though rhizoanalysis often casts out more traditional methods such as coding (Masny, 2014), I found myself stuck on my early procedural understandings of ethnographic data analysis. At the same time, I found myself stuck on many of the notes, voices, and work from this thing called my data set. To organize the work into something that spoke in a generalized, causal truth ran counter to the aims I have outlined thus far. Instead, I hoped to make of the data something non-hierarchical, unresolved, and messy. I still wanted to use ethnographic research to say something, but in entering data analysis, I kept in mind that this something should be about provoking possibilities that work with participants—stirred rather than speaking truths for them and others labeled in similar categories. Rhizomes offer one way of working against this positivist analytic grain.

Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “a rhizome is an acentric nonhierarchical network of entangled and knotted loops, folding and growing through”

(de Freitas, 2012, p. 557). Rhizomes are horizontal pathways with multiple sites of exit

104 and entry. Rhizoanalysis may be understood as a type of data analysis that “invites conceptual experimentation in a research event that consists of reading data, raw tellings, provoking questions and producing through becoming/affect different and new connecting relations in an assemblage” (Masny, 2014, p. 358). These ideas led me down strange analytic paths where new ideas and connections emerged and established codes came to vibrate in new ways.

With uncoded data and along the various routes of interpreting and configuring, I played with the data and searched for lines of flight.7 Rhizoanalysis included a few days where I printed out all of the materials and created diagrams, linking different moments from different participants. Another time, I lay vignettes from fieldnotes onto places on a

New York City map, looking at education in a very literal geographic sense. Using the educational archive, I captioned participants’ work with some of the dominant themes from coding. For some of these moments, I checked in with participants. Toward the end of fieldwork, for instance, I made diagrams of educational practices I had observed in school, in nonformal structured educational spaces, and in unstructured time. We sat together and pieced out connections, disjunctures, and absences. These diagrams both informed the last days of fieldwork and pushed the analysis of data.

These various engagements with the data offered new ways of seeing the project and pushed at or challenged some of the codes emerging during analysis. Though borders, where education was a thing to access, popped up over and over, looking at the map of New York City and seeing educational practices moving and connecting and appearing in multiple places in different ways, suggested movement. It created a new

7 Examples of rhizoanalysis are found in the Appendix.

105 idea of education operating in flows and rhythms. Yet, rhizoanalysis was not solely about looking at stable data from a different angle in order to open new codes. Instead, rhizoanalysis allowed me to wander through attachments, ponder associations, and let curiosity be something to live in rather than resolve. It was ultimately about seeing the project and my role in a different way than making sense of and categorizing people’s lives.

Finally, though most of what could be considered triangulation or member checking occurred during fieldwork, I shared brief snippets of analysis, description, and codes with participants at the end of August 2019. I wanted to hear their thoughts. These reflections and comments led to small edits or clarifications, but I feared if I incorporated any new ideas, it would simply lead to more research and more data. Data analysis thus consists of a limited data set representing a snapshot of the participants’ lives. Echoing

Tony Kushner’s ideas about playwriting, research was not completed but cut off.

Historical data analysis. Historical data analysis moved down an almost identical path, both coding the data and disrupting more traditional analysis through rhizoanalysis. I mostly analyzed the historical data at separate times from the ethnographic data, focusing specifically on grappling with question about how WISH emerged as an intervention for immigrant youth. Of course, the ideas and work intermingled throughout analysis, but the policy and school documents I gathered were mostly treated as a separate data set. However, the last step of data analysis put ethnographic and historical data into conversation. For instance, I used excerpts about immigration and education policy to caption participant quotes or pieces. The conversation between these pieces deeply informs this work’s final analysis Chapter.

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Dangers and Limitations

A first and most present danger in this dissertation was the risk posed in potentially exposing youth, both documented and undocumented, at a time when detainment and deportation are an ever-present risk. ICE conducted several raids in New

York City during my fieldwork. During this time, they also detained many U.S. citizens with the intention of deporting them. Places like schools and churches were, at least in some ways, safe from these risks. Our work, however, often took us into neighborhoods and places where I heard of ICE raids taking place. I knew that erasing this risk was never a reality, but I took several specific steps to reduce the danger that participants faced in our work together. Though several participants disclosed their immigration status, I never asked or assumed anything about their immigration status. I also did not record this information in fieldnotes or anywhere else, only listening to what they told me. During ethnographic work, I always let participants take the lead. I never asked them to alter their daily routine. I often investigated ICE activities before agreeing to meet a participant. When the government announced massive raids in cities across the U.S., I canceled plans to meet up with a participant. I did not feel that it was my place to tell him what to do or to be safe, but I suggested we simply meet another time and place.

The project also veered toward a dangerous deficit narrative. As previously mentioned, hoping to combat the idea that those struggling in school, marked on the margins, or considered failing are uneducated or excluded from education still initially started with the framework of seeing students in this way. I hoped to push back against this risk by looking at education outside of these frameworks and always reinforcing with participants that I hoped they felt successful in school, but I wanted to work with them in

107 other ways than just academic outcomes. Though narratives of exclusion and failure floated through many participants’ lives, I believe that the academically diverse group of participants helped challenge the risk that this was just a project about “failing” kids. It was instead something about the many categories and treatments recently immigrated youth routinely encounter.

Beyond these dangers, the research was limited in a number of ways. Though I have framed my whiteness and citizenship status more as an influence than a limitation, I was certainly limited by language. Though I speak Spanish and the participants speak

English, we are all classified as language learners. We played with accents and taught each other words (as someone who learned Spanish in Mexico, the participants laughed at my use of words like “chingón” and “órale.” They also made me say “que lo que” over and over.”), but I was often unsure of a specific meaning. Of course, the project never aimed at precise truth or definitive meaning. It is simply important to note that these factors created a distance that remained even through our most intimate moments.

This distance was reinforced by power relations present throughout the project.

As Gupta and Ferguson write “power does not enter the anthropological picture only at the moment of representation, for the cultural distinctiveness that the anthropologist attempts to represent has always already been produced within a field of power relations”

(as cited in Lave, 2011, p. 7). Power was always present, shifting, and influencing our work together. There was plenty of resistance as well. As much as I tried to reinforce an inherent equality among us and an unease with formality, I returned over and over to feeling like I was the participants’ teacher.

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The work was further limited by my timidity and uncertainty. It was full of missteps and second guesses. Over and over, I returned home, writing my fieldnotes and questioning how I missed something or wishing I had thought of another question to ask.

Lave (2011) refers to these feelings as a kind of apprenticeship for ethnographers. Of course, no project will proceed without blunders. Certainly, I learned the craft of ethnography while practicing it with participants. Yet, it felt less like building an airplane while in flight and more like doing an internet search of how one builds an airplane while in flight. That is not to say that I think my novice understanding of ethnography ruined the work. These ongoing false starts and missteps certainly limited the project.

Unsettled Validity

Given the assumptions that this project moves toward wildness rather than resolution, how can questions be answered with any kind of clarity? How does this project ensure that it stays wandering without floating off into orbit? In other words, as I finish working with the data and move toward writing the analysis Chapters, how will I know that these research questions have been answered?

Generally speaking, validity here relies on depth. I wanted to encounter types of education over and over and in different ways rather than hearing a scant reference to an educational practice or a type of knowledge. By hearing about it in interviews, during class, with the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) after school, and chatting about it during a bus ride across town, learning about and fighting for LGBTQ rights is an ongoing educational practice for Luna. As discussed in greater detail below, it is not just that I observed a plethora of something, but that these educations change things and make possible something new. The checklists and diagrams helped reinforce this validity. That

109 is not to say that simply because I only heard it once, an educational practice is not valid.

Rather, for inclusion into this project, I wanted to see something bubble up in different places and in different times and move across spaces. This work of course did not lead to a complete, totalizing picture, but it offered a sketch for interpretation and inquiry.

I did not assume educational practices or relationships between school and everyday education were valid simply because they occurred many times. Notions of validity also drove me to ask participants to reflect on an idea they shared, to ask them to expand on previous ideas, and even push back against some of their ideas. I may have mangled and transformed ideas in the process, but findings were only considered valid after ongoing interrogation.

So, ethnographic work used validation tools such as member checks or triangulation. These strategies help further honor participants and push against misrepresentation. Yet, a poststructural framework finds validity as a thing always unfixed and contingent. I may easily misrepresent, but no perfect understanding of validity will offer full representation. Lather (2007) suggests a type of validity that she calls paralogy or neopragmatic validity. “Its goal is to foster differences and let contradictions remain in tension. Paralogy legitimates via fostering heterogeneity, refusing closure” (p. 122). Not all responses or practices directly contributed to answering the research questions, but they did not have to sit within established, rigid frameworks. Validity was here a thing emerging in affirmation from participants and myself. After Foucault (2008), validity will be the emergence of deeply situated, courageous acts of telling one’s truths.

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Finally, this theoretical framework suggests that validity cannot be known in advance. Massumi (2002) writes that “It is only after we have stopped running and can look back that we are clearly cognizant of what it was that set us dashing. Participation precedes recognition” (p. 231, emphasis in original). Taking Massumi’s idea, valid findings must push toward something unknown. Valid findings cannot simply be the confirmation or rejection of an idea, but something that emerges from participation, something that participants and I will come to sense in doing and reflection. Furthermore, validity is here not about legitimating knowledge but about welcome something new and wild. Validity thus emerges at the point of an education otherwise taking hold in the research.

The project never led to a eureka moment of pure clarity. The research was not stamped, verified as concluded with the answer of some formula. But, there were some small moments where new ways of engaging and knowing in the world became visible.

For example, the participant with whom I most closely worked, who was labeled “at- risk” of not graduating, ultimately passed his Regents exams and is now on track to graduate this fall.8 Of course, validity was never about outcomes, specifically schooling outcomes. The project aims to impact educational trajectories, where school is only one site among many for education. Even with this participant graduating, the margins always appear elsewhere. What made this moment an example of validity was that the participant and I had found a new way of thinking. He had seen curricular borders collapsing, his music and basketball thriving in and out of school. And, he had verified his own equality

8 He is only 17, but the way credits transferred from the DR created a strange situation for graduating.

111 through an understanding that he would graduate and make music and play basketball and get out of his mom’s house and find a new job and…

Conclusion

The following Chapters may not be positivist, causal products, but they will come from lived experiences, observed practices, affective encounters, and historical discourses. In short, I will leave space for uncertainty, but the work will proceed from participants, places, and other things rather than crafting a predetermined narrative.

Simply because the work looks beyond school as an institution does not free participants from discourses of risk, failure, or exclusion. We push against these narratives and toward unknown places, but these discourses are not things to be overcome. Moreover, they carry everyday effects that are part of this research. But, this work aims to resist and push back. It aims to explore and wander toward being and thinking otherwise. With such resistance and possibility in mind, I turn now to the makings and workings of WISH and the everyday educational practices of the participants.

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Chapter IV

SURVIVE AND SUCCEED: THE MAKING OF AND EDUCATION FOR

NEWCOMER YOUTH AT WISH

Introduction

After the metal detector, from climbing the often-frozen escalators too many flights, passed the colorful walls of the co-located charter school’s two floors, straining open the heavy, black and red cracked-paint doors, a tarp sign is the first thing visible in the school. It welcomes you in. “WISH, WHERE ELLs SUCCEED.” Indeed, WISH

(Welcome Immigrants, Succeed Here!) Academy is a school that, since its inception in around a decade ago, has aimed to provide recently immigrated youth with the linguistic and community support to welcome students and ensure their academic success.

According to the school’s principal, at its foundations, WISH is a school dedicated to including, affirming, and helping immigrant students succeed (personal communication,

September 24, 2018). Resting on notions of support, belonging, and culturally responsive teaching, the twin tenets of inclusion and success ground the school.

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Figure 1: Poster hung in school

Despite this positive framing of WISH, the schooling of immigrant youth in New

York City has not always been so supportive. In many places in New York City, the subtractive model persists. Immigrant youth face exclusion along racial, linguistic, and citizenship lines to name only a few ongoing issues. Given the stark contrast between overwhelming exclusion of immigrant students seen in so many places (what Valenzuela

(1999) calls “subtractive schooling”) and the supportive, inclusive objectives of WISH, how did a school model like WISH come to be? Moreover, how did this particular framing of how to educate immigrant youth come to flourish?

This Chapter directly answers these questions, touching on the ethnographic research questions, but centering the question of “How did WISH emerge as a practicable intervention for recently immigrated youth in New York City public schools?” The

Chapter begins with previous interventions in the schooling of immigrant students and the rise of schools designed for recently immigrated youth. In this section, I also examine the policy and procedural steps that led to WISH’s creation as a way of contextualizing it within the New York City educational system. From here, engaging a “history of the present,” I interrogate the “newcomer” subject and this subject’s supposed educational

114 needs. This section largely focuses on an analysis of discourses of success and inclusion that frame WISH. Attending to affect and still working affectively, I here draw on news articles and other sources to show public feelings swirling about in the making and operation of these schools. Concluding the Chapter, I return to WISH’s evolving architecture, reflecting on the implications and everyday realities of the school aiming to construct itself in these ways.

A Brief, Incomplete History of Schooling and Immigrants in the U.S.

I begin this history decades into New York City’s ongoing project of educating immigrant students. Questions of how to educate immigrant students are as old as the

New York City school system itself. Ravitch (1974) suggests that “there is no more constant theme in the unfolding of New York City’s history than the reciprocal relationship between the native and the immigrant…in each instance, the clash of the old and new has occurred in and around the school” (pp. 5-6). Indeed, New York City communities and bureaucracies routinely engaged questions of the role of the school in welcoming and educating immigrant populations. These issues never operated in isolation, always functioning in conversation with national concerns on educating immigrant students and the position of immigrants in U.S. society. Discussing education for citizenship and linguistic needs, Cremin (1988) writes that these “issues were heatedly debated through much of the twentieth century, serving as surrogates for larger and more fundamental questions about the nature of American identity and the character of the American community” (p. 4). The point here is that this history, and this school more broadly, does not exist in isolation. It marks neither the beginning of educating recently immigrated youth nor a totalizing schooling approach.

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A more recognizable (in terms of this Chapter’s focus) conversation within the

New York City ecosystem took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when affirming language in schools became national law. Lyndon Johnson signed the Bilingual

Education Act (Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Amendments) in

1968. This act supported the creation of (specifically grants and funding for) bilingual programs. Where states and other localities routinely introduced the idea that most immigrants should have equal access to educational institutions, the Bilingual Education

Act took a firm stance on the curricular form of schools in questions of equality. In other words, it determined that “equal education was not the same as identical education”

(Malakoff & Hakuta, 1990, p. 32, emphasis in original). Furthermore, this act centered bilingual education programs as specifically necessary in improving educational outcomes. August and Hakuta (1997) suggest that the content of different bilingual education models emerges from an expansion of research occurring after the 1968 decision. As immigrant populations grew, and Title VII funding allowed for an expansion of programs, researchers and educators in general began more carefully considering needs and ideal ways to educate immigrant students beyond general assimilation (cf,

Reese, 2005).

Revealing this attention to immigrant student needs, in 1968 New York City opened its first bilingual school (García, 2010). By 1973, the city already included over

20 bilingual programs funded by Title VII grants (New York State Education

Department, 1974). Yet, the success of these linguistically inclusive programs were often hard fought. Furthermore, bilingual education was not homogenous. Programs ranged greatly in quality and aims. Writing about Puerto Rican students, but also connecting

116 these experiences to Spanish speaking students in general, Santiago Santiago (1986) points out that educators and families did not feel that students’ needs were being met.

Students not only were not allowed to speak Spanish in school but also were required to take orientation or English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classes until they gained superficial proficiency in the English language. In most cases, however, they were immediately immersed in English by being required to attend monolingual classes where all subjects, all textbooks, and all instruction were provided only in English. (p. 158)

Fighting for the educational rights of “LEP children” (as Santiago Santiago puts it) ultimately led the organization Aspira to sue the Board of Education. Representing over

80,000 children in New York City, Santiago Santiago (1986) suggests that the Aspira v.

Board of Education of the City of New York led to important shifts in affirmatively welcoming children learning English in New York City schools. Demographic shifts and related national reforms may have also contributed. For example, Lau v. Nichols (1974) bolstered the ideas of the Bilingual Education Act, specifically suggesting that a lack of bilingual programs violated students’ civil rights by not providing them with an equal education. Regardless of the direct causes, by the late 1970s, 21 schools and dozens of community-based and Board of Education programs used state and federal grant money to operate bilingual programs in over a dozen languages for tens of thousands of New

York City children (New York State Education Department, 1980). These programs may not have always been funded, accessible, or reflect the values and ideas of immigrant communities, but they signal curricular policies more closely welcoming immigrant students as immigrants. They reveal a more nuanced shape to the education of immigrant students than simply striving for equal access to a singular curricular program.

Furthermore, these programs suggest an attention (and slight acquiescence) to unique educational needs of a distinct population. Schools and districts had clearly moved from

117 the approach of simply providing immigrants with access to a bland, overarching school model.

Specific Approaches to Educating Immigrants Before the Whole-School Model

Before turning to the school model at the center of this historical work, previous and ongoing educational interventions for immigrant students in U.S. (specifically New

York City) schools shows the programs and interventions that influence WISH and similar models. It also reveals approaches to which these models directly respond.

Though language has never been the only issue considered in these conversations, it is constantly a central feature of educational programs. LEP or ELL is a broad category.

Students come to schools as language learners for any number of reasons. Likewise, these diverse approaches range in both understandings of the aims of schooling and the role of immigrant students in U.S. society. New York City has housed everything from English- only programs, where immigrants were expected to join public school with no acknowledgement of their needs and assimilate, to more linguistically immersive, culturally sensitive programs. Throughout, these approaches have been subjected to political and demographic shifts in New York City.

García suggests “six models for bilingual education, which are best seen as prototypes” (as cited in Malakoff & Hakuta, 1990, p. 38). Though I use this framing as a guide and contextualize several (though not all six) of these models, the point here is to see historical developments, political influences, and evolving, competing conceptions of how to best educate immigrant students. In doing so, I lay the foundations on which

WISH emerged.

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English-only programs. English-only emerges as a way to assert English as a necessary part of dominant U.S. culture. Bybee et al. (2014) describe that at the dawn of schools a national language of instruction had not been established. The authors point out that, though linguistic practices were far from democratic (indigenous languages never received the same legibility as German, for example), using multiple languages to communicate in schools was common practice in the common school era of the mid-to- late-19th century (see also, August & Kaestle, 1997). As immigrant populations arriving to the U.S. became more “ethnic” (Italians and Eastern European Jews in the early 20th century and Latinx and Asian populations in the 1950s and 1960s), an “Americanization” movement pushed for ways to keep the perceived U.S. cultural norm intact (Schmid,

2001).

An English-only approach flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s. As previously mentioned, when immigrants entered schools, they were expected to adapt to an existing curriculum with little to no adaptation. In fact, the education of immigrants here came to view other languages as evidence of a lack of intelligence. “The majority of studies by psychologists consistently reported evidence that bilingual children suffered from a language handicap…bilingual youth were found to be inferior in intelligence test scores”

(Schmid, 2001, p. 66). This perspective was bound up in the fear of new waves of immigrants being foreign and attacking the dominance of white, U.S. culture (Portes &

Rumbaut, 1996). Others, though, consider the English-only model as a form of

“submersion” (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1990). Students learned English by being placed in and surrounded by extensive exposure to English language instruction. English-only from this framing treats immigrant students no differently than any other student in a school.

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The goal of English-only, then, was dramatic and direct assimilation by essentially throwing students into the deep end of the educational pool. There was no specific programmatic design or curricular choice as English-only essentially meant bringing immigrants into schools as they had already been constructed. Though racist and xenophobic, and now what is commonly considered to be harmful to educational opportunity, this drastic approach arguably aimed to include immigrant students in U.S. schools and society. Unlike later developments, however, these programs simply welcomed students along a rigid line of assimilation or exclusion. Equality was here synonymous with access. As a final note, it would be misleading to characterize English- only exclusively as a historical intervention. From California’s proposition 227 in the late

1990s to the ongoing English-only movement, this approach still spreads across the U.S. cultural landscape.

ESL classes. Scholars addressed English instruction as a specific craft as far back as Fries (1945) study of ESL programs in Michigan in the 1940s. With population shifts in the U.S., “the mid-sixties brought an increasing awareness of ESL students’ needs” (Silva, 1990, p. 13). While Silva focuses this awareness on classroom writing,

Williams (2001) points out that generally speaking, since the 1960s classrooms in the

U.S. “have shifted from primarily addressing the needs of native English-speaking students to including a rapidly growing number of children from linguistically and culturally different backgrounds” (p. 750). Often in tension with bilingual education programs, ESL classes emerged as one prominent intervention.

In ESL classes, students are pulled out of other classrooms to intensely focus on learning English. After their ESL class, students return to the “sink or swim” model. The

120 structure of ESL classes varies widely, but the main focus is that students from diverse backgrounds are grouped into a single space and immersed in learning English. ESL shares a historical trajectory with other bilingual programs, expanding throughout the

1960s and 1970s, but was most often used when a school’s immigrant population spoke different languages. The goals of ESL classes are fundamentally different from other bilingual programs. Using teachers certified in ESL and a single period of teaching, the aim of these classes is linguistic assimilation or developing a remedial understanding of

English (García et al., 2008). At the same time, ESL is at least partially the product of circumstances. Given that the language of instruction is English, ESL classrooms have been used in New York City in schools with few immigrant students and students who speak different languages from each other. García (2010) points out that, despite parents desiring more bilingual classrooms, ESL classes have gradually taken hold in New York

City. Where only half of emergent bilinguals enrolled in ESL classes at the turn of the

21st century, less than 10 years later, “more than two-thirds of all eligible children” in

New York City were “in ESL classes that increasingly ‘shelter’ English and make no use of students’ home language practices” (García, 2010, p. 27).

ESL classes focus less on sharing resources and aiding students and more on intervening in perceived failure. Teaching in English and without profound recognition of students’ home languages (García, 2010), ESL classes dominantly follow the subtractive bilingualism model (Lambert, 1975). Where a student speaking English as their first language might add a second or third language through elective courses, ESL students are assumed to speak their first language only as needed until they can master English.

Additionally, ESL classes employ a model of targeted instruction. Though connections

121 between ESL classes and other parts of the day prove impactful for student outcomes

(Song, 2006), the dominant ESL model in New York City remains one of isolated pullout classes that do not use students’ home language (García, 2010).

García (2010) further points out that ESL classes have become more prominent in recent years in New York City not based on immigrant student needs but on an increase in ESL teachers and a growing distinction between bilingual education and ESL.

Additionally, García shows that in the 1990s, New York City bilingualism moved from a predominantly Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking population to “one that is highly multilingual” (p. 19). Throughout the 1990s, ESL programs also came to be seen as more effective. Interpretations of a 1994 Board of Education evaluation suggest that bilingual education is ineffectual compared to the targeted instruction of ESL classrooms. The study (New York City Board of Education, 1994) largely ignored culture, socioeconomic status, and the comparison of programs “were seriously confounded with native language: most of the students in the bilingual program had Spanish as a native language, while the students in ESL had other language backgrounds” (August & Hakuta, 1997, p.

148). Regardless of validity, the authors point out that this study furthered a notion that bilingual programs did not achieve the same outcomes. They lacked the rigor and focus of ESL programs. Outcomes here still rest on a presumption that immigrant educational needs are rooted almost exclusively in linguistic assimilation.

Bilingual schooling. From the 1968 Supreme Court decision, bilingual programs took shape around countering the subtractive approaches of “sink or swim” models. Such bilingual models aim to provide a more inclusive, culturally affirmative environment for students arriving to New York City schools learning English (García et al., 2011). As

122 they took shape in the 1970s, policymakers also aimed to use bilingual education programs to address the insufficiency of ESL to meet students’ developmental needs

(August & Hakuta, 1997). The shape and content of bilingual programs varies widely,1 but they traditionally take on two forms. First, “transitional bilingual education” offer both English language instruction and content-specific instruction in a native language.

These programs aim for students to pass into general education programs. The

“maintenance bilingual education” model supports content and language development in both the first language and English (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1990). In New York City, bilingual programs expanded both in schools and outside of schools in community-based organizations throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Federal funding, community pressure (as described above in the Aspira case), and a broad shift in educator and policymaker attitudes (García, 2010) allowed these programs to flourish.

Over time, however, the tension between bilingual education and ESL classes pushed against the position of bilingual education in schools. Understanding the goals of these programs as learning English (an implicitly reifying an assimilationist understanding), the above-mentioned reports from the 1990s critiqued bilingual education programs as ineffective. They lacked measurable success to demonstrate their “value.”

August and Harkuta (1997) show how the Board of Education (1994) report led ESL proponents and the media to push for more ESL programming. “The New York City evaluation has been used by advocates as providing ‘hard evidence’ (Mujica, 1995) because it makes bilingual education look ineffective” (p. 149). Similarly, broader political shifts reveal a perspective that immigrant educational needs did not include

1 García et al. (2011) suggest that laws helped expand access, but “the pedagogy was left to the educators” (p. 20).

123 learning in their native language at school. The most famous example is California’s

Proposition 227, which passed in 1998. Proposition 227 outlawed bilingual education entirely. English-only did not take hold in New York the way it did in California,

Arizona, or even Massachusetts, but proponents of bilingual education would be forced to reckon with this national discourse. Plenty of opinion pieces, for example, floated through the New York Times in the 1990s, arguing for limiting bilingual education (e.g.

New York Times, October 30, 2000). Around this time, with the passage of No Child

Left Behind (NCLB) and the subsequent rise of accountability measures, bilingual programs came under further scrutiny. All schools identified as serving ELLs were required to meet test score targets that could impact both funding and a school’s very existence (García et al., 2011).

Bilingual education also suggests the educational needs of a population using a limited definition. As previously mentioned, demographic shifts in New York City in the

1980s transformed the city’s immigrant and language learning population from one that was dominantly Spanish (and, when considering those coming from Puerto Rico, not always immigrating from a different country) to a multilingual population arriving from many different places. Additionally, emerging populational definitions carried educational needs (as identified by the Board of Education/DOE) that go beyond the bilingual model. For instance, the New York State Department of Education (2019) provides a resource guide for SIFE as a subcategory of ELLs. The guide identifies SIFE as students at least two grades below grade level in literacy (or having missed at least two years of school). It additionally provides an outline of a SIFE curriculum for newcomer adolescents. In short, this guide serves as an illustration of how, even for proponents,

124 populational reasoning and understandings of academic success suggest shortcomings of the bilingual model in supporting students’ specific educational needs.

Beyond ESL/bilingual education. ESL and bilingual education may be the most relevant to WISH’s history, but they are far from totalizing models or the only bodies of research concerning how to educate students identified as ELLs. Though not a specific educational model, translanguaging is most relevant here. Translanguaging is an understanding that greatly informs a different, more fluid approach to language practices.

It is “an approach to bilingualism that is centered not on languages, but on the observable communicative practices of bilinguals…There is now emerging evidence that keeping the two languages separate in schools at all times and following only monolingual strategies is not always appropriate” (García, 2010, p. 29). Throughout my time at WISH, student and teacher translanguaging practices were evident. Additionally, both actively (with teachers who had encountered these ideas during their Master’s or elsewhere) and without naming it, translanguaging was seen as a useful tool in education WISH’s students.

Whole school models. Seeking a more intensive and all-encompassing model, newcomer programs use a different approach than exclusively offering ESL classes or bilingual education. Short (2002) suggests that “traditional ESL and bilingual education programs are not designed to serve the specific needs of…newcomers” (p. 174). Within a large-scale design, schools aim to create a welcoming, holistic environment for students.

Newcomer programs take one of two forms. First, the majority of newcomer programs provide a short-term intensive transitional program with “curriculum and services offered” that “address the needs of newcomers specifically by providing intensive

125 language and cultural orientation” (August & Hakuta, 1997, p. 193). These programs essentially aim to enculturate youth and prepare them for the everyday realities of U.S. schools. These schools do not act as permanent educational homes. Staying for a few months or up to two years, students attend this form of newcomer school until they are ready to pass into a “traditional” school model. The schools themselves may exist on a shared campus or as their own building, but the point is that the school is entirely removed and exists as a separate school.

The all-encompassing approach does not mean that one model for language instruction dominates. WISH, for instance, uses ESL classes, something that I further explore in the sections below. Other schools include bilingual education or more holistic approaches. In the Internationals Network, there is no specific model but “every teacher is a language teacher as well as a teacher of academic content and skills” (Internationals

Network for Public Schools, 2019a). Additionally, newcomer schools’ official curriculum varies a great deal. Everything from language instruction or course offerings to enculturation changes from school to school. Of the half dozen or so newcomer schools that I visited while exploring research sites, classrooms, block scheduling, history tests,

P.E. classes, and so on all appeared. In this way, the schools structurally appear similar to many other schools in New York City. The schools are dominantly traditional public schools, though the Internationals Network and others emerged from partnerships with

CUNY and other city institutions. The Internationals also later benefited from grants from the Gates Foundation. The point here is that newcomer schools take on both language and culture as a way to immigrant youth.

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Friedlander (1991) attributes the rise in newcomer schools to the radical demographic shifts occurring in the 1980s and 1990s (see also, McDonnell & Hill, 1993).

Specifically, Friedlander suggests that newcomer schools initially acted as a response to rising numbers of students with limited English proficiency. She shows that “5 million children from over 150 countries” were expected to enter the U.S. and enroll in schools in the 1990s, numbers that match the “high immigration rates from the beginning of the

[20th] century” (p. 1). This trend has continued. Menken (2011) finds that “27% of all students in city schools were enrolled in English as a second language (ESL) and/or bilingual education programs upon entry to the school system” (pp. 121-122). As this demographic shift occurred, newcomer schools could operate to educate immigrant students entering public schools without overwhelming the school system. For immigrant students, the newcomer model could be “the equivalent of cultural and educational shock absorbers” (Friedlander, 1991, p. 5). At first, therefore, newcomer schools, as with other immigration programs, were about working toward more general forms of schooling.

Friedlander also affirms the idea that the structure of newcomer schools in the

U.S. varies widely since they emerged from local demand rather than federal policy. At this broader scale, “most states have policies and programs for LEP students, but they were developed to meet the needs of American-born speakers of foreign languages (e.g.

Puerto Ricans in New York), not immigrants” (McDonnell & Hill, 1993, p. xi, emphasis added). Continuing, the authors conclude that “immigrant students have unmet educational needs that are unique to their newcomer status” (p. xiii). Understanding this new, expanded, and increasingly diverse population, localities began developing this first type of newcomer school.

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A number of newcomer programs already existed in the 1980s. Rivera-Batiz

(1996) suggests that in New York City, “students [in these schools] will be best served if the schools closely follow the mainstream curriculum and work toward moving them into regular schools as quickly as possible” (pp. 5-6). But, an ongoing wave of immigrants with specific educational needs required something else. Responding to this diverse population’s needs, the Board of Education, working with CUNY, opened the

International High School housed at LaGuardia Community College. This form of newcomer school did not aim to have students move to other schools once acculturation and language learning had reached sufficient levels. The International School focused on helping newcomer youth graduate rather than transition to a new school. Throughout the

1990s and continuing to the present, programs such as these expanded throughout the city

(Rivera-Batiz, 1996).

The International High School started as an “alternative” high school. Its holistic structure and capitalization on new opportunities within New York City (a 1988 New

York Times piece (Sturz, 1988) attributes much of the successful academic outcomes to small class size, something emerging in New York City at the time) led to positive academic outcomes and a growing reputation as an effective model for educating recently immigrated students. When International High School’s first class graduated, 100% of its

53-person graduating class received college acceptances. Over time, the International

High School expanded, opening additional schools in other parts of New York City. The

International Schools eventually became the Internationals Network for Public Schools, a network of schools in a number of cities in different states. They continue serving newcomer students in a non-transitional, whole-school model. An influential report from

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Fine et al. (2005) shows their strong academic outcomes in New York City. From this report and a growing reputation throughout the city, the Internationals Network has become something of a standard bearer in educating recently immigrated students (e.g.

Bartlett & García, 2011 on the influence of International High School on the founding of

Luperón, the school at the center of their text). WISH’s principal, though she offered many critiques of other school models for recently immigrated students and suggested that WISH aims as something distinct from the Internationals, also cites them as heavily influential in WISH’s history and development.

The Internationals model changes from school to school, and it has evolved since its inception in the 1980s. The basic premise, however, has consistently been to provide a culturally and linguistically supportive environment while also merging language and academic content (again, the common saying within the Network that every teacher is both a content teacher and a language teacher). Beyond a dynamic model, the

Internationals lay the groundwork for creating a welcoming educational environment for newcomer students who may not succeed in other educational spaces. The Internationals promote a heavily learner-centered environment. Each school also has localized autonomy, which helps schools adapt to the needs of their student population. The network also offers a range of professional development services, including “successful management of student-centered ELL classrooms” or “strategies for integrating language and content” that further share the Network’s approach (Internationals Network for

Public Schools, 2019b). Ultimately, though the 1960s serve as a more general temporal entry point for understanding WISH’s history, the rise of the newcomer school model in

129 the 1980s marks a more direct starting point in making WISH a thinkable and practicable intervention.

A Brief Note on the Educational Landscape During Bloomberg

In WISH’s first year, New York City was in the middle of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral tenure. During this time, city schools shifted toward decentralization, accountability, and other movements in the hope of fundamentally and irreversibly altering the city’s educational landscape. As seen in greater detail below, this environment both contributed to WISH’s creation and limited its development. A school like WISH did not receive as clear attention in media and public discourse as schools like no excuses charter schools, Gates Foundation-funded projects like the Internationals

Network, or the “failing” schools that Bloomberg and others commonly attacked. Yet, from its inception, WISH was deeply embedded in these discourses.

Prominently, the creation of new, small schools, often framed as niche offerings, pushed WISH to what it would be. During the Bloomberg administration, New York City opened over 700 new schools. This political environment welcomed the creation of new schools and, at least on paper, new ways of organizing schools. WISH’s space for recently immigrated students and its arts-based framework led it to stand out as a possible school model for newcomer youth. At the same time, school closure under the rubric of accountability flourished in the Bloomberg administration. WISH opened to serve a population of newcomer students, but the direction it has taken has largely been various strategies of survival.

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A Genealogical Sketch of “Newcomer” Educable Subjects

Before turning to the direct history of WISH, I will now mine the subjectivities that WISH aims to educate by interrogating the discursive construction of “newcomers.”

Who are the pedagogical subjects of the whole-school model? What subjectivities and subsequent needs do researchers and schools imagine for them? A genealogical project on newcomers as political, historical, and educable subjects in New York City schools is vastly larger than this Chapter, but a brief tracing teases out WISH’s approach and the production of newcomers as a historical category. In the following Chapters, this sketch informs how it is these subjectivities that participants negotiate.

Newcomer is not a universalizing term. Interrogating the educational reasoning directed at “newcomers” is less unified than something like Talburt and Lesko’s (2012) history of the present of “youth.” I similarly share an aim of historicizing and problematizing these ideas, but newcomer is not an exclusively used category. Even within the newcomer designation, the U.S. DOE includes ELLs, unaccompanied youth, refugees, SIFE, asylees, and even new citizens in the category of newcomer (U.S.

Department of Education, 2016, p. 3). As I explored WISH as a possible site, the principal promoted the school alternatively as a “newcomer school” and as a “school for emergent bilinguals.” Indeed, García (2009) and others use the term “emergent bilingual” to pivot toward an additive understanding of students’ language use. All of these terms carry cultural connotations, but they are ultimately linguistic designations. Likewise, immigrant is a broad term with diverse significations. The 9 participants describe themselves as Latino/Latina/Latinx or Latin immigrants. Even the term newcomer itself suggests different types of learners (Short and Boyson (2012) propose four different

131 kinds of newcomer learner). Ultimately, newcomer acts as the most all-encompassing category on which WISH, similar schools, researchers, and policymakers act. Despite distinctions and subcategories, certain understandings guide the reasoning of and treatment for this population.

The Birth of “Newcomers”

Newcomers as a term for immigrant subjects preceded the emergence of newcomer schools. As early as the 19th century, researchers and others referred to recently arrived immigrants entering schools as newcomers (Reese, 2005). In the 1960s, and again with a new influx of immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, a population of new2 immigrants emerged, those seen as having racial and ethnic identities distinct from earlier immigrants, who were seen as more adaptable to U.S. cultural life (Lopez et al., 2015).

Creating a clear demographic binary, Baum and Flores (2011) suggest that recent immigration trends have “divided newcomers into two groups…One is composed of highly skilled professionals primarily from Asia who fill high-demand positions…The other consists of unskilled labor and manual workers primarily from Latin America, the

Caribbean, and some Southeast Asian countries” (p. 172). Newcomer as a category on which schools and other institutions would act came about amidst these shifts. In the wake of Plyler v. Doe and growing concern for the needs of “new” immigrants, the newcomer as educable subject emerged specifically with the newcomer school. This category gave a specific identity and identified specific needs based on schooling classifications. Furthermore, the newcomer subject existed independently of immigrant

2 There have been several “new” immigrant groups, including “new immigrant” referring to the largely white ethnic immigrant population arriving to the U.S. in the early 20th century.

132 subjects strictly in need of assimilation or linguistic instruction in schools. In other words, the newcomer required something more than access to U.S. schools.

Schools like International High School were founded on the principle that, through classification, categorization, and subsequent inclusion, members of the increasing immigrant population in the city could be supported and find success in schools and beyond. This classification varies from school to school, but essentially the category of newcomer involves limited English proficiency and number of years in the

U.S. Using the school-based definition (including WISH, the Internationals, and many other newcomer schools), a newcomer is a youth in the U.S. for fewer than four years and scoring in a bottom percentile3 in English proficiency exams. Additionally, testing upon arrival (often at a placement center) allows for an identification of grade level or number of years in school.

This categorization additionally implies racialization and class. A student arriving to a private, French school, for instance, may fit into this newcomer category quantitatively (though not subcategories such as SIFE or refugee). Yet, such a student would not fall under the reasoning applied to newcomers. WISH serves a student body made up of 95% Latinx students, most of whom live in a neighborhood not located near the school. 98% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Looking at other newcomer schools in the city reveals similar data. Newcomer High, for instance, serves predominately Latinx and Asian students, 87% of whom receive free or reduced lunch

(Newcomers High School, 2019). The newcomer here is positioned as a racialized and

3 Though this designation is broadly shared across many schools, including the Internationals’ rigid 4 years in the U.S. and bottom quartile of English, WISH accepts students with a wider range of English proficiency.

133 classed subject in need of educational intervention from the public sector for language and acculturation. Yet, it is not only a particular group of youth in need of linguistic and cultural education that makes up the newcomer subject.

Newcomers as Formed/Forming People

The very term newcomer supposes that youth arrive from somewhere else. A recently immigrated adult may also be called a newcomer in that sense, but the newcomer educable subjects that WISH aims to educate are new to an existing school system. They come as people with histories, experiences, and identities. Newcomers do not arrive tabula rasa, as a population on whom U.S. schools can write identity. The newcomer is a subject whose history must be explored, exposed, recognized, and incorporated into their educational life. As funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and other ways of recognizing immigrant identity poured into academic literature, and as newcomer schools wrote diversity and identity into their mission and design, it became clear that any approach to newcomers would require a recognition of and support for their identity as they transition into U.S. schools. Newcomers High School’s (2019) mission suggests, for instance, that along with English language acquisition, its ultimate goal is “the celebration of cultural diversity” The school also says that they “are a student-driven institution, committed to providing students with academic and socio-emotional resources to adjust to life in a new country and succeed in school4. This affirmative approach is, furthermore, a direct rebuke of the English-only curriculum developing across the country at the same time as newcomer schools.

4 WISH shares a similar mission to Newcomers High School. In the interest of protecting the school’s identity, I have opted to use Newcomer High’s mission.

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Included in arriving with identities is the fact that newcomer is a category born of diversity. Newcomers arrive from many places, speaking many different languages.

Landale et al. (2011) also describe how despite sharing the status of newcomers, children’s’ “individual situations vary widely because of differences in their parents’ human and financial capital, legal status, social resources, and degree of assimilation, all of which are tied closely to their country of origin” (p. 44). That history may include never attending school. It may mean that a student arrives as a refugee. Within the broad parameters of language and arrival, newcomer is a diverse category.

At the same time, such diversity has not stopped researchers and schools from identifying and executing a series of effective and ideal approaches to serve the specific educational needs of newcomers. Martin and Suárez-Orozco (2018), for instance, use observations from newcomer schools to propose methods for integrating and accommodating newcomers. The U.S. DOE as well as the New York City DOE offer

“toolkits” and “resource guides” for educators that offer many of the same ideas. Others suggest needs as part of newcomers’ very classification. Beyond quantitative measures used to identify newcomers, the newcomer school aims to serve emotional and social needs (Jaffe-Walter, Walsh, & Lee, 2011), Unifying the newcomer category, despite racial and linguistic diversity, the newcomer subject benefits from the affinity of shared educational space.

Newcomers as (in-need) Seekers

Though newcomers arrive with cultural identities, the newcomer subject comes to school looking for something other than simple cultural preservation. Furthermore, the newcomer cannot simply arrive, learn, and thrive independently. Friedlander (1991)

135 writes that “Educators in all programs serving these young people are aware that whatever their background, newcomer students are very willing and eager to learn and succeed, but do need an institutional cushion to prevent them from falling through the cracks” (pp. 5-6). This subject has been produced as one seeking the opportunity to learn and succeed, but who is in need of a specific kind of intervention to support their search.

Much of this discourse is driven by a tension between newcomers’ rich cultural histories and, at least in the U.S. schooling context, a lacking knowledge base. Even as newcomer schools frame language and identity as assets, newcomers arrive to schools without necessary grounding to succeed in schools. Their education may be

“interrupted,” their English may be “limited,” or they may be considered “at-risk” for any number of reasons and of any number of things. Newcomer schools are the link wherein cultural identities develop these missing components. Within this framing, there is a complex interaction between past and future. As they arrive with identities in formation, newcomers are older students, most often in high school, leaving limited time to combine their “funds of knowledge” with the knowledge present in newcomer schools. That is,

“these students need to learn English and catch up on subject area knowledge: academic literacy development is a particular problem” (Short & Boyson, 2012). The newcomer student enters a school system assumed to be a race where they start “behind” other students, even as they bring backgrounds essential to “catching up.” Fortunately, though, the newcomer is also framed as a subject in search of learning.

The first reporting on the International High School in the New York Times found that the main distinguishing factor for the schools’ success “is the students’ motivation…that reflects the traditional immigrant belief in the importance of education

136 to making a new life” (Sturz, 1988). The perpetuation of ongoing discourses of immigrant work ethic here combines with the notion that a specific kind of culturally affirmative education will lead to academic success and societal inclusion.

In this way, the newcomer is an emerging subject in the liberal, multicultural imaginary of the U.S. Though questions of citizenship often remain unsettled, through educational success, newcomers join a national melting pot, where “multiculturalism [is] transformed into an American value—a symbol of this nation that has not been achieved…in other nations” (Abu El-Haj, 2015, p. 115). In terms of schooling newcomer subjects, multiculturalism supports an idea that part of a newcomer’s path relies on their established cultural identity blending into the U.S. The newcomer school both supports language and cultural history and teaches how to be included in U.S. society. At WISH, classes on U.S. history and U.S. government as well as fieldtrips to the American History

Museum in Washington D.C. partially reveal a curriculum that invites newcomers to belong to this liberal multicultural society through education.

WISH also welcomes newcomers with literal signs and general sentiments of

“immigrants make America great” over and over. While this notion shares much with previous discourses of diversity and inclusion for immigrants, the newcomer subject arrives with particular identities and particular needs in order to learn and belong. Their minoritized status and the whole school model suggests that newcomers do not traditionally fit elsewhere. Their unique needs require specific interventions to fill in the missing parts and include them in a multicultural society.

At the same time, therefore, the newcomer subject is one who is not-quite included, not-yet a member of the system. They exist in a liminal space between

137 belonging and exclusion. Writing about the rise of newcomer programs, Friedlander

(1991) suggests that “given the recent demographic changes that have altered the face of

America’s classrooms, school districts have an unprecedented responsibility…to reach out to these youngsters and make them full active members of our world” (p. 4). Thus far, schools and other institutions have failed immigrants. The newcomer represents a hope for something different. Reaching out and making “youngsters” part of a liberal, multicultural society is an ongoing process that is far from guaranteed. Newcomer schools may have greater academic outcomes (and something like graduation is not synonymous with inclusion in U.S. society), but as I have pointed out several times, newcomers are regularly minoritized and marginalized.

Newcomers as Liminal Subjects

Newcomer schools began as a way to respond to an emerging population’s specific educational needs, but the newcomer school did not only come about for newcomers. Newcomer schools emerged as the newcomer population in New York City grew (Foner, 2000). Overcrowding became an increasing issue, with immigrant students and their educational needs straining resources (McDonnnell & Hill, 1993). A New York

Times article from 1996 implies that the creation of Newcomers High School “is an effort to help the immigrants pouring into the city, particularly northern Queens, where schools are drastically overcrowded” (1996). Previous immigrant populations required special attention and were equally seen as challenges to the stability of “regular” schools. A perception among educators and policymakers that newcomers negatively impacted academic results (Foner, 2000) and that their formed/forming identities made it difficult and undesirable to simply include them in schools. Early outlines of newcomer schools

138 reinforce newcomers threatening schooling results. The entire first class of International

High was considered “high risk” of dropping out (Sturz, 1988). The newcomer belongs not through assimilation without qualification, but through specific educational mechanisms.

To reduce the threat newcomers pose to schools and other institutions, they require a special space to better include them. The newcomer school is not universally the space for producing and treating this population, but as an intervention it deeply entangles with newcomers as educable subjects. Newcomers may attend schools other than newcomer schools, but the newcomer subject needs educational mechanisms affirming the newcomer’s culture and language while introducing them to U.S. cultural life. The notion of a separate space for a distinct population conjures common educational debates surrounding segregation. When the Internationals Network recently expanded to Washington D.C., the education chair for the NAACP suggested the newcomer schools reflected a segregationist model (Gross, 2017). Conversely, Jaffe-

Walter and Lee (2018) find newcomer schools offering culturally sustaining practices.

These spaces are, they suggest, necessary for sustaining cultural identity while welcoming newcomers in schools.

In the liminal space between becoming members of a multicultural, liberal society and being marginalized within that society, newcomers enter schools on a precipice. Abu

El-Haj (2015) suggests that “literature shows that new im/migrant children and youth get pulled into two different Americas: either moving up the racial hierarchy to become white or down into the racially minoritized black and brown underclass (p. 32). To a racial hierarchy, I add the idea that newcomers enter as and can remain linguistically

139 minoritized. For newcomers, any form of success, once more, comes to be despite their category or an overcoming of their circumstances. Once they succeed or fail, the newcomer is either a member of U.S. society, a participant in liberal democracy (Abu El-

Haj reminds that citizenship is much more than legal status) or a threat to it. At this point of realization, subjectivities shift to something else. One is no longer a “newcomer,” resting in liminality. Narratives such as “immigrant success stories” take the place of suspension in newcomer-ness. It is here that I stop short of other genealogical projects, leaving open the question of how to imagine this category differently (Talburt & Lesko,

2012) for the following Chapters. Instead, I turn now to the making of WISH and what systems of reason it engages with newcomers.

Survival and Success: The Life of WISH

What is WISH Exactly?

From the 1990s until WISH opened, the school’s founding and current principal worked as an assistant principal in a school in Manhattan with a large ELL population.

When the school began to phase out (the majority of the ELL population did not live in the neighborhood and the DOE determined that they wanted the school to be for students in the area), WISH’s principal decided to write a proposal to open a school for the students from this school. She took the majority of her team (those working in ELL programs) from the school with her. Taking lessons from this first school, the principal and her founding team wanted to make the school arts based, having seen the impact of arts on ELL learning.

The school opened with a single class of 9th graders around a decade ago.

Enrollment is an ongoing issue at WISH, but the school fits with the size of other small

140 high schools in New York City throughout the Bloomberg administration.

Demographically speaking, over 90% of the students are Latinx immigrants, with the vast majority of students arriving from the Dominican Republic. The school also includes students from West Africa and countries in the Middle East. Over 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunches. In recent years, the school has had a graduation rate above the city average, but recent data places the graduation rate (particularly the 4-year graduation rate) below the city average.

In terms of academic offerings, the school uses specific ESL classes for students.

The school places students in different levels of ESL classes. Some students pass out of

ESL classes, but the majority stay in these classes their entire time at WISH. Officially, the school teaches history, science, and ELA in English. It offers math classes in English or Spanish, depending on students’ English proficiency. The school also offers Spanish literature and AP courses in 2 subjects. Unofficially, as seen in greater detail below, the language of instruction is much more flexible and often responds to students’ comfort. I observed moments where teachers asked students to explain an answer in Spanish. I also observed entire classes where PowerPoint presentations and worksheets used English, but the class proceeded in Spanish. At the same time, not all teachers in the school speak more than one language. As an arts school, all students enrolled in music classes.

Additionally, ESL, ELA, and other classes also partnered with CBOs to offer arts-based projects during the school day. Also explored in greater detail below, however, arts programs were not often foregrounded. The arts bore through cracks in curricular spaces, finding spaces to pop up in between the everyday demands of schooling.

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In some ways, WISH is like so many other schools in the city. The school fits into the grammar of aged-based grades, 45-minute subject-based classes, and so on (Tyack &

Cuban, 1995). That is not to say that the school obscures its identity as a newcomer school. Support for undocumented students or pride for immigrant identities are visible through informational flyers shared with students, posters of encouragement hung throughout the school, and school events such as cultural Heritage Day.

It would be also easy to say that WISH is simply an iteration of the culturally and linguistically affirmative environment of the newcomer high school Luperón. In conversations with school leaders, Luperón was the most common reference point. The well-known newcomer school at the center of Bartlett and García’s (2011) text on

“additive schooling” is often held up as a model for newcomer schools outside of the networked system of the Internationals. It is also frequently framed as a unique place for recently immigrated youth. Bartlett and García (2011) refer to a conversation with a teacher recollecting Luperón’s identity. “There are only four programs [in the DOE]: transitional, dual language, gifted and talented, and SIFE. Ours doesn’t fit” (p. 116).

WISH similarly stands outside of this heuristic. Linguistically, for instance, WISH follows Bartlett and García’s notion of a speech community model, where WISH’s

“language practices follow those of the school community—those of the students, the teachers, and the school leaders—rather than being externally imposed” (p. 116). In addition to classroom flexibility, announcements come over the loudspeakers in English and Spanish. In the hallways, students dominantly speak Spanish or Spanglish.

Yet, WISH is not simply a replica of Luperón or a “regular” school remolded to serve newcomers. No unified curricular approach or pedagogical ideology defines WISH,

142 but two central discourses (inclusion and academic success) and a distinct evolutionary path link WISH to other newcomer schools and reveal its uniqueness as a school for newcomer youth. The purpose of the following sections is not to evaluate the extent to which WISH lives up these lofty aims. In practice, these discourses were messy and sometimes contradictory. Rather, the following sections describe how these discourses frame WISH’s identity and depict the knowledge and ways of being valued in school.

Inclusion

In the first moments of meeting the principal, she told me that WISH is not a screened school. The goal, she explained, is welcoming all immigrant students. “Other schools,” she said, “want to the cream of the crop, who will [pass the Regents].” She explained that WISH welcomed any newcomers looking for a place that would support their language and culture while helping them build life and academic skills. Indeed, inclusion is reinforced in many aspects of the school. From physical design to course content, WISH frames itself as a place that includes newcomer youth. This discourse was evident even in my first days of fieldwork.

I walk around, looking for something to do. The hallways are mostly empty, and I start to write down the contents of signs and things in the hallway. The first sign I see is on the principal’s door. It says “Nueva York es una ciudad de inmigrantes.” Another sign advertises an immigrant rights event, saying that educators are on “the front lines of defending immigrant rights.” Multiple signs, some that appear to be made by students, others of the more traditional school variety, say “nadie es ilegal/no one is illegal” (fieldnotes, September 24, 2018).

In a similar vein, the school holds a “national Heritage Day” every year, where students arrive in flags and t-shirts depicting the colors their country of origin. The school here aims to include students through (rather than despite) their cultural identities.

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WISH uses a limited number of artifacts to guide the school’s identity (at least, the principal and assistant principals did not feel comfortable telling me that they use official policies for something like language). The school commonly operates through what teacher-leader Erin refers to as informal understandings. For instance, despite not having official guidelines for language, students are encouraged to speak however they feel comfortable. Even though the language of instruction is often English, the school actively encourages teachers to be flexible in this regard. Students may feel more comfortable speaking Spanish during group work or responding to a teacher’s question in

Spanish. This approach has also led to some unresolved tensions. The school has welcomed in several students who speak indigenous South American languages, languages that none of the staff speak. Erin describes how the school is still wrestling with how to welcome students with these needs into the school. Academic content is not made to specifically connect to student identities and make them feel included, but I routinely observed small moments of teachers (particularly in literature and social studies classes) referencing immigrant stories and connecting class content to students’ lives.

There are several ways that the school spreads the discourse of inclusion.

Inclusion also relates to a later theme of how the school survives. WISH came about with the direct intent of creating a school to serve newcomer youth. Yet, in the fall of 2019, after I completed my fieldwork, WISH admitted a new group of 9th grade students. For the first time in the school’s history, they welcomed “heritage speakers” among the new 9th grade class. Heritage speakers are those who grow up learning and speaking a language informally, often at home. Many of the 9th graders arriving to WISH learned English as children and grew up in the U.S. Before this fall, the subjects of

144 pedagogical address had been exclusively newcomers. Now, the school pivoted to welcome and educate a new population alongside newcomers. As the principal announced this shift to students on a final day assembly in May of 2019, she offered a recommitment to the school’s ideals. She said that, though they would welcome some students who have a different background, they were still committed to WISH’s mission of welcoming and supporting newcomers and students with an immigrant background. In this shift, I find my central conclusions concerning WISH. First, the school is founded on the inclusion and success of newcomer students. Second, the school’s history is defined by an ongoing evolution as it tries to survive in the New York City educational ecology.

WISH vs Everybody

Like the signs around the building, school events such as assemblies reminded students that they should feel included in the school. Yet, the more time I spent at WISH, the more I understood that the school did not simply emphasize unqualified inclusion.

There were specific ways of expressing this discourse. Whether describing themselves as the black sheep misfits of newcomer schools or using assemblies to talk about the uniqueness of WISH, the staff and students of WISH framed inclusion through its own community-making narrative. Moreover, community-making often relied on negating other communities. The principal, for instance, described WISH by saying how they were not like certain other schools.

The community of WISH was often built on contrasting itself from other schools and communities. As the principal reinforced the idea that they are not a screened school, she described WISH as being a school made up of underdogs and those who band together to make the school a welcoming place. Walking with Leo one day, he described

145 how he was accepted at another newcomer school but his sister was not. “This is the kind of place where we could both be—where they’d take both of us” he said (fieldnotes, June

21, 2019). Beyond comparisons to other newcomer schools, students placed WISH in contrast to other schools. Matias said “we are all friends here. Like, it’s not like other schools—the point is the teachers, they want you to feel at home” (interview, March 11,

2019). Even during one of our few focus groups, the students described coming to New

York City as an isolating feeling. Even living in a Dominican neighborhood did not feel like a real sense of community. People too often keep to themselves on the street. At

WISH, though, they all agreed they had found a sense of inclusion into a community

(fieldnotes, March 25, 2019). Of course, not all students felt included. Many students pointed out feelings of exclusion or general frustrations with the school. The point, though, is that inclusion perpetually operated through imagining WISH as a community, an island against less inclusive educational spaces.

Within the school, community at times emerged from places of adversity. Having minimal external support, teachers had to band together and place it upon themselves to make the school inclusive. The staff engaged in regular work sessions on diversity and inclusion. Erin described many of these sessions as centered around questions asking

“how can we be supportive of the linguistic and cultural diversity in our school? How can we celebrate welcoming? …ethnicity and differences…what are we going to do about that…to help each other?” Erin posits that in pursuing these questions, “the staff have different learning needs and personalities. Because we work well together, that gets sent down through the school” (interview, June 13, 2019). The staff working together to create

146 and support an inclusive environment relied on their own community-building against the ongoing struggles of uncomfortable space and a lack of resources.

Attempts to improve the school were likewise grounded in community-based inclusion. One of the central projects for the school year was the equity task force. For months, a group of students, several teachers, and occasionally the principal met during

Wednesday lunches to identify problems in the school and make the school a more inclusive space. At the end of the year, the task force presented recommendations of hiring more teachers of color and more Spanish-speaking teachers. In a moment of frustration, Leo pointed out how the school had not listened. Rather than hire new teachers, two Latina immigrant teachers had been excessed5 at the end of the school year.

The discourse of inclusion clashed with inclusive outcomes. As I describe in the section below, the chasm between discourses and everyday realities in the school come from a complex set of demands placed on WISH smashing into the school’s desires to educate newcomer subjects.

Throughout, the idea of WISH as an inclusive community is expressed in banding together to build an educational home. Teachers and students worked together to make

WISH a place that was theirs. For instance, after years of transience, WISH settled onto an upper floor of the educational complex. When I first began fieldwork, the school carried all the markings of a DOE school, with only scant posters affirming immigrant identities. Toward the end of fall, Erin and some students began a project of painting the walls and lockers. By the end of the year, WISH still bore recognizable architecture, but the halls felt like a more personal, permanent home.

5 Letting teachers go when there are more teachers than teaching positions.

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Inclusion into…?

As previously stated, there are many indicators that WISH is not much different than “traditional” schools in New York City. Between posters affirming immigrant student identities, the school hangs the same series of “Read” public service posters on the walls that I had in my suburban Philadelphia school in the 1990s. Students study U.S. history and take unit tests. Obviously, traditional is a relative and normative term. The idea here is that in many ways, WISH follows a recognizable schooling structure that does not challenge the grammar of schooling. This recognizability of a school built on challenging much of the history of schooling in New York City—welcoming newcomer students in a culturally and linguistically additive way—begs a question of why the school appears this way, something I discuss below. It also asks into what the school aims to include students.

The school answers the question of inclusion into what in some ways. The school posts evidence of academic success throughout the school. They maintain a board with college acceptance letters. WISH holds a career day with firefighters, social workers, and other professions speaking about the possibility of productively joining the workforce in

New York City. Assumed in these actions is a notion that the school aims to include students into predetermined logics and forms of successful lives. This is not to suggest that students should avoid college or not be exposed to different possibilities of work.

Yet, returning to considerations of multicultural liberalism, there is an implication of the school including students into this societal order. In my time in the school building, immigrant culture was always affirmed, but never problematized. Curriculum instead focused on participation in U.S. society. Citizenship was often framed as something

148 larger than legal status. Instead, it was a kind of way of being and comportment. WISH centering inclusion allowed for students to be welcomed into this framework rather than challenging its foundations.

Even adjacent to school, nonformal educational partnerships furthered this narrative. When I joined Ximena and Valeria in their afterschool program (something I describe in detail in Chapter 5), the organization’s lobby played a commercial about

“including Latin@ immigrants at work,” featuring images of smiling Latinx employees.

Walking to the subway together after the program, I asked them about their impressions.

In previous visits, we had spoken about our mutual appreciation of the free snacks and love of the comfortable chairs during these visits. On this visit, however, I tried to dig a bit more, perhaps problematizing some of the program and Facebook as a whole. I asked

Ximena, who wants to be an artist, if being in advertising like the afterschool program taught them about would meet her artistic ambitions. She told me not really, but somewhere like that would be a really cool place to work (fieldnotes, March 12, 2019).

At WISH, students were unconditionally included and supported. When they spoke different languages, arrived with trauma, or when they showed up after months of absence, WISH always welcomed students. Floating through this inclusion, however, was a sentiment that the WISH community could help students leave its small island and join an existing order.

Welcoming and Supporting “Risky” Students

Though inclusion was commonly discussed in terms of community, WISH also posed inclusion around supporting those “at-risk” of dropping out. As I detailed in the introduction, the school wanted to include those who fell through the cracks of other

149 schools and ensure that at WISH students did not fall through the cracks of cracks.

Responding to this issue, Erin described how teachers planned sessions to established student intervention plans. She again contrasted WISH’s work with other school. “I feel like a lot of schools just fill out forms and do the plan for compliance” (interview, June

13, 2019). At WISH, though, an informal process of meeting across departments and grade levels aimed at identifying and creating strategies to support “at-risk” students. For

Erin, “the chaos results in productive supports.” Inclusion is not synonymous with academic success or, once more, about the outcomes of this discourse. Yet, even as participants’ grades dropped or absences from school increased, they all talked about

WISH as an inclusive community, one where they felt safe and welcome any time. Felipe stopped attending school for close to three months, with a few isolated days at school.

When he suddenly popped up in the hallway one afternoon, I asked him how it felt to be back. “Good,” he said. “Happy to see everyone. And teachers say I can still graduate.”

(fieldnotes, May 17, 2019).

Inclusion as a discourse in the school, particularly contrasted with other spaces, is reflected in broader discussions about newcomer schools. Gibson and Koyama (2011) examine the fact that much of the academic literature around immigration and schooling focuses on “the shortcomings of schools in promoting the social and academic inclusion of immigrant-origin children” (p. 401). Conversely, newcomer schools are centrally defined through inclusion (Bartlett & García, 2011; Lee & Walsh, 2015). The “island of opportunity” (Suárez Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2014) framing further supports WISH’s inclusion as a community. Inclusion in this sense also directly contrasts English-only approaches, which Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1996) find has the “principal

150 objective of excluding” newcomer students (p. 152). Erin described inclusion in similar terms. “It’s not like people walk around saying ‘English only!’ Classrooms open spaces to be language affirmative…we care about our work and about supporting students.”

Success/Exito

The focus on additive schooling and affirming culture functions as a reason in itself. Teachers at WISH simply wanted to welcome students for who they are and who they were becoming. At the same time, this approach to schooling operates as a path toward success. In its mission statement, WISH identifies aims such as students will “aim to enroll in college,” “grow academically,” and “work to value their education both in the school and in the community” (School,6 2019). The objective here is to use the school’s inclusive work with newcomers to boost academic outcomes. Of course, success is a defining discourse for almost any school in New York City. Graduation rates and college acceptances frame a school’s identity. A distinguishing factor here is the narrative preceding success. On InsideSchools, the principal refers to the school’s status as one for newly arrived students. “Yet,” she says. “they still accomplish so much.” Success is always a thing qualified, with newcomer students overcoming or succeeding despite expectations.

Success moved through every corridor of the school and consistently hung over the students and teachers. Enrichment, care, and pleasure also flowed through the school at times. But, these questions were always couched in terms of success. Speaking to an assistant principal about a student who had recently arrived to New York City after

6 Paraphrased from school’s mission

151 spending time detained in multiple detention facilities, she explained how the school supported and welcomed him after ongoing trauma. Over and over, the assistant principal returned to a question of his gains and academic progress. Inclusion may be a central tenet of WISH, and other aspects may be ambitions, but success is the school’s defining discourse.

WISH Is Here, Not Elsewhere

Returning to the sign that opened this Chapter, WISH suggests that success emerges from the inclusive community grounded in affirming newcomer identities.

Newcomers may struggle out in the world, in other places. At WISH, though, newcomers find success. This notion of success links to an understanding that “traditional” schools do not welcome newcomers. The U.S. has an “ELL dropout crisis” (New York Immigrant

Coalition, 2020). It is only in spaces such as WISH that newcomers will find success.

Though success was mostly contrasted to schools not specifically built for newcomers, it was at times discussed comparatively, as when the principal shared how their graduation rate exceeded Luperón. WISH had become more successful, she told me, than even the newcomer school built for success.

Success is also something that happens in schools in general. Students might be successful in other spaces, but success in school always subsumed other forms and spaces of success. Students might struggle in school but find success in some of WISH’s nonformal education programs. Yet, as seen in the following Chapter, these programs support the logics (including success) of schooling. Success beyond the bounds of school do not fit into the discourse of “success” in WISH’s terms. Mateo spent much of the year working almost full time at McDonald’s and struggling in classes like science and social

152 studies. When one of his teachers asked if I could share what was going on, I hinted that he appeared tired and that I know he has an afterschool job. The teacher nodded and told me that he “needs to get his shit together. There is no reason why he can’t be successful in here” (fieldnotes, February 1, 2019). The teacher had not ignored Mateo’s situation. In fact, this teacher often listened and expressed understanding. Rather, a fundamental tension ran through the discourse of success, centering it in school, at times at the expense of other forms of success.

Status of Success

The school’s curriculum guide describes WISH’s academic program as one that

“prepares ELLs for a successful future by offering unique opportunities for students to excel in Regents exams, Advanced Placement courses, early college experiences, and on- time graduation” (School, 2019). Looking through this document, the student handbook, and several other documents, there is never a discussion of what success actually is beyond the academic outcomes to which I have just referred. There are references in the student handbook to how family participation is integral to student success. Success is consistently deployed as a bland and ambiguous term. As both participants and the school leaders I interviewed questioned, “whose success?” “What do they mean when they say success?”

No one answered this question and yet it always felt like something everyone in the school knew. Success was not a process or a feeling, but a status. Students and teachers walked around the building wearing markers of success or failure. Students in particular walked the school with markings of success of failure. The successful kids enrolled in AP classes and took higher levels of ESL courses. They participated in

153 afterschool clubs and other nonformal programs. Those falling outside the rubric of success grouped together in other ways. At the same time, success was not a universal term. Erin described how communication among teachers revealed students seen as “at- risk” in some ways were highly successful in other areas. Again, though, all success fell under the umbrella of the school.

Survive to Provide This Space: Making Do at WISH

The story of WISH that I am telling is not one in which these discourses have spread across the school community and influenced the DOE. They have not taken hold and been adopted in a singular way within the school. Instead, the school has had to constantly adapt to be able to continue their work. WISH is not valueless or apolitical, but in the course of its existence, political realities have thrust survival into the center of

WISH’s life. In finding routes to survive, WISH has struggled to educate newcomer subjects in the way its founders imagined, but it has evolved to continue including newcomers and promoting their academic success. In this way, survival has been WISH’s own form of inclusion (within the New York City educational landscape) and success (by continuing to provide newcomer youth with a welcoming school).

“Caught in Politics”

Early in designing and developing the school, WISH shifted from dreams of fluid language practices and a school in and of the community to the specific model it adopted.

The principal explained “I wanted to serve ELLs without a bilingual program. But at the time [we] wrote the proposal—the executive director of ELLs at the time, said there’s a need for a transitional bilingual program. I didn’t want to be [where the school is located]

154 because it’s not the community who’s coming to the school. I wanted to build community” (interview, November 14, 2018). As mentioned above, data had recently shown the alleged efficacy of these kinds of programs. Similarly, the DOE identified available space in the educational complex in which WISH operates. It was not what the principal believed students needed academically or where students needed a school. But, it was what the DOE identified as needed and possible at the time.

The principal called these modifications to WISH’s model “getting caught in politics.” In its founding, WISH wanted to center the arts and creativity as a way to engage newcomer youth. Arts, those designing the school believed, contributed to academic success for newcomers. At the same time, WISH students had to take Regents and contend with the shifting expectations of other public schools in the city. As Erin described, “my first year, the superintendent came and said we were an arts and crafts school…So, [the principal] freaked out because [they] thought we were going to get shut down” (interview, June 13, 2019). From here, the school began to promote rigor.

Newcomer inclusion and success continued as the central goals, but the school shifted to more directly focus on outcomes unrelated to the arts. Similarly, the arts continued in a diminished form. “We have some of that,” the principal told me. “Not as much as we did…” Arts-based programs now mostly function through community-based partnerships. Local theater companies, for instance, join an ESL class and help them put on a short play in class. Alternatively, teachers have found niche ways to incorporate the arts, starting photography or poetry clubs. In these small moments, students find renewed feelings of inclusion. Miguel told me that he feels at home at WISH when he is part of the photography club.

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The Cost of Public Schools

WISH does not have the same reputation or experimental design as other newcomer schools, but it carries a distinction in publicness. Unlike schools like Luperón,

WISH is not screened. They welcome any newcomer students who arrive to their doors.

Without screening students, their academic success rates have suffered. In an increasingly competitive market for students to enroll in a school in New York City, this demand has forced WISH to accommodate new possibilities. They have “responded to a demand for college readiness courses and courses such as the AP offerings” (interview with principal,

November 14, 2018). Despite these efforts, WISH was under-enrolled in the 2018-2019 school year. Under-enrollment places schools in a precarious situation, especially risking closure entirely (Valencia, 2012). Consequently, this fall, WISH welcomed a new group of 9th graders that included heritage speakers. The result is certainly part of the neoliberal framework taking over schools. Students carry a “backpack of cash” and schools compete in an open marketplace (Arnow & Mondale, 2016). In an effort to continue the values they have established, WISH continues making accommodations such as this change in population.

Furthering the narrative of WISH against everybody, the school exists as a singular entity. During the Bloomberg administration, schools operated through networks. In the de Blasio years, the city shifted back to a district system, but still included “Affinity Groups,” which allowed schools with shared ideas and values to work together under a single superintendent. Networks such as the Performance Standards

Consortium (or just the Consortium) allow schools to engage education without the demands of Regents, something with which WISH particularly struggles. The most

156 prominent newcomer schools—the Internationals Network for Public Schools—uses a similar network structure. WISH, conversely, receives none of these accommodations and none of these supports. It is left on an island by itself, reckoning with the demands and expectations the DOE places on it. As a result, adaptations will likely continue as

WISH vies for its own survival in an effort to create an inclusive environment where its students can survive.

Negotiating Demands

WISH is located in a ten-story building, one of the DOE’s many educational complexes in the city. Its first years, WISH used the entirety of one floor as well as a portion of another floor. When a notorious high-performance charter school opened a high school in the complex, they moved to share a floor. Then, they moved up a floor.

Finally, they were pushed up one more flight. “We’re like nomads,” the principal described. “When we started, we didn’t even have furniture” (interview, November 14,

2018). Throughout my time with the school, there was a sentiment of WISH as a group of black sheep who banded together. They were an unscreened newcomer school, not part of a network, and often pushed out of their homes. Once more, it was the world against

WISH. One teacher told me that a rumor floats through the school that the charter school, using its ample funding for heating and air conditioning, vents their air into WISH’s floor, ensuring their comfort at the direct expense of WISH’s.

Returning to inclusion, this constant change created a sense of impermanence for the school and its newcomer students. Since the school is not located where the students live, there is a feeling of distance. For newcomer youth, this impermanence may be added to already-present senses of impermanence (Mangual Figueroa, 2019). Responding to this

157 adaptation, in the fall, Erin and several students worked together to paint the lockers and hallways. What had been a mostly empty space where the students showed up on school days become something a bit closer to home. The WISH community had here claimed a sense of belonging where they had been told for years and years that they only partially belong.

Conclusion

The history of schools and other educational institutions understanding and intervening in the education of immigrants runs along and entangles the history of schooling in the U.S. Language policy questions shifted to broader legal and cultural issues, opening space for a new political subject, the newcomer. As with this general history, newcomer schools and the newcomer subject also share a parallel and entwined history. WISH is one such school, but specific encounters and political responses have created a unique educational response to welcome newcomers and educate them toward academic success. WISH’s story continues, with the school’s maneuvers and adaptations still operating within the broad discourses of using language and culture to include newcomers and educate them toward success. Other educations exist beyond the ways these discourses have determined newcomer success, beyond the logics of schooling, and beyond the configurations of newcomer educable subjects. What are some of these educational practices and what kinds of possibilities do they create that may allow for seeing newcomers and understanding new ways of knowing and being beyond current frameworks?

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Chapter V

EDUCATIONS IN/OF/WITH/THROUGH SPACE

Introduction

They learn English and science and U.S. history. Stories of immigrants in the U.S. and themes of immigration find their way into math classes. They develop understandings of reading passages. A Long Walk to Water takes months to read, but they keep on. Sometimes, in class, they freestyle rap together. In government, they study the importance of citizens educating themselves in a democracy. During science class, discussions of volcanic activity inspire a connectedness to artwork. Teachers hold them after the bell to offer pep talks or remind them of upcoming deadlines. Spanish literature starts and the teacher scolds not only for being late but for letting down families and communities by doing so. They play the same damn song in music class, over and over on violins.1

Conversations wind through hallways, learning, listening, creating new ways of understanding from each other. In the cafeteria, the free lunch teaches them that the food they eat is not important. Their nutritional health is not a matter for the school day.

Sometimes they skip it just to wander the hallways together. They play fight, sneak upstairs to the gym, and test the school’s limits. The security guards are friendly, but when they arrive late, security gives them a hard time. They cannot cross through the

1 As with the introductory Chapter, this section uses specific fieldnotes from ethnographic work with each participant. For expressive purposes and flow, I do not cite fieldnotes within this introduction. I support the ideas presented here with in-depth analysis throughout the Chapter.

159 metal detector without a teacher to vouch for them. With double periods, they take prolonged bathroom breaks. Sometimes, during these breaks, the principal stops them, asking about how they are doing and ushering them back to class.

The school spills out into the city. They go on college tours, visit museums, and take buses to see new cities. Museums welcome them, ask them to sit in circles, raise their hands, tour guides look uncertain as they converse in Spanish. After finishing a book in ELA class, they take a trip to see a film adaptation. Afterward, they debate the adaptation in a café, looking like bohemians huddled at the back of a bar.

When the school bell rings, some go to clubs or community groups. They start a

Gender and Sexuality Alliance and join a media club that meets at the school or ventures to the offices of Facebook. A college prep program teaches the basic grammar of living a university and professional-bound life. They travel across the city to attend introductory and preparatory clubs run by the NYPD. They learn discipline. They forge identities as studious or disciplined or artsy people. A few go to jobs, working afternoon and night shifts at McDonald’s or helping parents in maintaining apartment buildings. They learn to get by.

There are other times too. Learning with less structure, outside the organization of a club or program. Say, playing a new game on the phone. Watching Netflix with subtitles to learn English. Caring for siblings. Raising their son. Creating found art projects. Applying to university. Experimenting with rap lyrics. Messing with a camera and creating portraits and city landscapes. Exploring the city. Remembering the

Dominican Republic (la R.D. or the D.R.) and asking each other why it is so different from New York City. Thinking about being an actor, dreaming of being famous,

160 wondering what comes next. Worrying about right now. They intellectualize on the power of connecting with other cultures during a walk through the park or the possibility of fighting racism in the U.S. and the D.R. Theorizing how to use the subway and how people on the subway look at them with dark skin and voces dominicanas. Hoping to be and to be seen otherwise. Dreaming of millions of otherwises.

These are the educational lives of 9 youth living in New York City and enrolled at

WISH. Their educational stories are partially visible here, nine incomplete, entangled narratives of playfulness, curiosity, grief, struggle, and education writ large. In this

Chapter, I turn from history to ethnography, conspiring with the participants in this study to uncover educational practices flowing through WISH and everyday life. I start with co- constructed (with participants’ ideas and feedback) introductory biographies of each participant. I also devote a large portion of the Chapter to map and describe educational spaces in 3 distinct spaces: school, structured nonformal spaces, and unstructured spaces.

The Chapter operates through affective surges, sensing daydreams and feeling educational affects while simultaneously focusing on categorically and structurally tracing practices in these spaces. Looking at distinct spaces interrogates the relationship among different educational practices and places. After exploring educations in these spaces, I conclude with a consideration of the gravity of these spaces, thinking with the educational constraints and possibilities emerge in each space.

And Now, In No Particular Order, Briefly Introducing…

Before jumping into these introductions, I want to note a few caveats. These quick introductory paragraphs are obviously partial. Not only is this section brief as a way of introducing participants to readers, many details they wanted to include could act as

161 identifying markers or pose other unnecessary risks to participants. These descriptions also do not serve to stick specific identities to the participants, but reflect introductions of ever-changing, unfixed identities.

Miguel

Miguel describes himself as a photographer and a disciplined, serious person. I first noticed Miguel while sitting at the back of a classroom. His upright, still posture caught my eye. Even though he wavered on his desire to join the army or the NYPD, he often wore clothes with these patterns or logos. In the D.R., he worked with a family member on a documentary. The experience inspired him to learn as much as possible about photography. He often spends afternoons wandering the city and taking photographs, even skipping a required summer school program to do so. Despite describing his affinity for discipline and control, from his own account Miguel struggles with focus and organization. Miguel and I often laughed about and strategized over our shared struggles with timeliness. In a most extreme example, when the majority of my participants and I went on WISH’s annual fieldtrip to Washington D.C., Miguel arrived, sweating, sprinting, and an hour late, just as the bus pulled away without him (fieldnotes,

May 3, 2019). Throughout our time together, Miguel thoughtfully responded to questions. He bleeds a quiet intensity. We spent many afternoons in prolonged silence as he thought through the framing of a photograph or considered how to respond to a question. When responding, he spoke deliberately, calculating each word. I also saw him trying to break out of this persona. At a community event in his neighborhood one weekend, he acted as the photographer. Throughout the event, Miguel moved from group to group, eagerly asking to take photographs of groups and moments (fieldnotes, May 18,

162

2019). When we last spoke, Miguel was not sure about graduating or what might happen at the end of the school year, but he was thrilled to continue his photography work.

Mateo

Mateo asked to join the project to share his desire to become a doctor or lawyer as much as explore his ongoing current responsibilities. In addition to school and periodic afterschool commitments in a science club and a basketball team, Mateo works an almost-full-time job at McDonald’s. Halfway through the year, he tried to quit to focus on school. As he described, though, his family needed him to keep working. After a month away, he returned to the job. Walking with him to work one day, he simply shrugged it off, saying he could handle and balance all of his responsibilities (fieldnotes,

June 10, 2019). He enjoyed learning how to work as part of a team and developing an increasingly diverse set of skills at his job. Mateo also loves videogames, sharing nuanced understandings and an intimate knowledge that led us to an ongoing debate over, among other topics, our favorite games. His curiosity took him toward learning Japanese at the same time as learning English. Even though we developed a playful relationship, and even when we talked about incredibly informal topics, Mateo insisted on calling me

“mister.” He finds time to hang out with friends, playing basketball and videogames, but there is no denying that the hefty amount of responsibility he takes on has an impact on his everyday life.

In our first interview, he shared a representative story where he went to school, then worked until 11pm. At the end of his shift, his manager asked him to work an extra hour. He said, “that’s not a problem. You give me all the hours that you want. They say ok you stay here till 6am. And I just stay here and work all day. So, for example, let’s

163 say, this day is Monday, right? I take my schedule to 11. And then I continue to 6am. To come here [WISH] at 7. Then, to go to work this same day.

“So basically you don’t sleep?”

“Basically, I’m not going home. I go to the home of one friend close to school.

And wash everything, put my uniform on. That’s the most difficult day for me…”

(interview, November 27, 2018).

For all his stress and feelings of being pulled apart in many directions, Mateo keeps making plans. He planned to attend a science and basketball camp (fieldnotes, May

17, 2019). His grades and attendance wavered, but his curiosity always hung around.

Mateo loved asking me questions as well as describing the research project to others.

Sofia

Sofia joined the project when she barged in on my first interview with Mateo.

Saying she was Mateo’s girlfriend, she asked only 1 or 2 questions before requesting to join the project. Our introduction to each other stands in stark contrast to how Sofia, her friends, and her teachers frequently describe her. The most common phrase I heard when she spoke in class was “could you speak up?”. That is not to say Sofia is a meek person.

Interacting with friends or in class, she actively stood up for herself. But, even in a school of 300 students, many teachers did not know her. Teachers who know her were often surprised to learn she wants to be an actor. She directly describes herself as a shy person.

She talks at great length about wanting to study acting at school and be some kind of actor later on in life. If not an actress, or in addition to being an actor, she talks a great deal about being a fashion designer. She additionally describes herself as academically focused. While money and time are constant issues, she plans to apply to college.

164

Despite some initial shyness, Sofia increasingly shared her desires, especially around acting. She never fully articulated why she wanted to act, but talked about it constantly. As we grew closer, she began asking more and more questions about college life, about how to apply, fund, and navigate it. She also brought a plethora of questions around acting, especially after she found out that I majored in theater in college. From our last communications, Sofia shared that she feels comfortable academically and plans to graduate. She has also applied to a number of colleges.

Leo

In my first weeks at WISH, while I was still familiarizing myself with the school,

Leo sprinted up to me and asked to join the project. He explained that he wanted to be a psychologist and a study of immigrant students’ lives would help him further develop an understanding of their psychological needs and how he could better serve his community.

At first, I felt that Leo might not be a match for the study. He described his educational life as almost entirely focused on what happened in school or in service of school. As I still played with the idea of what it meant to be “at-risk” and what counts as educational life, a teacher began speaking to me about Leo. The teacher described Leo as one of the strongest students at WISH in terms of academics but one of the students most “at-risk” in life outside of school (fieldnotes, September 24, 2018).

Additionally, in our initial chats and first interview, Leo also described a complex educational world that spanned nonformal programs, homelife and jobs, and creating and forming relationships with cultures and nature. He often takes an autodidactic approach to learning, whether it be related to a school subject or a personal interest. Throughout the year, both through his participation in school activist groups and in his life outside of

165 school, Leo increasingly explored his racial identity and Dominican heritage. He maintained many intellectual and activist commitments, with a doctor telling him he had basically not grown or gained weight in a year. Leo took the advice and tried to relearn his old hobby of mixed martial arts, though his focus ultimately returned to study and activism in ways that served schooling interests and furthered his academic success.

Though he has been accepted and plans to attend college in the U.S., Leo wants to eventually return to the Dominican Republic to create systematic change in the areas of mental health and education.

Matias

Though I developed intimate relationships with all participants in the study, and welcomed emotional connections, I always resisted being closer with one participant than others. Undoubtedly, though, I spent the most time with Matias of anyone in the project.

We walked through various neighborhoods together. He invited me to watch him play basketball. We worked on job applications together. He laid open his struggles and desires, talking openly about his life in school and at home. At various times, Matias wanted to be a basketball player or a rapper. Whenever he recorded a new song, he would excitedly open YouTube on my phone and show me what he had created.

He also constantly showed an impulse of caring for others. This part of his identity emerged whether he checked in on me during a day at WISH or if he talked about watching after his younger brother. In classrooms, Matias expressed a desire to focus and show respect to teachers, but he often found himself falling asleep or wanting to sneak upstairs to the gym. Matias’ relationship with his mother and stepfather has had many ups and downs. His mother kicked him out of the house for smoking a joint. Matias

166 describes being outside of the house as even more difficult than fighting at home as his neighborhood has, in his own words, “lots of bad influences.” Matias also expressed himself constantly, especially when he wrapped me in totally unexpected hugs. At the end of the year, Matias left WISH without graduating and began working at McDonald’s.

Ximena

Since she was a kid, Ximena has loved making found art. She feels that art “gives me the opportunity to say things I don’t say out loud” (interview, November 15, 2018).

The only participant not coming from the Dominican Republic, Ximena spent her childhood in South America, before coming to the U.S. As she has navigated life in the

U.S. she has had to learn to stop being afraid, fostering an identity of care and responsibility. This role has included acting as an interpreter for her mother for everything from bills to picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy, which she says fundamentally changes her relationship to her family. School is sometimes a struggle, with Ximena suggesting she is not a student who gets a 100 in every class. At the same time, she finds inspiration everywhere. She didn’t understand everything in a science class, but discussing volcanoes taught her ways to connect what she was learning in school to her art. Ximena also spends time with friends, talking about, among other things, racism, xenophobia, how people are scared of immigrants, and how “education is a way to fight back” (interview, November 15, 2018). She sees education as a way to stop being ignorant. Among her group of friends, Ximena often finds herself playing the role of facilitator or peacemaker, making sure everyone feels included and welcome in the group.

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Felipe

Felipe prefers to listen. He finds that talking and sharing his voice can sometimes be difficult, not because of an issue with English or Spanish but because the words are often not there. He loves hanging out with a friend who teaches him how to play every new videogame he can possibly find. He also loves baseball and played on WISH’s team until he stopped showing up to school (and also took a hiatus from the project). Felipe prefers to “do his own thing,” both spending time on his own and making his own choices. In the middle of his hiatus, he came back to WISH for a few days, joining his

ESL classes as they rehearsed a theater workshop with a prominent New York City theater company. When he tried to ask a question, the theater teacher told him to “quiet down and hold on,” Felipe became increasingly upset. He walked out of the classroom and did not return to school for a few weeks (fieldnotes, February 2, 2019). In the spring, after four months of sparse attendance, Felipe returned to school, promptly came up to me and, with little explanation, asked if he could still be part of the project. We worked together from his return until a little after the end of the school year, exploring his passion for baseball and, inspired by friends at WISH and in his neighborhood, making rap music. Hoping to refocus his education on schooling and trying to graduate from

WISH, Felipe returned to the school in the fall.

Luna

I had finished recruiting participants, had spent time with everyone in school, in spaces between classes, and had begun moving to afterschool and nonformal educational spaces. One day, sitting with Ximena in an afterschool group, Luna approached me and asked what I was doing. After sharing my elevator speech about the project, she instantly

168 told me she “had” to join. In our time together, the moment we met perfectly encapsulates Luna. She stands up for herself, fearlessly presents herself, and wants to share so much of who she is. In her own words, Luna is “I don’t know, just [Luna]. I’m fabulous” (fieldnotes, February 8, 2019). When students and teachers struggled or refused to welcome Luna in the classroom as a transgender girl, she took out a bag of makeup, applied it, and raised her hand to answer a question. That is not to say Luna entirely ignored the impact of bullying or other issues.

One of the great lessons she has learned, according to her an important piece of her education, is how to be a kind person, a “person who helps people” (interview,

February 13, 2019). She said that she initially learned these values in school. But, even greater lessons took place outside of school.

In the past I got bullied because I was fat. Then outside school, when I come out gay,2 they told me like ‘I’m gonna come out clean, like I don’t want to be your friend.’ I was like ‘why’ and they was like ‘I don’t want to be the friend of a gay person because they gonna say that I’m gay too.’ And I’m like ‘oh, ok, don’t talk with me anymore. Just follow what you think.’ That gets me so mad. And then I fall in a depression for like 2 months. (interview, February 13, 2019)

At WISH, though, Luna has found a vibrant, welcoming community. Luna started a

Gender and Sexuality Alliance club for students at WISH and led a group from WISH at

2019 Pride. She plans to attend university in the U.S. and become a lawyer. Though she describes herself as academically successful, Luna consistently appeared in teacher conversations about “risk.” Like every participant, her educational story is ongoing. But, for now, Luna has been sent back to live in the D.R. Her mother stated that she does not want her living in New York as a transgender girl.

2 Luna never explicitly came out as gay. She most often referred to herself as a trans girl, but only referred to her sexual orientation in our first interview.

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Pablo

The second I finished reading my recruitment script for the first time in an ESL class, Pablo’s hand shot up. He asked “why do you want to work with us?” (fieldnotes,

October 15, 2018) and has not stopped asking questions for over a year. A musician, fashionista, dad, and caretaker of everyone he meets, Pablo’s education spread in many directions. Walking the hallways, riding the subway, or standing on the street, Pablo exuded confidence. He shouted jokes or started singing at full volume in the middle of the street. He frequently left school early or did not go at all, though we ran into each other recently and he told me that this year he attends more regularly. He sometimes spends the day visiting his son or exploring the city. Other times, he enjoys staying at home and playing video games.

Music is Pablo’s passion. Almost every time we discussed his music, Pablo struggled to articulate his feelings, turning to vehement hand gestures and vigorous head nods. I never fully asked him about it, but I found some of his lyrics to be a bit machista.

I then questioned my own response when, during our first focus group, he put his arm around Luna, kissed her on the cheek, and asked how she was doing. Pablo continues pursuing many of these interests and activities, but music still holds a prominent place in his life. I continue checking his YouTube channel and see new songs on a regular basis.

Educations, Catalogued, Tracked, Categorized

Educations moved, spilled, bled across boundaries. At the same time, certain educations glowed in certain places. Educations contextualized, sticking to times and places. Before turning to the complex, entangled, wild, and incomprehensible practices that move through different forms and explode across time and space, I want to explore

170 and describe educations in three distinct spaces. Once I had recruited participants and discussed an overview of their educational lives, I created a kind of graphic organizer as a way to prompt and show educational practices that participants undertake and value.

After listening to the first interviews, where participants shared much about memories of education and ideas of the future, I also added a section at the top and bottom for past or future educations.

Figure 2: Organizer I framed participant observation through school, nonformal education, and unstructured time/everyday life. This approach created a heuristic for participants and I to use, even if it had clear borders that we all routinely crossed. In the last third of fieldwork, I sat with participants and asked participants to fill in the chart as they saw fit. Some kept descriptions broad, filling in school with topics like “math” or unstructured time with activities like “basketball.” Other participants wrote down knowledge, skills, or values like “tectonic plates in Earth Science” or “learn to take care of sister.” Filling out this

171 organizer also illuminated gaps. Participants identified educational practices that we had not yet explored, places of importance we had not yet visited.

On the vague chance that certain descriptions expose participants to risk, I am not including the completed organizers for each individual participant. I include a broad analysis of education in these three places largely unattached to specific participants, though I do link some experiences and practices to participants (it is hard to talk about music without talking about Pablo, and vice versa). This section also focuses more on description than analysis. As I have likely repeated too many times, these descriptions do not represent universals. I present some common themes of education in different places here, but I in no way searched or found something like a unified “immigrant schooling experience.”

School

WISH does not use a unified curriculum or class schedule. Almost everyone takes the same set of courses, including math, history, ESL, science, gym, ELA, and Spanish literature. Specific course topics vary for students based on grade level and level of

English. The knowledge and ways of being in WISH are not standardized. But, WISH is a school that can be seen as similar to hundreds of other schools across the city. Some classrooms organize desks in rows. Others cluster desks for group work. The school has a small, infrequently used computer lab and a roaming laptop cart that teachers can use.

WISH shares a gym with the other schools in the building. With the exception of a few double periods for ESL classes, WISH follows the common 45-minute blocks for each class, allowing students a few minutes to transition from room to room. All teachers use a scope and sequence from the DOE. In that way, I would observe a government class at

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WISH in the morning. In the afternoon, I might conduct observations at a school in a different borough for my job as a student teacher supervisor. Following the same curricular map of high school history classes for New York City DOE classes, the two classes would largely cover identical topics. On this day in February, most 11th grade social studies classes in New York City are talking about the Great Depression. Being a public school in New York City, the biggest tests of all—the Regents—dominate the schoolyear’s curricular trajectory.

Within these external constraints, WISH’s loose, informal structuring leads to a curriculum and pedagogy that largely comes down to personality and style. Every participant took a science class that largely used a lecture format. The music teacher deployed a consistent approach of demonstrating what to do and then having students play along with music. For instance, one day, he played a quick scale on the violin.

Students then used the school’s violins (they had about a dozen of a few different instruments) to play along with a recording of the scale as the music teacher walked around, making small adjustments. Six participants took a history class with a well-liked

“no-nonsense” history and government teacher. This teacher routinized his class with daily PowerPoints and end of unit presentations and tests. Along with the daily

PowerPoint, he often asked students to work in groups to answer specific questions or debate a topic in U.S. history or government. Throughout the school, teachers occasionally use projects or presentations, but most learning is segmented into units that culminate in tests.

Within this overarching structure, students learn dynamically. They respond to different pedagogical practices in different ways. Even for individuals, there is no

173 universal way of framing schooling experiences. They love school and are bored out of their minds and love one subject and then hate it or love and hate it at the same time. Leo, for example, relishes going to school. He rarely misses a single class. Walking out of music—the first class in which I joined him—I asked Leo why he wanted me to start there. “I wanted you to see how boring it is,” he told me. I then asked for him to elaborate. “I don’t know. It’s pointless. I just take the class because it’s there” (fieldnotes,

November 19, 2018). I encountered similarly definite, familiar feelings of boredom.

Around my third month of participant observation in the school, I began to recall the rhythms of schooling, not as a teacher or academic, but as a student. I often sat, bored not by any fault of a teacher’s pedagogy but by the sheer mundanity of a school day. Once, for some confusing reason, Pablo asked me to hang out with him during a math test. The teacher strangely encouraged it. So, for the next hour I sat in a desk, completely silent, watching for any twitch of movement, thirsting for any sense of energy. Looking through my fieldnotes, they describe the movement of pencils, Pablo’s hunched shoulders, and the complete lack of ventilation (from fieldnotes, February 13, 2019).

I am reminded here of a moment in Ordinary Affects (Stewart, 2007). “When something happens, we swarm toward it, gaze at it, sniff it, absorb its force, pour over its details, make fun of it, hide from it, spit it out, or develop a taste for it” (p. 70). This sentiment was true for participants in all kinds of ways. They looked for little moments to make joy and moved with and against the energy of the school. Within the mundanity of the schoolyear, participants still vibrated with enthusiasm when they saw each other between 8th and 9th period. They excitedly collected their desks together to start group

174 projects in science class. Or, participants found moments to escape the boredom, seeking the energy of the hallways, the cafeteria, or places hidden from authoritative adults.

That is not to say that school is boring, with students straining to create energy. It is also not to say that school is thrilling. Once more, schooling experiences are largely fractured. Even as Pablo often skips school, saying he is indifferent to it, he senses a closeness to teachers and friends. Walking out of WISH one day, I passed Pablo hanging out with some friends in a hallway. I asked how his day was going. “I’m with my friends, my teachers, I love it here” he explained (fieldnotes, January 30, 2019). Many times, I joined Ximena, Leo, Sofia, and Mateo for the last two periods of the day. From Spanish

Literature to U.S. History class, they cycled through feelings, attitudes, and types of engagement. Some days, Mateo barely lifted his head off his desk in U.S. History, which he identifies as one of his favorite classes. On certain days, Sofia’s hand shot up as soon as the Spanish teacher asked a question, fighting through a raucous, buzzing classroom and her own shyness to join in. There are, of course, infinite reasons for how these experiences came to be, evolved, and shifted. Sometimes, I inquired about the overall feeling about a course or whether someone was having a tough day. Often, participants sought me out to complain about a class or a teacher. Suffice it to say that throughout the school participants encounter a spectrum of ideas, feelings, and movements.

On a more specific scale, school is both a welcoming place that stirs a sense of genuine belonging and a feeling of unsettled belonging (to use the term from Abu El-Haj,

2015). As a most overt example, during my first weeks working with Luna, the welcoming she experienced surprised me. When we walked the halls together, it was hard to finish a sentence or move three steps toward her next class without running into her

175 friends. This veneer of acceptance lulled me into thinking students and teachers at WISH almost universally welcomed Luna. Then, in science class one day, students noticed Luna was running late. “Oh, she’s not here yet,” a student said, sarcastically emphasizing her pronouns over and over. The teacher joined in. “Well, we can’t wait for him, or her, whatever [participant] wants to be called now,” with the teacher using Luna’s birthname instead of calling her Luna (fieldnotes, March 1, 2019). I did not mention this moment to

Luna, but she confirmed the dichotomy to me in our conversations, saying that many people at WISH make her feel cared for, but others refuse to recognize her identity. A tug rope of belonging and unsettled belonging, even occasional feelings of exclusion, visible in moments like Felipe marching out of the school in the middle of the theater workshop, floated throughout the schoolyear.

School politics are also there, felt and fought for. Leo pushed for more teachers of color, particularly male teachers of color. Luna spent months trying to organize the

Gender Sexuality Alliance before their first meeting. Participants hope to change the school’s landscape through their actions. Yet, there was a sense from many of the participants that, even as they shared appreciation for WISH, they were in the middle of fighting ongoing losing battles. In our final interview, Leo had just learned that the

Spanish literature teacher, who many participants had told me was their lifeline in the school, had been excessed. He described how she had not been replaced. The school was only becoming whiter, less reflective of the student body and student voice. Leo articulated a feeling that he simply needed to graduate and move on to larger fights, though he would continue fighting for a more equitable school community throughout his senior year (interview, August 14, 2019). That is not to say that school was an ongoing

176 political struggle. Matias repeatedly told me that he just wanted to get by, to manage, and to survive on the way to graduation. He appreciated the feelings of community, but his central focus at WISH was simply to stay in school and graduate. For him, the politics of everyday living overshadowed specific struggles in the school community.

For all of the space I have devoted to showing fracturing responses to school and schooling individualized experiences, I found one universal within WISH’s education.

Education in school is highly structured. It operates through institutionalized routine. The diverse learning, ranging from hidden curriculum to explicit instruction, all occur within a single floor. Bells and desks dictate when and where learning is supposed to occur.

Access to the building and routine attendance within the school are necessary conditions to begin education. In general, the grammar of school persists (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) and cordons off what is possible within schooling education. At the same time, WISH’s education is only one education among many.

Nonformal Education

Like so many schools, WISH’s school day ends just after 3pm. Yet, a series of clubs, nonformal education programs, and other opportunities extend into the evening.

WISH’s only semi-mandatory program after school is a weekly science lab. Here, students gather in small groups to work on a self-guided science lab. The lab corresponds to what students are doing in science class during the day. So, it is essentially a continuation of the school day that occurs after school. Despite its label as a requirement, many participants routinely skip the lab, with little consequence to their grades or, they allege, their scientific knowledge. Mateo was quite vocal about this topic. He loves science. Even as he struggles in his Earth Science class, and occasionally skips the lab, in

177 the fall of 2018 he piled an afterschool science program atop his many educational commitments.

Outside of science lab, WISH maintains a number of formal partnerships with local organizations. Ximena describes the Facebook media club as standing in for art classes. Where the school day does not currently include arts-based classes beyond music, this program aims to provide a weekly artistic outlet (from interview with

Ximena, April 3, 2019). Once a week, a group of just under a dozen students gather in a classroom at WISH and discuss the technical and artistic aspects of advertising. Every other week, the students go to the Facebook offices to work with members of their media team on public service commercials. The school also partners with several theater groups.

All of the participants joined theater programs in some capacity, with parts of these programs taking place during the school day.

In addition to these partnerships, several teachers sponsor afterschool activities and clubs. These nonformal education programs emerge at the discretion of teachers and the school administration. Within the programs, teachers commonly reify the power dynamics of the school day. Throughout the year, I spent a lot of time with Miguel in photography club. The teacher supported students as they learned about composition, lighting, and general rules of photography. Meeting twice a week, the club included lectures and direct instruction. There was also a flexibility and openness to the class that did not exist during the school day. The students spent Wednesday afternoons once or twice a month wandering the city, taking photos. The teacher cared for and encouraged open, experimental learning. At the same time, the power dynamics and pedagogical relationships from the school day remained intact. For example, the teacher chastised

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Miguel for wanting to skip photography club one day. “You made a commitment to come. This is your responsibility, like school,” the teacher explained (fieldnotes, May 8,

2019). Miguel’s teacher suggested that yes, Miguel could choose to leave, but the teacher simultaneously dictated his authority regarding responsibility and following a schedule.

In a similar vein, joining with several other schools, students at WISH could play organized baseball or basketball. But, attendance and grades determined eligibility to participate in these programs. During Felipe’s absence from school, I ran into the baseball coach. I asked him if he had heard from or seen Felipe. The team had already begun practices, but the season had not started. The coach explain that he had not heard from and, due to his attendance and grades, he would not be eligible to join the team when the season started (fieldnotes, February 15, 2019).

Other nonformal educational activities related to WISH includes fieldtrips, optional test prep on Saturdays, and political involvement in the school. None of the participants joined student government, but Leo participated in a student-led equity task force. The group worked together to find a way to make WISH a more equitable place for all students. Joining these activities required a commitment, a signed form, and often included the pre-requisite of teachers accepting students wanting to participate. One teacher told me that, though one of my participants had returned a permission slip, they would not be invited to join an upcoming fieldtrip due to lack of focus in their class

(fieldnotes, April 29, 2019). The school day was, at least on the surface, unconditionally guaranteed and open for all of WISH students. Nonformal education commonly operated with schooling outcomes acting as an access point.

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Beyond what WISH or its partners offer, participants and their families sought out nonformal educational opportunities that serve similar goals as schooling and act in conjunction with schooling. Two of the participants spent one day a week in the NYPD

Explorers Program, a program dedicated to youth learning “teamwork and leadership skills” (NYPD Youth Programs, 2019). In this afterschool program, youth engaged activities also intended to increase their discipline and focus. The sergeant leading the group often told those in the program about the importance of school. Similarly, The

Opportunity Network provided Leo with the academic and professional skills necessary in pursuing higher education. At Opportunity Network, Leo spent time in a setting closely resembling a seminar class at WISH. He learned skills such as how to write a professional email or how to complete a job or university application.

I also include jobs in this category as participants identified a number of educational practices occurring during jobs. Furthermore, they described these jobs as structured learning experiences with predetermined ends. Mateo relates many of the skills he learns at his job to the knowledge he needs in school. “If my boss tells me to count something or use some equation,” he tells me, “this makes things easy in math”

(interview, November 27, 2018). Multiple participants also report that jobs teach skills like time management, self-reliance, and teamwork. Jobs also act as an opportunity to practice English, as Leo routinely does while helping his father.

Nonformal education programs breathe a bit more openly. Each space welcomed different educational forms. These spaces did not totally dictate what kinds of education occurred, but they were fields with which participants had to grapple. Miguel became much more playful at the Explorers, but he did so despite a kind of rigidity in the

180 precinct. Leo described The Opportunity Network as a rigid place that taught him how a formal, professional environment might feel. Going to the Facebook headquarters created a sense of wonder and excitement as the participants and I wandered sleek open office layouts and stocked up on plenty of free snacks. Settling in, participants may have sat in a conference with comfortable chairs that rocked and a wonderful view of the city. While in the room, however, a Facebook employee offered procedural instructions on the next step of the process in creating an advertisement. The organization and ideas of nonformal education programs rendered them school-like, even when the spaces diverged from schooling

With less of a focus on direct outcomes or measurements of success, these programs emphasized events such as the Explorers community gatherings or a photography exhibition. Those programs that did include culminating events appeared without as direct a need to assess. The Facebook group produced a video that was then shared with other schools and groups in an end-of-year celebration. For their relative openness, nonformal education still operated through the logics of schooling. It was almost entirely still outcome-oriented and structured around a knower transmitting knowledge to learners.

Unstructured Time

Education in everyday life is not only what is left over after institutionalized learning concludes. It is not just the stuff sitting outside of school or nonformal programs.

Like Moten and Harney (2013) suggest, “intellectual life is already at work around us”

(p. 112). Educational practices valued and used in everyday life operate in ways every bit as rigorous and academic as the educational work present in school and nonformal

181 education. Participants’ everyday educational practices wound along many diverging and intersecting paths as they negotiated and played with education in the biggest sense of the word.

As an entry point, participants and I took up this aspect of the research as a loose term to explore what happened in unstructured or free time. I often framed the question in spatial or temporal terms (e.g. “what is something you enjoy learning in your free time?”). With little prompting, participants divulged learning processes, responsibilities, skills, dreams, values, and ideas. These educational practices reveal surprising, becoming identities I had not seen in school. Some of their educations are recognizable as things in which youth across the world partake. Sofia loves learning games on her phone. Matias takes on the responsibility of caring for his little brother. Ximena leads her friends and instructs them on how to get along with each other. All of the participants talked about figuring out how to move through the subway, navigate the city in general, and learn the codes of a new place after arriving to the U.S. Leo described how, when he first moved from the D.R., he was accustomed to greeting everyone on the bus with a smile, a “good day,” or asking “how are you?” His first times riding the subway in New York City, however, silent glares and confused responses taught him to keep to himself (interview,

November 1, 2018).

Other educational practices are more specific to individuals, groups, or to the

WISH community. Luna often spoke of how she studied and learned from people in the

LGBTQ community. That is not to say that issues impacting LGBTQ youth do not occur throughout the world but that Luna was, she explained, learning how to be herself.

Almost all of the participants discussed the process of learning and practicing languages,

182 but Mateo emphasized an interest in taking up Japanese. “I learn it by watching. I see another person do it. That’s one of my strategies. Or ask questions…When my friends who [are] Japanese, I’m saying, when we watch anime, I say ‘bro give me a sentence.’”

“I imagine that’s scary.”

“I’m not scared if I’m not knowing anything. I just ask questions” (interview,

November 27, 2018).

As seen in Mateo’s description, these more specific educations entail exploration and risk. They go off toward new paths. Their only curriculum is their desire to study in new directions. They enter these endeavors with no guarantee and guided by friends’ emergent and uncertain pedagogies. In another example, Felipe described wanting to learn how to play Fortnite. “We play PS4. It is a process. I learn with my best friend. I didn’t know the movement of the characters, how to control them, but I was learning every day.”

“He taught you?”

“Yes, like he told me ‘press the X to jump…throw this’ I was learning like that”

(interview, December 6, 2018).

For participants, education in everyday life is often practical. They describe something like learning the subway as an incidental education in the process of living life in New York City. As these examples indicate, though, everyday education is also about passions. Pablo and Matias love creating music, learning about new artists, sharing music with each other, and posting freestyles to YouTube.3 Sofia looks for every possible avenue toward acting. Even as she says that she feels too scared to join a youth theater,

3 I desperately wish I could share their lyrics or videos, but even portions easily link to their YouTube profiles.

183 she reads about and thinks about acting constantly. As someone raised on 1990s videogames, Mateo’s historical knowledge and critical lens shocked me. He spoke with great fluency on videogame systems released before he was born. He analyzed and offered critiques of my favorite games in ways that made me reconsider my encounters with these games. One day, we spoke for 20 minutes about the gameplay and narrative styles of the Resident Evil games.

These forms of education also intersect with social lives and shared educational experiences. Participants’ passions influenced each other as they learned together and from each other. In our first conversations, Felipe talked about a lack of interest in music in our first conversations. During our second interview, he suddenly wanted to learn about music and start rapping, something he attributed to Pablo and his other friends

(interview, May 22, 2019). Sofia joined Miguel so that he could practice photography and take headshots of her. They spent several days in the spring wandering Manhattan, discussing their dreams, and encouraging each other in acting and photography.

Given the diversity of spaces and activities, there is no structure for a pedagogy of everyday life. Pedagogies like Felipe learning a videogame moved through rote instruction. Leo’s understanding of the subway system was experiential, with knowledge of the subway system and learning social patterns entwined. A curriculum of everyday life may be somewhat more unified in that participants pursued desires without specific ends in mind. Even Mateo learning a language did not move with a plan but just questions of what a scene in anime meant. This curriculum, as guided by desires and interests, moved even more openly than a rhizomatic flow. Learning emerged in one

184 place, moved in a chaotic flow, disappeared, and reappeared in a different way and different form somewhere else.

Conclusion

This Chapter offers a view of how educational practices operate within specific spaces. Each educational space carries forces that influence and make possible certain types of educational practice. The school is certainly a large educational presence that continues to move outward. Yet, everyday life offers an education driven by other ways of exploring and practicing knowledge. In this Chapter, these educations have been presented as distinct and divided by time and space. I now turn to larger themes and see how these practices interact, move, and spill across time and space.

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Chapter VI

A BORDERLESS CURRICULUM

Introduction

For all their differences and distinctions across time, space, and practice, education moves about. It never stays put. Dynamic engagements are not divorced from space but they are also not defined by them. They move. Educations in one place drip into others. They teleport and evolve. Categories blur and merge and float away in unpredictable movements of interest and study. Within movement, educations change.

Their visibility and viability alter depending on how and where they appear as well as who is looking and in what ways. Education also does not begin at specific points (say home or school) and move in a linear fashion. Much like Stewart’s (2007) understanding of the affective subject, educations are “a collection of trajectories and circuits” (p. 59).

They pop up, spread out, blur, and reform, often in chaotic, rhizomatic ways. As these educations move, they both create and limit opportunities.

Building on the previous Chapter, this Chapter turns to disrupt the divisions and distance framing such a structural approach. Rather than education in 3 distinct places, it wanders, influenced by space but roaming a borderless land of desire and creativity. I share my three main findings from ethnographic work, framed around education and movement, the relationship between education and opportunity, and the legibility of educational practices. In concluding the Chapter, I look toward what new possibilities emerge from understandings of education as a practice of equality in everyday life. I hope that the research positively impacts the trajectories and material conditions of

186 participants’ lives, but the Chapter ultimately listens to how educational practices often obscured in research resist the confining narratives research and policy have placed on them. They spin toward new worlds of possibility, even if those possibilities remain an obscured horizon.

Entangled and Moving Educational Practices

In this section, I explore the complex relationship between educational practices and movement. With education’s relationship to space, certain forms of education are taken up in certain spaces. These formations also relate to broader conceptions of expectations and legitimacy within education. The education of certain, seemingly credible places sneaks outward to dominate the forms and types of education. Yet, for all the movement and entangling, there are still distinctions between different spaces where education takes place.

Legitimate Education Is Something to Access

There is a box. It has a certified stamp on it. The most necessary learning, values, and knowledge for life in the United States fit into this box. In 2019, any child in the U.S. can, theoretically, visit and use it. The thing is, though, when something is made into a thing to access, lines are drawn. It becomes a thing one enters and exits, even something one comes to possess. Leander et al. (2010) refer to this notion—the “classroom as container”—as the dominant discourse within educational research. “In this container- like perspective,” they assert, “space is perceived of as a location in which activity occurs” (p. 332). If education is made synonymous with schooling, that suggests that education happens within this space. It does not move outside of the school walls and is

187 obtained within them. Like the common phrases I heard throughout WISH (throughout many places in fact), education is something to “get.” I heard over and over “once I get my education,” or “back in the D.R., I got my education at this school.” With these considerations, education/school becomes a thing to hold onto, to possess. For participants, access to this box is far from guaranteed. Related to but distinct from inclusion, access is both the physical and metaphorical entrance to sites of knowledge.

With walls beyond walls and gates beyond gates, the notion of education as a thing to access played out in participants daily routines. Most obviously, access appeared in struggles to physically enter the school. During Regents testing, some participants asked to meet and chat after their tests. Waiting for Luna one afternoon, Matias found me by the school entrance. He explained that he was trying to enter the school to take a test, but that the security guards would not let him into the school.1 He said that they would only allow him into the school if I signed him in. After walking with him through the metal detector, I asked what he would have done if he I had not come to sign him in. He shrugged and said he probably would have skipped the test (fieldnotes, June 20, 2019). A few weeks earlier, I encountered a similar incident. Walking toward the school during a test prep week, I passed Pablo on the street. He said that he arrived late and his teacher would not let him into his classroom to take a practice test. When I asked what he planned to do, he shrugged, smiled, and said he planned to head home and play X-Box for the rest of the day (from fieldnotes, June 6, 2019).

The notion of physically accessing education also moves beyond the school.

Participants commonly encounter issues in enrolling, finding, and joining educational

1 The policy of not admitting students outside of designated times came from all of the schools in the building. This observation is not an attack on the security staff.

188 activities. Mateo talked often about his love for science but that he had nowhere to put that love since he missed the deadline to sign up for a science club in his community. He had taken a few classes before but did not continue the afterschool program. Sofia described not knowing how or where to go to learn about acting. The two of us searched online for classes and scholarships, but she said she was scared, had no money, and no time. When we last emailed, she said that she would just wait until college to take up and pursue acting. Whether being sent out of a class or nonformal program for behavior issues or not participating in educational activities for many other reasons, these barriers and borders popped up everywhere we went, revealing education as a thing to attend and attain and dividing a meaningful education inside specific spaces from education outside.

Beyond spatial terms, teachers and others reinforced accessing and thus coming to “get an education.” Several teachers often lectured their classes about the importance of paying attention and focusing. One time in particular, a teacher asked a class “what are you going to do if you don’t get an education here? Out there, it’s a whole different story” (fieldnotes, March 1, 2019).

That is not to say that participants have been refused any form of educational pathway. Other spaces, where access was not a factor for participants (or at least where access was more fluid), mattered to them in educational terms. These structured and contained programs, however, are educations made legible. In making them something to access, school and related programs become legitimate sites of knowledge. Pablo’s chance to verify his education through a practice Regents test vanished when he did not access the physical building or the test. Over and over, Miguel guilted himself for not

189 focusing on his education, for not being able to find a way to pay attention and get his education.

With education as a thing to access and obtain, school (and related places) becomes the site where knowledge is codified. You come in, learn the right things, stamp and certify it through proper protocols, and then become educated. In addition to casting aside other forms of education, this framing makes school a place to legitimate ideal forms of knowledge rather than a place to produce and play with ideas. As Moten and

Harney (2013) suggest about the university, this cordoned approach to access forms a kind of education that governs knowledge rather than creating education as an open- ended exploration (see, for example, Biesta, 2013). Consequently, school tames education and brings it toward a mechanism of control. In a school like WISH, constructed on the foundations of student identities, these identities must pass through the school’s filter. As Moten and Harney describe, “The student has no interests. The student’s interests must be declared, pursued, assessed, counseled, and credited” (p. 67).

All of this occurs within a bounded, legitimate place like school.

At the same time, these boxes of legibility and legitimacy do not always safeguard a pure form of education. Everyday things spilled through the school. The hallways, lunch, the stairwell, these liminal spaces simultaneously challenge and support the curriculum and teaching of classroom life. Milling about in front of the school, hanging out on the top floor, sauntering the halls. These in-between times brimmed with illegible and illegitimate educational practices. As Matias and Pablo rapped together in the hallway or Luna lingered after the bell to teach her friends about a new makeup technique, teachers shouted things like “hurry it up, there’s learning to be done” (from

190 fieldnote, January 30, 2019). In other moments, hallways became places to reinforce legitimate educations. Students sat cross-legged on floors, studying for tests or continuing debates from a class discussion.

When these moments stand in contrast to legitimate forms of education, school becomes a place for serious learning. I observed plenty of playful, fun moments between participants and teachers in WISH. Yet, access to the school came with the condition of being serious. When Pablo and Felipe played jokes, admittedly often ones disruptive to many people in the school, they often lost access to the school’s legitimate learning. One practical joke, a stink bomb released in a stairwell, resulted in a five-day suspension.

Intellectually speaking, “being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 6). Even still, both in small moments in classes, in liminal spaces in the school, and in many places outside these walls, participants practiced all kinds of frivolity that disrupts the notion of education operating through spectrums of access.

School and Outside Are Distinct Educational Spaces

If school can operate so much as a container, it stands in contrast to education taking place on the outside of school. I felt a different energy every time I walked out of the school and sensed changes in demeanor and comfort when spending time with participants in their everyday lives, but I noticed this distinction in full force the first time

I accompanied participants on a fieldtrip. I had joined for walks and afterschool clubs, but this was the first time we walked together from the school building out into the world.

We walk to [the museum]. As the kids exit the school, their shoulders relax, their voices rise. They suddenly jump on each other’s backs. Laughing, play fighting. With joy, they shout to each other across the street. [Ximena] and [Leo] wrap their arms around each other. [Mateo] pops in a headphone and starts

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singing along with his phone. It is as though everyone walked beyond the barriers of a forcefield and weights lifted from bodies. The desks and walls organizing their days stay behind as they wander the streets of [WISH’s neighborhood]. (fieldnote, February 15, 2019)

Encountering education in this way suggests that outside of school, the participants are freer, awash in openness and exploration. The outside of school carries fewer expected educational outcomes and more possibilities. During this fieldtrip and others, I asked participants what they wanted to get out of it or what they expected to get out of it. They often responded that they were not sure or suggested “we’ll see.” It was not only the activity operating in this way, but the open space, where they could roam and playfully explore together.

The same was true in nonformal educational spaces. Miguel asked me to join him for a community event sponsored by the explorers:

We spend most of Saturday together. Aside from his posture, [Miguel’s] usual militaristic demeanor has vanished. He is goofy, playing with his camera. He suggests we speak in Spanish, something we rarely do. His stoicism dissolved into a kind of exuberance. His face lifted with joy the moment we saw one another. The group asked him to act as photographer for the day. He tells me that he needs to take photos, but isn’t sure of what. I ask if anyone is guiding him and he says he is on his own. (fieldnotes, May 18, 2019)

The distinction was even more overt when walking through the city. Matias and I spent a number of afternoons walking different neighborhoods, especially near his favorite basketball court. Even though WISH had a certain vibrancy, and the city noises spilled into rooms with windows, the city oozed noise, vibrated with energy. Where this energy filtered into moments of WISH—say a car horn in the distance, as Matias and I walked, it surrounded us and we fed it. Matias talked about how walking around, on his own or with someone, helps him think of lyrics. At this point in our walks, he always began freestyling. The many spaces of everyday life pulse with charges I could never fully

192 recognize but always stirring different forms of exploration and interaction. Physically, moving outside of WISH is much more open. Intellectually, I observed participants moving among different communities of learners. Most importantly, I watched as educational lives framed through risk and failure came to life, vibrant, confident, boiling with possibility.

The outside may be freeing, but it is not free. New forms of governance and control reach out to affirm the social order. Education in everyday life, for instance, is also a riskier place. ICE can show up and detain undocumented students outside the school, but they cannot enter a school building. Fieldtrips and other organized educational events may leave the confines of schooling, and may work without predetermined objectives, but these educations are still, from the perspective of educators, seen as supplemental and less legitimate. After joining Luna and some of her classmates on a trip to the World Trade Center, where they encountered the memorial, explored city history, and spent the day learning from each other, I asked a teacher why they selected this trip. “Honestly,” they told me, “they are taking tests today and we needed these kids out of the building” (fieldnotes, March 27, 2019). That does not mean that this teacher or the administrators who determined a fieldtrip would be necessary do not value educational experiences outside of school. It is just that these moments are dominantly viewed in this way.

Furthermore, school can also be a freeing place. WISH and other schools may form around predetermined logics and goals, classrooms and hallways may be organized to confine bodies, but the event of schooling can become a place of freedom. Matias describes school as a refuge. He sees WISH as a place that protects against other

193 influences in his life (interview, December 12, 2019). Ximena also describes WISH as her first community. The majority of participants attended 4-5 schools before moving to the U.S. WISH was commonly felt to be a place of stability (interview, April 3, 2019). In this way, much like Masschelein and Simons (2013) argue, school carries the potential to be a place apart from everyday life. It is a distinct space wherein education operates as a place suspended from the demands, subjectivities, and controls of the world. Likewise, it can be a place removed from the riskiness of everyday life and a place to take up different kinds of adventurous risks. That is not to make a utopia of the school

Masschelein and Simons theorize or the way WISH acts as a refuge. Even within this potential place, though, internal politics, power relations, and thus barriers to unqualified welcoming still exist.

Assembling School

Despite a distinction in the places of education, school appears everywhere. It creeps outside. It takes shape and structure in unexpected places. It is not just educational research or discourse that frames schooling as the dominant way of doing education.

School re-forms suddenly. In casual moments, in informal chats, school suddenly appears. It sticks to places that are supposed to be outside of school. And nobody seems to flinch. During our museum fieldtrip, I found my body in the same discomfort and boredom. The curiosity and rhythm circulating through WISH found its way into the museum. After the vibrant raucous exploration of the walk to the museum, a docent found our group and began a tour. She asked us to sit in a small circle and listen. After a few minutes of lecture, she asked the group a review question about who knew what. She asked for raised hands. She told students who was right and who was wrong. We then

194 moved to the next section of the museum, with students playing and talking during the transition. The lecture and questions then repeated at the next place. The same hands from history, ESL, science, and so on were held high in the museum (from fieldnotes,

March 1, 2019).

The evening after this fieldtrip, I looked back to one of my first weeks of fieldwork. Amidst recruiting and familiarizing myself with WISH, I had simply wanted to describe the feelings, write through the affects winding throughout the school. In particular, even though I visited dozens of New York City schools each semester as a teacher educator, fieldwork marked the first time in over 5 years that I had spent significant, sustained time going through a school day.

Somewhere around 8th period, I realize I am suddenly accustomed to the old rhythms of school, moving through the hallways, knowing when students should raise hands, when they should listen, what they can get away with. The tone and texture of teachers’ voices. The way they speak to me in one way and students in another way. I am, now, reacquainted with this strange ecology of a school. Sitting at the back of [teacher’s] room, I recall my own boredom, desire to participate, engagement and lack thereof as a student. It is, now, familiar. (fieldnotes, October 31, 2018)

Despite its difference in energy, the openness of experience, and the semi-autonomy to explore, the museum and other structured places reified the rhythm and rote form of knowledge production seen throughout the school day. The relationship between school education and (speaking broadly) structured outside-of-school education was one of subservience. That is not saying anything of a museum educator, afterschool teacher, or boss’ intentions, values, or pedagogy. Rather, the way of doing school popped up in many places. Of course, there is also a great diversity in the ways of doing schooling.

Yet, in many spaces participants organized themselves in formations of sitting in a circle or in rows and learned through procedures of question and answer to test knowledge.

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These approaches looked and felt quite similar to WISH and other schools. Furthermore, these encounters suggest stable, narrow forms of knowledge to be valued and centered.

In addition to the formations of school popping up, school’s mechanisms of legitimation take shape in different spaces. For weeks, Ximena excitedly told me about the culminating event with the Facebook group. All of the schools participating in the program sent students to present their projects. After each group presented, the program coordinator read each person’s name and gave them a certificate of completion. After the event, as Ximena, Luna and I spoke, I asked if I could look at the paper they received. It was a simple note indicating that they had participated in and completed the program

(fieldnotes, May 28, 2019). It was as if their research and work in this afterschool program could not be serious if it did not come with some form of credential, even if that credential did not discernably certify anything.2 The educational project came about mostly through this formal form of “graduating” rather than the hours spent learning editing skills or researching social issues. Recognition and clapping emerged from acknowledgement of certified completion. At the same time, participants participated in nonformal spaces with school-like logics, but they did not pursue education the same way they did in school. Ximena and Luna did not care much about the paper. They valued the experiences in the group and felt proud of the product they had created.

In the class trip to Washington D.C., I found myself caught up in the same school mindset. As Ximena, Leo, Mateo, and Sofia gathered for selfies with a replica of the

Batmobile, I wondered why their interests were not on the more serious (i.e. school-like)

2 I asked the teaching artist and other people in the program about this certificate. It does not count toward college credit. As far as I can tell, it is just a paper to tell the participants they completed the afterschool program.

196 aspects of the museum. Walking through the museum, not only did the time in the museum resemble the common classroom activity of a gallery walk, with students moving from place to place scribbling notes, but the entire museum seemed to carry an aim of “students will be able to learn how awesome America is by listening to our exhibits.”

Noticing the tone of the museum, I find Leo out on the mall. I ask what he thought of it. He tells me it was fine. Sure. Feeling a kind of hidden curriculum, I ask him ‘wasn’t it all a bit ra-ra go U.S.A. or something?’ He looks confused, pauses, and says, ‘yeah, that’s the point, right?’ I just say that the whole thing read like a history textbook [something Leo and I had critiqued in previous conversations]. I mention the tiny exhibit on the Know Nothing party3 and how everything else made it sound like immigrants were and are completely welcome in the U.S. ‘I think that would be a different museum,’ he tells me. (fieldnotes, May 3, 2019)

The curriculum of the museum resembled one where visitors could explore and learn, get different things out of their visit. Ultimately, though, the museum holds certain expected learning outcomes. To problematize and challenge U.S. history itself would make U.S. history class or the museum an entirely different kind of education.

At the same time, returning to the distinct spaces of outside and inside, the energy and formations of schooling emerged in ways that seemed more autonomous, closer to self-directed learning. Perhaps, school is just the best-known template for learning.

Walking through neighborhoods, participants decided what to learn and where. Learning to play dominoes with Pablo carried a boisterousness that felt impossible inside a classroom at WISH. Yet, as people on the fringes of the game took up the role of learner, the same old roles took shape. Someone asks “who knows what happens if I do this?” A player explains to Pablo why he made a certain move (from fieldnotes, June 13, 2019).

3 A xenophobic, nativist political party from the mid-19th century

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There is a clear order of a knower, in possession of knowledge, and a learner. As

Rancière (1991) suggests, this is the machinery of schooling. “To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex” (p. 3). Teaching and learning appear in so many places, but I noticed how school stuck even to a casual game of dominoes.

It is important to reiterate that school is not a universal entity. When I suggest that school assembles in all of these different places, I refer to the fact that the schooling I have experienced as a student, moviegoer, etc. and the schooling I observed at WISH pop up in other places. This form of schooling is not the wild potential of schooling that I discuss in the following Chapter. It is not even a singular entity unto itself. As previously mentioned, I observed many playful and subversive moments in WISH that present the school as a creative experiment in education. Yet, the common educational dynamic to which Rancière refers—that of knower/master explicator and ignorant, willing learning— dominates educational formations. Whether in a museum, on the street, or in a classroom,

I observed education working to control knowledge. This prominent way of doing education reflects a notion of placing education under a banner of “management and control” (Agamben, 2013, p. 5). Deleuze proposes societies of control as an extension of

Foucault’s disciplinary society, “in which the institutional regulation of individual and social life proceeded in ways that were continuous and unbounded” (as cited in Crary,

2013, p. 71). The logics, shapes, and general ways of doing school reach out and extend beyond the school walls. They encroach on nonformal educational spaces and everyday life. That is not to say that education does not happen in these places. Instead, I suggest

198 here that watching school assemble in so many places suggests a predetermined, knowledge-controlling form of education permeates and burrows into how we understand schooling.

Borderless Constellations of Learning

School moves. Places of learning mark themselves with distinction; some open and expressive, others asking for calm reflection. Yet, education is not static. It does not know borders. School, the street, the museum, home, the park, la cancha, the recording studio. These are not isolated worlds but pulsing networks influencing and influenced by participants’ education. Education travels across time. It follows, sometimes chases. At times it lays dormant, hidden until a surprising moment and in a surprising place. What is practiced at one time and place takes on a new shape, but learning continues elsewhere.

Knowledge is on the move. Leo learned English from his first days in WISH. He went home and put on Netflix. It taught him a new form of English. He stepped foot on the subway, not knowing the cultural codes of public transit in New York City, and started speaking the kind of English he learned from Netflix, specifically the show Wild

N Out. Luckily, it was only strange looks from older riders indicating to him that something was off. The lessons of the subway and of different ways of speaking. He practiced English with friends and continued riding the subway every day. He started noticing not only that the subway is a place to keep your head down and not talk at all, but the English you know at school is different from the English you practice with friends is different from the English you hear on various tv shows. And yet, as he keeps studying, it changes again. He starts using language much closer to what he learned at home in

199 playful essays in ELA classes. He infuses Spanglish into political speeches he shares with the school (from fieldnotes and interview, November 1, 2018).

Mateo learned teamwork at school, working on a history project. It taught him to compromise, play to his strengths, and work things out. This knowledge pays off when his boss reminds him that teamwork is one of the most important things to know at his job. Even if there are moments where he spaces out and burns his hand on the fryer, he comes to understand how his work fits into the larger project of working together. It makes the job more enjoyable. Shifts are easier. He figures out how to support new employees or confront colleagues about spending too much time at the register rather than helping to prep in the back. He is not sure how he missed it, but this same skill, teamwork, is essential to playing basketball (from interview, May 2, 2019).

School subjects pop up, unexpectedly, with force and connection in everyday life.

Felipe engaged in little of history class beyond his love of watching videos and being able to hang out with friends in the back of the room. One day, while playing Fortnite with a friend, he saw a “whole something of Pyramids” in the game. He did not know why, he said he could not explain it, but he connected to it. Something struck him and stuck with him. It led to discoveries, to readings, to more focus throughout the following history unit. Felipe wanted to learn everything possible about pyramids. He shared facts and ideas about them and their uses in different civilizations (interview, December 6,

2018).

The movement of education from one place to another is both nonlinear and nonhierarchical. Though Felipe’s interest in pyramids spurred school learning, such educational endeavors do not prop up school as the legitimate and superior site of

200 education. His inquiries cross through schooling. They move outward from his everyday life. Yet, there is no ultimate place or purpose for this interest. Eventually, Felipe told me that, while he still played Fortnite, his interest in pyramids and his desire to even attend history class had vanished. Ximena was desperate for formal art classes to pop up at

WISH, but the school has not had an art teacher for years. Yet, she finds her art education in school anyway, taking small inspirations from looking at computer models of the volcanoes in science class or critiquing the painting so many history teachers use to depict westward expansion (Gast, 1872). These moments find their way into her work with found art.

Such decentralized movements might evoke rhizomes, the image of thought of non-hierarchical and nonlinear knowledge filled with entries and pathways making up multiplicities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The educations we explored reflect some of these ideas as they wind, entangle, burst, and fizzle out. During analysis, I found myself stuck within the rhizome, not staring down at a tangled mess, but still bound up in these movements. At times, there was a spark, something to map. A pyramid stirs learning.

Netflix prompts language practice. Other times, they jumped like an electron, teleporting unpredictably. Educations flowed like the magical novel Exit West (Hamid, 2017), where doors in a closet in Greece open onto a courtyard in London. Walking and talking about or doing education, without a line from one point to another, we found ourselves somewhere else. Matias had given up on practicing English with me. For weeks, we spoke only in Spanish or Spanglish. Suddenly, in the middle of a walk, he breaks into a bilingual rap (fieldnotes, March 11, 2019). There may also be connections such as

Miguel’s interest in photography connecting to his learning experiences while helping his

201 uncle on a documentary in the D.R. But, education is chaotic, borderless, and without definite form, like trying to make a curriculum of fog.

The point here is that pieces of knowledge, academic interests, skills, and passions emerge in different places and both translate and jump from place to place. They start somewhere or nowhere. Once they emerge, they vibrate about erratically. They do not often prop up school learning and commonly stand indifferent to it. Rather than traveling from school teaching language to homework supporting it to independent practice solidifying it, educations move anarchically. They start anywhere, say Matias joining a friend for a walk and ending up at a basketball court. Then, they pop up in school such as Matias skipping class to go learn a new move on the courts on the top floor of the school. That crossover moves to a new court. The foul shot is pantomimed and rehearsed on the street. These educations vanish for months and reappear in different forms, say Pablo suddenly wanting to focus on the violin in music class. He constantly skips, messes around at the back of the room. Then, inspired by his own music, shifts to want to focus on learning the simple rhythms of violin (from fieldnotes, November 19,

2018).

These educations serve no master beyond desire. When I ask what they want to get out of certain pursuits, the participants shrug their shoulders or respond that they are not sure. These moving practices are not about graduating. They are not about mastering a craft or reaching some defined outcome. Of course, Luna wants to improve her skills in putting on makeup, but there is no discernable endgame. The most common refrain is just to be in it, to do it without really thinking about where it leads. To be in the act of studying alone or with others.

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That is not to say “anything is possible!” in or through education. “Everything essential—where [they] go to school, the kind of job [they] can get, where [they] can live—is dictated by the color line [or immigration status]” (Hartman, 2019, p. 19). What it does mean is that the educational practices participants engage work through their everyday life. They seep like fog through everything they do. They stick like grains of sand, disruptive and sometimes impossible to get rid of. Education is not stopping or starting. It is always there, on the move.

Education and Opportunity

The common conception of education and opportunity as intrinsically linked was visible, at least to an extent. School can be an opportunity. Specifically, the discourse of education and opportunity as bound up with immigrant identities moved through WISH and beyond. To quote the Internationals Network, a group of schools specifically designed for newcomer students

Since the early 1600s when the first Europeans began settling New Amsterdam, there has been a continual arrival of immigrants from all continents seeking a new life and opportunity on these shores. Today, as a society, we recognize that quality public education opens the door to vast opportunities, and we place great value on educational attainment. (Internationals Network for Public Schools, 2019b)

But, opportunity for what? For whom? With what conditions? School is certainly not the only educational opportunity. In our time together, participants and I often spoke of opportunity as it relates to education. They felt a complex relationship among their different educational practices and various opportunities. Different places and different activities opened pathways to all sorts of opportunities.

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School As One Educational Opportunity Among Others

Participants affirm the narrative that hope and possibility can embed in schooling.

School itself is an opportunity to study, to belong, and to open and pursue new pathways.

Speaking generally on her thoughts on education, Sofía suggests that “some people left their country to find a better education for their kids. So, opportunities can give more opportunities” (interview, December 20, 2018). Despite his thorough critiques of the school, Leo understands WISH as a place to fight for his vision of justice and a place that can give him the opportunity to go further in life. Leo sees WISH as part of his path to college, as a place that will forge and support his career and future in general. Yet, WISH is not the only place where he pursues these specific opportunities. He attends an afterschool program literally called the Opportunity Network. It supports school and the opportunities school provides but also extends beyond the school itself. Leo describes how through learning to create a resume or send a professional email, this place creates further opportunities for academic and professional life (from interview, April 12, 2019).

Life in New York is also seen as an opportunity. “When people illegal here. And they want a better life. Someone legal, they don’t appreciate the opportunity.” (Matias, interview, March 11, 2019). For Matias, this opportunity entwined with education, but it did not necessarily mean the opportunity to take advantage of school. Matias talked often about the opportunity to roam the city, to wander to a basketball court and learn new moves with strangers. This opportunity often came with risks (“bad influences” in

Matias’ words), but Matias saw opportunity to learn and create and play sticking to every place he traveled. Mateo, likewise, saw educational opportunity at work and in friends. It was there that he could learn language or make money that gave his family a better life.

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He also understood school as a site of opportunity to graduate and hopefully attend college, but those opportunities seemed distant and abstract, where he saw the opportunities presented by work as present in his everyday life (from fieldnotes, January

30, 2019).

Ximena talked about education and opportunity in a broader sense, seeing it as a way to fight back. “Education is an opportunity that is given to you. It gives you the choice of no longer being ignorant” (interview, November 15, 2018). As with Mateo, she talked about school as a place often brimming with opportunity. At the same time, she most often talked about opportunity and education as something only vaguely related to school. “School helps,” she explained, “but there are some things, it’s more your own education. There are some things that school don’t help you with. I’ve seen that a lot with my sister” (interview, April 3, 2019). Her family gave her the opportunity to “be a responsible grown up.” In learning responsibility and figuring out how to take care of others, much like her artwork with found objects, Ximena takes what is given to her and figures out the possibilities. She views translating bills or shopping for her mom as an essential opportunity to becoming a strong, fearless person.

These kinds of opportunities can also be found inside of school. When Luna and I began working together, she asked me over and over to find her in math class. Almost every week, I went to math, waited for her, and left after about 15 minutes. After about a month, when Luna and I finally figured out the miscommunication, I realized she had asked me to come when she meets with the school counselor. She talked about these meetings generally as one place she had the opportunity to explore and share her gender identity. Here, she learned how to share more about her identity with her mother and

205 consider how to respond (fieldnotes, March 6, 2019). School was the opportunity to explore and express herself in ways that home life did not allow.

School as Disruptive of Opportunity

At times, the opportunity to be successful or included in one educational place came into conflict with the opportunities of other places. When Felipe returned to WISH after his long absence, we chatted after school one day. He explained that opportunities for play and hanging out were readily available during the school day. The kinds of things he wanted to learn were not in school. In fact, spending time in school prevented him from these pursuits. Additionally, school came to be a place not identified with opportunity as much as failure. When he came to school, teachers yelled at him and reminded him that he needed to work harder to learn English or focus in history class.

Meanwhile, outside of school Felipe said he practiced all kinds of things, used all kind of knowledge, and yet hardly ever thought about feeling like a failure (fieldnotes, June 3,

2019). For Felipe, as with many participants, time in school often came to act as anything but a place of opportunity. He returned partially out of expectation and partially from a recognition that future opportunities hinged on the credentials school could offer.

Mateo found opportunity in school but constantly struggled with the balance of school and work. He described both as opportunities, but often opportunities standing against one another. If he put in more hours, he could learn the skills and gain the seniority to make more money. Additionally, he often spoke of the “Archway to

Opportunity” program, where his job offers tuition assistance in college. To take advantage of the program, he would have to maintain a certain number of hours at work and possibly take on a manager role. As previously discussed, though, the more time he

206 spent at work, the more difficult school became. He never resolved this tension, taking partial advantage of both opportunities and stuck between the two.

In the present, school could be the opportunity of rest and safety for Matias but also disrupt the opportunity to learn what he most enjoyed and pursue the knowledge he most valued. Similarly, Ximena appreciated the social aspects of schooling. She loved meeting friends and learning with them on group projects. At the same time, she constantly noticed school stifling the opportunity to learn with others and to develop her social relationships. The everyday demands of schooling forced her toward rushing from class to class and hurrying home at the end of the day rather than speaking with friends.

Equality/Opportunity/Education

Writing on equality, opportunity, and education deeply entwines these concepts.

A common conception of this relationship can be seen in the infamous Coleman Report

(1968), aptly titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” In this framing, education is inherently an opportunity. Using this opportunity may be hindered by any number of social factors. If used properly, though, or equitably distributed, youth can work toward becoming more equal. Education can make things more equal. Participants reinforced this notion. Miguel often told me “I have to have more focus” and “there is a lot of complaints that I am not using this opportunity [of school]” (fieldnotes, April 30, 2019).

In our first interview, I asked participants what education meant to them, how they understood it. Almost everyone identified education as a kind of pathway to becoming more equal. The problems were the same old but very real stories. Even as participants faced racism, poverty, and many forms of social exclusion, WISH offered an opportunity for a different kind of life, one in which participants could become equal. Leo, for

207 instance, pointed out how his older sibling graduated WISH and moved onto college with a full scholarship.4 Leo’s sibling was not sure of a career, but he explained that college offered them a different status and opportunities (from fieldnotes, March 30, 2019).

Yet, participants did not always experience school as an opportunity to become equal. Even the affirmative environment in WISH can be oppressive. Pablo complained about how he could wear a flag for the school’s Cultural Heritage Day, but he had to act a certain way, be a certain way in school. Similarly, Felipe storming out of the theater rehearsal was intended as a play about how immigrants use opportunities, expressed through the students’ interpretation. It instead ended in Felipe stomping out of the school and not returning for weeks. This is not some error in the ways of the school, fixable with adjustments. It is also not simply participants, for whatever reason, not taking advantage of opportunity. This framing of equality through education burrows into the roots of schooling in the U.S.

In this institutional conception, equality is achieved, offered to those who pass through schooling to become educated subjects. The educated person, the thinking goes, is one who comports themselves, who shows that they are equal through how they act and what they do in legitimate sites of learning. As Matias pointed out, education is about how you act, how you show respect, behave, and be a good person (as in, ser bien educado). From this perspective, the educated person is the one who uses the opportunity of school to become an equal person. To do this, participants had to figure out how to do school as much as they had to figure out the direct school curriculum. At times, that meant learning when to adapt to the structures of schooling, like Miguel arriving on time

4 Emailing with Leo recently, he shared that he too has been offered a scholarship to attend a college in the U.S.

208 or Felipe not fighting with the teaching artist. (Of course, there was plenty of subversion.

The doing of school was always about traversing a tension between things like when to skip class and still receive attendance credit). Other times, that meant working within the credentialing structures of school. Mateo arrived in New York without the schooling experience to enter the same grade as other people his age. He talked about how he did not know as much as his peers, suggesting he was not yet equal to them. Instead, he needed to start back in the 9th grade and work up to that equality (saying “I know as much” and “I know equal things,” in interview, November 27, 2018).

Education in everyday life can also show a perception of inequality. It can be an opportunity to teach that one is supposed to be less than. The spark for experiments in equality, which I explore in the sections below, started when Matias described people on the subway seeing him as someone not equal, someone who does not know things. He wished he could show people that he is a person who knows things and is a good person, full of potential (from interview, March 11, 2019). From this initial perspective, Matias would have to work toward being seen differently by using school. Overall, this framing of equality, education, and opportunity suggests that immigrant youth like the participants in this study are in need of the school’s help. School what is needed to become an educated, and thus equal, person. As I mentioned in the introduction, I do not want to confuse my framing with a critique of school. I am about to offer a different understanding of these concepts, but that should not be read as a dismissal of the possibilities of schooling.

From another perspective, one explored in the theoretical framework, equality is not the product of leveraging opportunity. It is not a chance handed out to youth willing

209 to take what is given. Equality is not generated through educational trajectory. It is already there, bubbling in participants’ lives at all times. Of course, I entered this project with this Rancièrian perspective. The more time we spent together, however, and the more I gently pushed back on the way they spoke about their educational lives, the more education as a practice of equality came to be seen as something they were already doing.

Moreover, I watched participants demonstrating such equality to the world around them.

Even where opportunity was not given, participants revealed equality. Leo said that “you have to play the game if you want to win, but I don’t want to play. The game’s not fair…I should get these things because I’m a human” (interview, April 12, 2019). A few days after our interview, Matias showed me a rap video he made:

He stands in the street, lyrics pouring out, loud, unabashed, intricate, in Spanish, about [a narco].5 All the things I’ve overheard teachers say, concerns they’ve shared about his education. His own feelings about how people see him. And yet there he is, fierce, engaging in an intellectual activity. Emancipated from what any teacher in [WISH] could teach him. (fieldnotes, April 3, 2019)

The lives of experiences of participants are not synonymous with others marked on the margins, but these ideas echo Hartman’s (2019) writing in Wayward Lives,

Beautiful Experiments. Their education and equality “were never meant to survive, and yet we [the participants] are still here” (Hartman, 2019, p. 37). Even if participants have not succeeded through the opportunity school aims to provide them, even if the world says you are not equal, they refuse. Through the acts described in the sections below, they show that they are always already equal and express that equality every day.

5 The video has enough views that I think names might identify Matias to use names here.

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Undocumented Educations6

Even as knowledge and skills are not stuck in one place or another, the legitimacy of school knowledge and the notions of desirable knowledge disturb participants’ educational practices. Unlike common framings, however, participants did not identify with the repressive norms of certain epistemologies. They did not feel that their knowledge was subjugated or their identities suppressed. Instead, in the face of bureaucratic and institutional demands, their educational practices largely move through

“legitimate” educational spaces undocumented.

Subjugated Knowledge

Starting this project, I assumed I would find, even in a culturally affirmative newcomer school, subjugated knowledge. Foucault (1980) describes subjugated knowledge as

a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges…and which involve what I would call a popular knowledge…though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but is on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force solely to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it — that it is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work. (p. 82)

Elsewhere, Foucault (1978b) continues that legitimated forms of knowledge cast out these other forms. “It would be driven out, denied, and reduced to silence. Not only did it

6 I am not referring to documentation status here, though I am aware that using this loaded term links with discussions of documentation status.

211 not exist, it had no right to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least manifestation—whether in acts or in words” (p. 4). The specific, hegemonic forms of knowledge and ways of being certified and seen in institutional spaces like school stand in direct contrast to forms of knowledge (and, relatedly, ways of being) that resist their colonizing power.

Subjugated knowledge also depends on someone or something doing the subjugating. In the literature review, I pointed out that the kind of educational practices I encountered have been under-explored in the literature. Participants’ educations do not often seriously count in educational research, at least unless they serve the aims of schooling. Within an ethnographic project, subjugated knowledges become visible through schooling practices. At the same time, I am not attacking teacher actions or curricular choices. There is something deeply structural about which discourses count as

(serious, rigorous, intellectual…) education and what kinds of practices come to be silenced.

I did in fact observe many instances when, even as teachers expressed and curricula bent toward a funds of knowledge-type approach, participants’ knowledges were subjugated within school and in everyday life. Every fall, WISH holds a cultural pride day. Pablo arrived wearing a Dominican flag. Sofia painted the flag’s colors on her cheeks. Students moved through the hallway singing bachata. An overt contradiction arose when students were told to sit down and focus in their U.S. history class. In fact, even as participants talked about their racial identities and connections to their countries of birth, their understanding of these places or their importance in their lives never came up as a topic in school.

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Meanwhile, everyday life often centered what Pablo called Dominican “knowing of things.” He talked about how important it was to learn how to play dominoes and how he studied little facts and about life in general while playing. Walking down a street with participants who played, domino games were always available to watch or, occasionally, to join. Leo desired the inclusion of knowledge of Dominican life within a more traditional curriculum, asking for a critical investigation of the Trujillo dictatorship in school. That is not to say that “Dominican knowledge” was the prevailing, dominant form of knowledge in everyday life and it was suppressed in school. Everyone in the studied population deeply connected their sense of knowing to places and Latinx identities. But, there were always many types of knowledge present and many ways of being disqualified in school. In classrooms, I consistently observed instances of knowledges participants individually value becoming subjugated. As a brief example,

Matias’ understanding of playfulness and subversion was almost always disciplined, with teachers telling him to “save it for later.”

Culturally Relevant Teaching to Demands

The culturally relevant teaching that aimed to build on students’ funds of knowledge most often responded to their positions as immigrants. Text selections, details in history class, and even math word problems used immigrant narratives as a way of showing students’ knowledge as relevant and serious. Yet, each time these topics emerged, they did so in service of the demands of school. For instance, participants in one ESL class read a Sandra Cisneros poem about immigration. After reading the poem and dealing with some vocabulary and literal meaning, students were asked to identify

213 the main idea of the poem. In a cheesy response early in my fieldwork, I asked myself

“what might be the main idea of these kids’ lives?” (fieldnotes, September 24, 2018).

In another class, students read a text on the “immigrant story.” Once more, as soon as they finished the text, the knowledge of the immigrant story was turned to focus on developing reading skills. Later, I asked Matias what he thought. He told me that the story was fine. I asked if he connected with it at all, if he learned anything, or if he took away any lessons. “No,” he said. “I didn’t really get anything [out] of it at all”

(fieldnotes, October 11, 2018). This curriculum treated cultural relevance as something stable, unproblematized and unquestioned. The figure of the immigrant and the immigrant story takes shape as imagined and essentialized subjects and their narratives.

The same device appeared in many classes. Teachers applied a curriculum that used

“immigrant knowledge” as a way to reinforce the demands of schooling. Their knowledge proved useful only insofar as it could serve the sufficient knowledge atop the hierarchy.

To an extent, there were times when knowledges were, as Foucault describes, silenced or disqualified. Yet, in seeing this strange mix of taking up a kind of presumed form of student knowledge and putting it in service of a predetermined, institutional knowledge (i.e. that of school), it appeared that knowledges were not being subjugated.

Additionally, the personalities, interests, and values of participants—Pablo and Matias rapping in class, for instance—appeared in a serious way in school as well as outside of it. It was here that I began considering another understanding of how knowledge operates in different spaces for participants.

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Educations, Undocumented

As a quick caveat to this section, I point to my use of the term education rather than knowledge. This shift does not suggest that I am conflating education with the way of describing knowledge in the previous sections. The kinds of things undocumented in this research certainly include knowledge. They also include creatively using and playing with knowledge and responding to or resisting different ways of knowing and being.

Thus, this section engages notions of subjugated knowledge while using the term education.

To say that knowledge was subjugated at WISH ignores visible moments of knowledge practice and how teachers inquired into and welcomed this knowledge in certain ways. Teachers recognized and affirmed much of their students’ lives that fell beyond and did not serve the school curriculum. Their educational practices were seen.

Teachers and peers affirmed their value. Even in essentializing and teaching to demand, teachers navigated and invited in small moments of different kinds of educational practices. Alternatively, students themselves made a pathway for these educations, whether subversively or through actively asserting their own agency. The issue was always how these educational practices lingered. They were never cast out but were also never fully welcomed. They hung in the classroom as if they belonged but something about the space limited that belonging. Rather than oppressed or subjugated, these educations remained present but undocumented.

Participants and I talked about documentation status in a number of ways.7 Some viewed documentation status as an elite privilege too often taken for granted in the Latinx

7 Both resisting the categorizing, bordered practice of labels and taking extra care to not identify participants in terms of documentation status, I have generalized my ethnographic notes in this section.

215 community as well as in the U.S. in general. Many participants talked about the struggle that all students at WISH face, seeing everyone in the school as placed at-risk of detention based on their race and language. During one of our few focus groups, participants also disrupted the focus on immigration status, saying “sure, like the papers and citizenship, it matters. But we all just here together” (fieldnotes, March 25, 2019).

Far from a universalizing narrative, I read this statement as a collectivist understanding of how students responded to their treatment in school and elsewhere. We also spoke of how they understood documentation status in general. With some aspects of documentation status, participants discarded the idea. They spoke of how arbitrary citizenship can be, pointing in particular to a contrast between Puerto Rico and the D.R. Simultaneously, they described very real effects. One participant stated, “I can just be sent back to D.R. without any notice or anything, and with no way to get back or nothing” (fieldnotes, May

24, 2019). Essentially, living undocumented meant a constant sense of uncertainty and in- betweenness. It also generated a sense of resistance and defiance, where walking to spend time with friends on the weekend essentially showed a willingness to push against how people were supposed to live a hidden life.

Scholarship theorizes issues such as legality and citizenship in a number of ways.

There is a general call in research to generate “nuanced theories about undocumented life” (Gonzales, as cited in Aguilar, 2019, p. 153). de Genova (2002) makes a similar call to theorize the status of legality and understand it not only as a legal problem but an epistemological and political one. Furthermore, these concepts are “both material and ideological,” acting through racial and linguistic discourse and practice (Negrón-

Gonzales, 2013, p. 1286). Theorizing “undocumented-ness” always asks for a

216 formulation of “the numerous daily practices undertaken by undocumented young people which require them to bridge the schism between belonging in a place they do not have a legal right to” (Negrón-Gonzales, p. 1286). Aguilar offers tenets of what he calls

UndocuCrit. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, UndocuCrit provokes the possibilities of listening to undocumented peoples’ lives in order to validate and take them seriously, though recognizing that these themes are in no way homogenous. Extending these ideas, I listen to participants understanding of their own educational lives to consider ways of knowing and being that take shape and are not necessarily supposed to be in educational spaces; and explore the liminality and riskiness of these educations.

In educational terms, this relationship to documentation popped up throughout the school day. Though literal documentation status remained an ever-present theme, I present this idea as a way to understand the treatment of participants’ educational practices in different spaces. Of course, invoking this political term shares much with literal documentation status, but I use it here specifically to explore how participant knowledge was not subjugated—where a kind of active dismissal or silencing occurs— but undocumented. Undocumented educations represent ideas, intellectual work, or becoming values that become partially visible but remain undervalued, vulnerable to subjugation, not taken up, or simply left discarded. They are welcomed, but never fully formed, always at risk of disappearing into the background of a “legitimate” curriculum or vanishing completely.

Of the many instances of undocumented educations, I most commonly noticed participants interests finding a way into school in small moments. In a momentary lull in class, a teacher asked Pablo and Matias to rap. During a career day celebration, teachers

217 tasked Miguel with taking photos. Walking by Luna, a teacher inquired into her makeup kit and how she liked using it. In a similar moment, Ximena drew in the margins of her notebook and the teacher talked about how they loved her drawing.

Just as these educational interests emerged, classes snapped back in another direction. After these brief comments, teachers returned to the lesson. Luna was asked to put her makeup kit away. Ximena returned to notetaking. Having cancelled art classes, the school did not have any specific art classes in which she could develop her artwork.

In another class, Matias was told he could share a little rap in the last couple of minutes of class, but the bell rang before he could do so. Once seen, teachers acknowledged

Sofia’s interest in acting and invited her to two theater-based fieldtrips. Yet, she never found an opportunity to fully express this interest, eventually deciding to just wait until college to pursue it.

Curricular identities and values also became undocumented. In the course of our conversations about his educational values, Matias told me several times that he both wants to learn to develop and show that he is a caring person. When I asked if he thinks his teachers see this, he said of course they do. I then asked where he can practice that, caring for others, in the course of the school day. After thinking for a moment, he said he did not know. Thinking about this for the next few days of fieldwork, I noticed moments where Matias acted kind or helped people, but he did not have many openings to do so.

After a chat with Felipe one afternoon, a teacher caught up with me to tell me that if Felipe was part of the study, I absolutely had to ask him about his poetry. We had worked together in many settings and he had never mentioned anything about poetry.

When I next saw him, I asked Felipe about this. He shrugged and said that he had been

218 given a writing assignment last year, wrote a poem, but had not received a similar assignment since. There was no reason to continue writing if it were not assigned.

Luna never fully defined what she meant, but she talked about her fabulousness, her presenting of herself as someone who is fabulous. As with the other examples, I asked where she could learn fabulousness or do fabulousness. She said that there were times, but most of the school day was about learning school subjects. Ultimately, the school always returned to an authoritative and stable form of knowledge. Once more, however, that does not mean subjugation took hold. The school, as Leo suggested, valued student knowledges. Teachers demonstrated clear interest. “And then time just runs out, like they don’t have the time or the people to do it” (interview, August 14, 2019). In a setting where legibility and borders reign, those unqualified things come to take up a liminal space.

The aspect of these examples that renders them undocumented is not a teacher’s missed opportunity or the need to offer these moments with more rigor and determined objectives. They enter educational spaces already with the risk of being left aside. The perceived needs to push immigrant youth toward specifically defined images of success and inclusion in a system of dominant knowledge does not always suppress other forms of knowing and being, but it does leave them teetering for moments when there is time or when they might be applicable to other lessons.

Undocumented educations also came from participants. It was not just teachers, administrators, or curriculum leaving these educational practices to liminal spaces. They are educational practices that assert their own kind of value but actively refuse external legitimacy. These practices are essentially a refusal of the “gift” of inclusion, something

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Rubio and Almendariz (2019) write about in terms of undocumented youth taking up the subjectivity as an agentive form of resistance. Pablo and Matias often snuck up to the gym to play basketball and rap with each other. After doing this, I noticed a teacher asking them how what they were doing elsewhere would benefit them, what they would be able to show for it afterward, and how that might contribute to their grades. They shrugged and moved on with their days. Here, as with many times, participants asserted educational practices that they knew would not fit into schooling success or inclusion.

They did them anyway. In ethnographically documenting such educational practices, I aim to listen to refusal rather than legitimate, at least in ways that reinforces existing orders.

In everyday life, educational practices similarly became undocumented. One could argue that educational practices simply have a time and a place. Given funding constraints, arts might simply need to occur outside of school. Luna might need to learn about and practice using makeup anywhere but during history class. Free of authoritative knowers, youth may be able to openly pursue an everyday form of education that is completely documented. After all, even as the school only opened infrequent time for

Miguel to take photos, we wandered around parks several afternoons as he researched and practiced photography. Yet, these educational practices still became vulnerable in the face of working, preparing for tests, and meeting the general demands of expectations.

Without a form of legitimacy to guarantee their value, the perceived “frivolousness” of certain educational practices always felt like they might slowly evaporate. Leo and I delayed plans for months to take a walk around a park. He talked about watching different groups of people do cookouts and seeing people moving through the park as the

220 deepest education he experienced in New York. He said it taught him about different cultures and a sense of connection to nature. We spent time together in more formal spaces, but he always worried about school, work, and preparing for college. Mateo and I similarly started an intellectual project, moving from conversations about video games to a deeper critical engagement that included everything from learning processes of different genres to a cultural analysis of games like Resident Evil. As his work schedule intensified and Regents took hold, Mateo stepped back. When we walked to his work, he wanted to focus more and more on whether or not he would have to go to summer school and what kinds of programs he might do over the summer.

In another vein, everyday life also included normative values rendering other forms of education undocumented. When Luna came out to her mother, her mother’s initial reaction was to silence any further research or thinking about expressing her gender identity. As Luna continued negotiating the situation, her family allowed some forms of inquiry, but her position as a transgender girl in general, and her education about being transgender specifically, lingered in a kind of tenuous space.

What, then, happens to those undocumented educations? Do they remain in liminal spaces? Does a culturally responsive school legitimate the desirable ones? Are there educational practices that disappear? Undocumented educations do not vanish or dry out. They find routes toward understanding, creating, expression. They vanish and emerge where least expected. At times, they are not in school, at times they are. They suddenly and forcefully emerge with or without authorization to do so.

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Conclusion

This project as a whole left much undocumented. There were plenty of moments that my own position or inexperience as a researcher silenced. Even as participants identified certain educational practices as central to their lives, the appropriateness of me participating in these aspects left them uncertainly shared, at least within this study.

Going through the process of documentation, I also pursued ways to keep legibility from turning into another logic of domination. For all its precariousness, undocumented educations opened spaces to play against and on the margins of set structures.

Throughout the year I spent with these 9 people, I found equality in many different spaces. We explored connections that seemed distant or situated as educational practices popped up in all kinds of ways in all kinds of places. Education sometimes moved chaotically and sometimes moved in predictable fashions through the forcefield of legitimacy. School, everyday life, opportunity, and equality share in strange relations. As

I move to the final Chapter of this work, I take a closer at those educational practices that resist conforming to categorizations and see what new possibilities for education emerge from exploring these educations. I also do something that I did not imagine when I began this project: go back to school.

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Chapter VII

SCHOOL AS A WILD DAYDREAM

Introduction

In the last days of fieldwork, Matias and I walked through Manhattan on a sweltering afternoon. We reminisced about our time together. He talked about his new job at McDonald’s and we speculated on the future. I asked a few questions regarding things at school. He had passed some of the state tests and failed others. He suggested that he would return to WISH in the fall, finish his outstanding requirements, graduate, and go play basketball at a local community college. Texting during the fall, he told me that he had left school without graduating. He wanted to take some time to make some money and focus on making music. As we walked, we spent a while chatting about how his summer would look. He seemed content—excited for time with friends and more independence—but I felt a bubbling nostalgia passing between us. As we were about to say goodbye, we both lingered. Matias planned to head to play basketball, and I asked him if he wanted me to walk with him.

We walk a few blocks to the [basketball] court. He sees some people he knows and it’s time to say goodbye. I reach out my hand and he slaps it, comes in for a quick hug. He looks over his shoulder and waves as he walks onto the court. I see him say a few words to someone he knows and lines up. Everyone is shooting for teams. He waits his turn and I watch him take a shot, curious if the hype he’s put around his game stands up to how he looks while playing. His form looks good but the shot clangs off the rim. He gets back in line with the group of kids. A few more arrive. It’s a pretty diverse group of teenagers from all over the city. I look down for a moment and when I look up, Matias has faded into the crowd. I start to walk away and look back but don’t see him. (fieldnotes, August 8, 2019)

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Beginning this Chapter with an ethnographic anecdote from the very end of fieldwork, I find myself stuck on a few questions. Going back to Mangual Figueroa’s

(2014) writing about leaving the field, where she poses questions about researchers’ responsibilities to the communities in which they work and the people with whom they work, I wonder about the conclusion of this project. In the months since finishing fieldwork, participants and I have corresponded with some regularity. I have supported some navigating the college application process. Some folks have shared updates on their school year and their plans for the future. I have lost contact with a couple of the participants. Overall, what has changed? For Matias, Luna, Leo, Mateo, Pablo, Ximena,

Sofia, Miguel, and Felipe, much has changed. I have changed. WISH has changed. But, what does this project have to do with any of that?

From the outset, I never wanted to make this dissertation about creating a new school model or identifying best practices for immigrant youth. Whenever I encountered moments of ethnographic refusal—where participants and/or I actively decided to not include educational practices in this project—we embraced this tension. I see refusal as part of my responsibility here. Our relationships were not bound by the research project and the project itself never sought totalizing or causal ends. At the same time, I also want to honor the commitment sticking to the roots of this project: Opening new ways of thinking about and understanding education for immigrant youth whose educational lives have been made precarious or “at-risk” within educational research. How, then, can I both embrace refusal and not have Matias fade into a crowd of kids? Perhaps, the question is more about how to provoke these new possibilities, creating new forms of legibility, without generating new logics. It is about listening to the specific participants

224 so deeply centered in this project to both honor them and create new understandings of education for any of the kids with whom Matias was hanging out, without conditions, without qualifications, and yet with history and culture. So here at the end, I find myself doing the exact thing I wanted to avoid: thinking about a better model of school.

The previous Chapters used historical and ethnographic methods to explore how

WISH emerged and navigated the New York City educational landscape as it tries to survive and provide culturally and linguistically affirmative education for newcomer youth. Additionally, these Chapters interrogated the spaces and places of education, looking at the complex interaction of legitimate and undocumented forms of knowledge and seeing how they move across time and space. This dissertation concludes with some open-ended ideas based on historical and anthropological research. Informed by the findings in previous Chapters, and particularly supported by further ethnographic data, I take up a more philosophical approach to offer two ideas for educations that are anti- colonial, anti-racist, and aim to remake the possibilities of education. These ideas closely relate to the previous Chapter’s findings but offer implications and new possibilities rather than descriptive analyses. They answer the eternal question waiting at the end of research: “so what?”. What new possibilities emerge from this work? What changes because of this project? This Chapter takes these lessons and speaks back to the idea of schooling, presenting a philosophical challenge for what a collective, anarchic school of and for un-governance/disorder could look like. It concludes with a brief vision of what new possibilities emerge from these lessons/philosophical provocations (particularly for researchers and educators). Even as the dissertation concludes with a proposal for a school, I ground these ideas in Halberstam’s (2011) question: “Do we really want to

225 shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual commitments, or might we rather take this opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking altogether?” (p. 7).

Wild Practices

What Are They?

Undocumented educations do not stop at being undocumented. As they resist becoming documented, they open up new understandings of educational practices that are wild. For Halberstam1 (Halberstam & Nyong’o, 2018), wildness is “a mode of mess making in a world obsessed with order” (p. 456). Wildness “abandons the security of coherence” (p. 454). It is, ultimately, an “unrestrained, uncivilized, disorderly, and ferocious, anti-colonial relationship to thought and being” (Halberstam, 2014). In short, wildness is that which both falls outside of order and resists categorization.

Halberstam is cautious with wildness. It is not an idea to blandly venerate. After all, he reminds that wildness emerges from colonial imaginings. In that sense, wildness is that which falls outside the colonial order. The wild is here savage, in need of taming.

Alternatively, but also framed through coloniality, wildness conjures the romantic image of wanderlust. It is the writer, roaming through nature on a path of self-discovery; an image of modernity and whiteness. In education, such a framing of the wild presents knowledge as something to domesticate and control. It is where ideas are made for classifying and utilizing. Learning is about understanding how to adapt. Different ways of speaking, different forms of thinking, or different practices of intelligence all function to

1 Even though this piece is co-authored, I attribute “wildness” to Halberstam as it is part of an ongoing project on wildness, anarchy, and queerness. Authorship is tricky.

226 serve the order of things. In school, that means organizing those educations existing out in the wild. How can all of those “other things” be either harnessed or banished, utilized to serve pre-existing logics of school or silenced? It is also about finding out who is “at- risk” of not achieving the proper education and figuring out ways of bringing people on the margins into the warmth of order. For instance, the American Indian boarding schools took on a civilizing form that stood in direct contrast to wildness. Conversely, this kind of wildness also frees a select few (say, a Zuckerberg type) to autodidactically explore their identities. This other wild allows a privileged wandering on the shores of thought, learning new things, exploring unknown terrains of education that do anything other than challenge the social order.

With these cautions in mind, I see the undocumented educations participants and I explored as forms of educational wildness. These ideas deeply entwine, but calling educational practices undocumented relates more to legibility whereas wildness serves more an idea of educations that are uncategorizable. Wild education will always be somewhat obscured, not completely legitimated. Yet, some undocumented educations may not be wild. They may simply be waiting to become documented. Wildness emerges from notions of queer anarchy. Furthermore, this idea comes out of a rethinking of the archives, “of bodies and modes of being that fall out of the definitional systems produced to describe them” (Halberstam, 2019). It is certainly not a universalizing idea, but wildness offers definite considerations for educational thought and practice. Returning to commitments to participants and communities, I want to clearly state that I am not calling participants wild. Additionally, the way I take up this idea, it is not held to this project or to immigrant youth in general. It emerges from my time with the participants in this

227 study, but it is about the wild potential of education for or from anyone. The lesson of wild, undocumented educations is that there are forms of education that refuse to be confined or ordered.

Wildness is not just the educational practices taking place in the “outside.”

Wildness moves beyond the very logics governing educational orders. That may be dominantly found in schools, but many pedagogical relationships show the same use of education as a way of organizing and ordering thought and being. Aims, tests, disciplining forms of learning (say, how to be a good person), these all show a form of education bound to order and legibility. For instance, any objective placed on a white board takes the ideas of a class and places them into a framework of mastery (of skills, understandings, knowledge, etc.). Wild educations pull away from such enclosure to open up messy questions of what if. What if education arrives at something completely unanticipated? What if, upon arrival, educators do not know what to do with that which emerges?

Wildness shares much with other theories explored in this dissertation. Whether the intellectualism of everyday life in the undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013) or the vibrant lives of those marked on the margins (Hartman, 2019), wildness is fundamentally concerned with a rethinking, a challenge to legibility and governance. Halberstam uses

“low theory” (Halberstam, 2011), where different objects of study (particularly pop culture) come into play as a way of theory building. Listening to Rancière (1991),

Halbesrtam sees it as a way of undertaking intellectual adventures. But, the use of low theory or wildness in general is not about widening the understanding of what counts; wildness is about challenging the foundations of thought. Halberstam’s approach would

228 not only say that yes, video games can also be considered as something academic.

Instead, wildness welcomes new and unruly considerations of what it means to act intelligently. Video games can be an entirely different type of academic thought that resists the codification of school learning.

Wild Educations, Expressed

Ximena made art using available objects to say what she felt could not be said in school, could not be shared elsewhere. The work did not fit into school. It found no place in her afterschool programs. “I just do my own thing,” she said. “It’s just what comes to mind, I don’t paint, I don’t do, unless [a person] really inspires me, or like that person said something and it got stuck in my chest and I just want to paint it all out” (interview

April 3, 2019). Maybe her art will find a home in an art school or a studio of some kind.

And it should. Even if her art finds the warmth of a school, the work itself is beautiful and untamed—completely wild. Yet, for me, the education, the learning and creative forces, the way she takes messy lessons from nobody in particular, looking at a Monet painting in a book, hearing about found art as a form of creation, and then messing around with bottles and other objects, all to make unfinished, disorganized art, this is a form of wild education.

Wild educations flowed outside of formal pedagogical structures. Learning occurred in unauthorized ways and stayed in unauthorized forms. Creativity proceeded without the proper methods. Wildness also offers a kind of anti-instructional pedagogical relationship. Pablo and Matias rapped with each other, building off of one another, listening and resisting a how-to. But in their performances, they taught one another. As they listened to different artists, they learned together. It led to a lot of disorganized,

229 stuck moments, where they did not know what to do. Instead of figure it out, they kept playing, messing around, making disorderly rap.

Within this framework, wildness is not opposed to training or developing craft.

Ximena’s art or Pablo’s rap reflect deep commitments to study and practice. Yet, wildness has no particular ends or direction. There is no central reference point defining mastery. Miguel’s photography developed over the course of the year. The technical knowledge or use of rules was not necessarily something wild. Wildness became visible when he started questioning these rules, asking how photographs might look when they did not follow the rules, and studying new examples and new ways of making photography.

Wildness also offers the notion of learning to be a person outside of categorization. When I asked Luna to tell me about herself, she said “I don’t know, I’m

Luna. I’m just fabulous” (interview, February 13, 2019). Working with Luna, I started to trace this educational journey, to ask how she learned about queerness, how she saw herself fitting with others in different communities, and how that led to an identity framed in fabulousness. In Foucault’s (2008) terms, I began to explore a basis to understand “of what discursive practices was the speaking, laboring, and living subject constituted as a possible object of knowledge?” (p. 3). Yet, she refused a describable, legible form of who she was supposed to learn to be. Her wildness was not found in pedagogy but in the being of herself—her “courage of truth” (Foucault, 2008)— something that is unexplainable and untranslatable for others. Her wild education was living and speaking a truth that resisted governance, refused to be anything other than fabulous.

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Wildness also does not mean forming “uncivilized” or uncontrolled people. It may resist order (the order of domination), but it is not opposed to something Leo and others shared. “For us [Latinx Spanish speakers], manners goes inside of education or educación” (interview, April 12, 2019). In its anti-colonial sense, and even in its disorderly way, wild educations can still welcome comportment. It is just that behaviors are not controlled and governed to meet dominant discourses. Behavior is about emergent relationships rather than some prefigured idea of how to act in the world. The most overt example of this “proper” wildness was Matias’s value of caring. He always told me that education was about being a good person and being respectful. The point of this, he explained, was to care for others. At the same time, he never hesitated to give me a huge hug or yell at a teacher he felt was unkind to him. Initially, I balked at these moments, fearful that they broke from both codes of conduct and his statements on education as a form of respect. As our relationship progressed, however, I realized that his understanding of education in this way showed a respect not governed by the logics of a school’s code of conduct or my unease at a sudden showing of emotion on the subway.

Wildness is thus both individual and collective. It reflects an individual’s move completely beyond the bounds of governance. Wildness must always shift, with one staying outside grids of intelligibility. Yet, it operates through a mutualist form of respect, including respect for the unknown, the weird, the misunderstood. Even as it is a personal journey, the coming to wild educational practices is, moreover, built collectively, through shared action and conversation. Halberstam (2014) reminds of the collective paths of wildness through praxis in Egypt, Spain, and Greece, where wild individuals joined together, respecting each other’s difference. Engaging in wild

231 educations can mean to become wild oneself but work together to imagine other worlds and other educational possibilities.

Sometimes, wild educations occurred in orderly places while using others’ knowledge (as de Certeau (2011) suggests, “a tactic is the art of the weak” (p. 37) that enables people to take things up and remain unfixed). When WISH partnered with prominent New York City theater company to adapt and perform a story that students read in ESL class, I watched the teaching artist grow increasingly frustrated with the ways that my participants and a few others subverted and played with the text. At first, it looked like a total mess. They merely toyed with the blocking. In a particularly crude moment, the teaching artist asked Matias to bend down and clutch his stomach. Almost immediately, he was pantomiming giving his scene partner oral sex. As the rehearsals continued and disorder mounted, I started to understand a wild performance beneath the surface of learning lines and movements. An unruly, disordered play took place behind the veneer of the play. The strange thing was, though, that in these wild moments the students performed and expressed roles like actors (from fieldnotes, January 14, 2019).

It is important to note that, though wildness flows through school and everyday life, education happens in space. Wildness can be a form of education but the wild is also a place. It is the place where education should not happen. I do not mean places struck by poverty, where policymakers do not see education. Instead, wild spaces are those where authorities dictate education should not happen. Education in the wild may have more flexibility to become wild. Even as wild educational practices popped up in school, the confines of formality and the external educational demands influence the possibilities of

232 wildness. Walking with Miguel and taking photos in a park, he may have carried an understanding of rules learned in school, but he became much more free to play.

Prominently, wild educations are not the performance of others’ knowledge but of their own. Art projects, photographs, rap. Basketball. Being fabulous. Being confident

(for Leo). Learning responsibility. These messy things traveled through school, home, work. They emerged in nonformal settings and everyday life. Fourth, fifth, and sixth spaces. Not just liminal but totally undetermined. They were messy, often explained in uncertain terms, with wild gestures standing in for what participants wanted to say. They were ongoing practices, made and produced, not the mastery of a test or the demonstration of knowledge through a performance assessment, but dynamic expressions. They were, once more, “a magical ecstatic performance” (Halberstam,

2014).

Daydreams

As a researcher, I entered this project with the goal of peeling back that partition of the sensible (Rancière, 2006) so that equality came forth through everyday experimentation. For me, equality was visible from the first walks and jokes with participants. It was self-evident to me that yes, oppressive and exclusionary conditions persist, but in no way were participants waiting around for someone to teach them about their worthiness to join the world. These wild practices showed an equality that refused the governing logics of institutional inclusion. At the same time, I found us stuck. How could other actors involved in educational discourses see this equality? How might anyone, whether it be the person sitting across from Miguel and his friend on the subway or a DOE policymaker, see these wild moments as practices of equality? More, how

233 could it escape the forms of school grounded in inclusion and outcomes, moving beyond the trope of “see, these kids can in fact learn.”

As we approached the second interviews, I noticed an emerging theme. In addition to and connected with these wild practices, participants often spoke of dreams.

Of course, dreams are a common topic in education. “What do you want to become when you grow up?” “Education is how we make dreams come true.” And yes, we spoke of dreams in this way with some frequency. Participants thought about what might happen after WISH. I asked about how they imagined their lives in 5 year, 10 years, and so on.

Dreams laid open future goals and aspirations.

Simultaneously, something else bubbled to the top of our conversations, something quite similar and yet totally different from dreams. It was more chaotic and fantastical. In one continuous thought Pablo spoke of becoming a fashion designer, wanting to go home and take a nap, being a rapper, a good father, a basketball player, and a few other things. He was not describing his plan to become a mogul or mapping out the rest of his life but expressing a scrapbook of ideas, just casually daydreaming.

Daydreams are not the goal-seeking, future oriented things that dreams are.

Within education, dreams might be something closer to a cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), a desire with definite ends that material conditions often thwart and desire refuses to abandon. But daydreams are something else. Daydreams do not look forward but underneath, to the side, and to other, unknown and deterritorialized terrains. They start anywhere and move everywhere. They might touch on the future or think to something in the present. The point is, daydreams open new worlds of possibility.

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As I first explored daydreams, they were most often framed as overly romantic, in the extreme form becoming maladaptive dreaming (Somer, 2002). Daydreaming may be associated with disassociation or checking out of reality. In a sense, these acts may be

“the daydream of a subject whose only antidote to structural disenfranchisement is a literal surge of vitality and mobility” (Stewart, 2007, p. 116). Yet, daydreams are also places of radical alterity. These are not some empty fantasies but turning “a dream of possible lives into ordinary affects so real they become paths one can actually travel on”

(p. 116). Again, these paths are not the planned actions of achievement but thinking toward new possible ways of life.

When I crossed paths with Pablo a few weeks after his initial eager sharing of daydreams, he had a new interest, musically. He started thinking through his ideas and desires about school. As we chatted, he choreographed new ideas about how he would live and who he would be.

Daydreams as Acts of Parrhesia

In one of his final lectures, Foucault (2008) directly links the courage of becoming oneself through truth-telling to the possibility of being otherwise. He uses the

Greek word parrhesia to describe a different kind of truth-telling. Parrhesia, or rather the parrhesiast, is “someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse”

(Foucault, 1983, p. 1). Parrhesia is more than simply sharing ideas or speaking without restraint. It is a form of risk, an act of wisdom and anti-authoritarian truth-telling that challenges dominant truths. Parrhesia is not the mastery of dominant truths but something else, something emergent, “not the professor or teacher, the expert who speaks of tekne in

235 the name of a tradition” (Foucault, 2008, p. 25). In this way, parrhesia welcomes a personal truth, not that of a prophetic new Truth but something courageous and personal.

The parrhesiast speaks their truth even as entrenched forms of knowledge or dominant ways of being seek to govern out acts of parrhesia.

So, when school and other educational discourses say “be included,” “strive for graduation,” and many other things, daydreams speak a truth of otherwise. Miguel stared at a clock throughout science class. I asked him what he was thinking about and he said he was thinking about his uncle, a cinematographer in the Dominican Republic. He wanted to make movies like that some time and was dreaming about a time he helped his uncle on a documentary (from fieldnotes, May 8, 2019). Daydreams become parrhesia both as they are explored in the mind and performed. Daydreams suggest a value, a worth denied in so many ways. Welcoming daydreams invites a world without specific limits. It is not just for others to see participants in new ways, but for them to keep imagining themselves in new ways. It does not matter (at least within the confines of this act of truth-telling) if daydreams become lived realities (nor does it preclude this possibility). It is a laying bare the self (even if the laying bare is done alone, in one’s head) as something that can think about other ways of living.

Daydreamed acts of parrhesia may be against the authority of another, external and authoritative truth, but at times they can also run parallel. Leo explained

A daydream of mine is like, well it’s my insecurities. How can I learn about myself in a way that I can regain that confidence? For me, it’s all about being yourself and being independent. That’s all I want. It’s not like, with the government, it doesn’t matter if I’m a firefighter. It doesn’t matter how I’m serving the community. I gotta know the way I can help the most and it’s gonna be healthy for me.” (interview, April 12, 2019)

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WISH very much encouraged Leo and others to be this kind of person. In this statement, though, Leo spoke of desires, to conceive of himself as someone who is equal and not only listening to the instructions of knowers but making his own way.

To dream new possibilities is a subversive, nonnormative truth, but one that is deeply educational. Parrhesia stands against the structured truths of “the professor, the technician [the teacher]. The prophet, the sage, the person who teaches” (Foucault, 2008, p. 19). With individual teachers, I saw daydreaming cut down over and over. At one point, a teacher directly told one of my participants “hey, stop daydreaming” (from fieldnotes, May 1, 2019). Perhaps too eager to defend teachers, I am reminded over and over here of the confining structures in which teachers are embedded. They too face great risks in being parrhesiasts. But, the education of daydreaming one’s truth shows emergent knowledge, thinking and feeling in thought. Foucault points out that it is a form of wisdom, but daydreams show that it is an education of telling truth through imagination.

But, as Pablo suggests, “music, it’s another life…there’s all different things, but it’s all just me” (interview, March 6, 2019). Not the stable, unitary subject of Pablo, but of performing countless possibilities, “glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering of a candle” (Stewart, 2007, p. 59).

Daydreaming Impractical Educations

When you come to the U.S. as an immigrant, your life changes, it’s all change. You feel like things you learn in your maternal country, you think that you are wasting time. You know nothing and you have to catch up. (interview with Miguel, March 13, 2019)

Miguel felt a sense of education as a race, one in which immigrant youth (in another conversation Leo added minoritized groups in general) start far behind. They need to catch up, linguistically and academically. As previously discussed, educational research

237 centers this idea, placing ELL and SIFE as populations outside the norm, off course from the end goal of a competitive academic success. Consequently, every educational moment counts; everything must be productive and useful. The kind of utilitarian urgency present in no excuses charter schools was not visible at WISH. Teachers and students often teased the rules of the charter school with whom they shared space. At the same time, the feeling of needing to catch up and make use of education with urgency persisted. One of the biggest impediments to exploring everyday educational practices was always that students never had any time. We so often walked to the subway together as they told me about pressure moving in on them from jobs and school and other commitments. We rescheduled over and over as they felt the pressure to “catch up.”

There were times when it seemed like these demands occupied every moment of participants’ lives. Sofia’s palpable exhaustion or Leo’s constant missing of meals and exercise showed a crushing demand on their educational lives. Even still, participants spent time daydreaming in educational practices that served little use for school or

“catching up” in general.

Crary’s (2014) 24/7 suggests that capitalism’s outward thrust has intruded upon every aspect of life, including the singular escape of sleep. A thorough interrogation of capitalism and its relationship to education is beyond the scope of this work, but in a similar way, the permanent demands of productivity appear in the logics of schooling.

There is no time to challenge the prefigured purposes of education when one must race against others. Sleep is lost to prepare for a test. Work and school demand more and more time. Play and pleasure might pop up, but they can exist only insofar as they serve the goals of schooling. Maybe a balance exists, where hanging out with friends, learning

238 hobbies outside of school, and working toward academic achievements all function together. But, participants routinely felt a pull toward specific kinds of productive education, with any free time sacrificing their position in the race.

Even still, participants made time to mess around. Sofia and I spoke a great deal about games she learned on her phone. She passionately detailed how to play certain games and what she loved about them. Ito et al. (2013) describe this kind of educational exploration in a thorough ethnographic project on youth “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” with new media. They challenge the authority of in-school educations and describe both a generational and school-based divide, showing new media as sites of collaborative exploration. At the same time, learning, mastery, and accomplishment push messing around from dreaming back to the logics of education as something productive and rooted in outcomes. Moreover, as much as the games, the media with which she interacted were important, Sofia spoke about playing on her phone as a time to think about things and wonder. She talked through some of her thoughts while playing on her phone. “I want to be independent. I want to have my own place. My dream is to become an actress. Even though people say it’s hard, but I don’t think that” (interview, May 29,

2019). Her phone was a place and time of fun and messing around to play a game about fashion, but it was also about making a space to think and act and dream outside of the ever-increasing demands of the school.

Where the persistent demands of education “fix” people, putting them into specific positions and governing them to be always productive, always in pursuit of what they are supposed to learn, master, or be, daydreams make something else possible.

Daydreams defy the logics of an education that demands catching up. They are an

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“irrelevance to the operation of the mind or the pursuit of knowledge” (Crary, 2014, p.

12). Participants lost themselves in ways that, at first, seemed to have little relevance to a study on educational practices. As we proceeded, they teased out more and more how new routes away from the “permanent daylight of reason” (Nietzsche, as cited in Crary,

2014, p. 24) passed through thinking and dreamy knowing. They thought out loud about unreasonable risks, and dreams of unknown possibilities rather than learning what one is expected to be.

The School of Otherwise

Hartman (2019) presents her work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as “an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise” (p. 7, emphasis added). In taking up overlooked and fugitive lives from the archives, she fabulates the possibility of another world, one free from unequal, oppressive norms. The present work does not deal with traces from archives but the ongoing, still early (to sound like an old person) lives of

9 people. Their imaginations and daydreams are full of critical fabulation, but I have committed to listen to and learn with these lives while searching for new possibilities in education. To do so, I conclude this work with a fantastical imagining—one influenced by Hartman’s work and completely speculative but emerging from educational discourses as well as the ideas and experiences the 9 participants shared. It is an imagining of a school that is otherwise. A school of and from lives lived otherwise. A school made for being and thinking of an educational otherwise.

Such a school is a wild daydream. It is wild in that it resists governance. Its occupants do not behave, do not shuffle from class to class in an orderly fashion.

Dissensus reigns. It is a daydream in that it is oriented toward alterity rather than

240 achieving future objectives. Minds drift. Imaginations run wild. The task at hand may be lost in a swirl of wonder. Trying to make the school of otherwise exist out in a world, forms of governance will creep in like spies, taking notes to make sense of it all.

Aspirations for the future are welcome in the school. It is simply a standpoint of resistance and freedom, specifically as it regards outcome-based learning and striving for ungovernable lives. In this way, a wild daydream of a school takes shape.

The school of otherwise is occupied. There is no lottery, no placement center.

But, it is public. It is of the neighborhood. The school of otherwise is not segregated but a place of affinity, marking that distinct line between cordoning off and creating a space of welcoming and belonging. This school is not for everyone. And yet it is. It is for everyone who is there. That means it must constantly change, malleably adapting to its occupants. To do so, it is of everyone who is there. That creation excludes many, actively, and invites in others. There is no application, no prerequisite, but there is a single qualification. To occupy the school, one must come to recognize the equality of everyone in the school. For, the school of otherwise is a school of radical equality. That means exclusion. No America First. No transphobes. No English-only. In fact, only translanguaging. Only anti-hierarchy. This is the starting point. The school emerges from the people who show up and make the school together. That might take time and patience. The community decides, but one is not immediately banished for not seeing someone else’s equality. You wake up and try it again.

The school has an open curriculum. The rigorous intellectual work is completed not by philosophers and scientists for students to understand but by the school’s occupants. That is not to say the school starts from zero. Students do not need to

241 rediscover the Pythagorean theorem. The lessons of the past are there. We teach each other. But the knowledge is also truly of those in the school and the lives and histories they bring. In the school of otherwise, we read the canon of ourselves. We read Cervantes too, if we decide. Leo wanted to. He may be alone or share the reading with others. But there is intellectual work to be done not by others but by us. There are still languages to learn, plays to be performed. The curriculum is bound to a question of what everyone in the school owes to each other. It is a curriculum grounded in mutualism. Yes, it is radically democratic. Felipe can throw up his hands in frustration and leave a theater production. There is no disciplining teacher to say “stop that or else…” But, when students freely join educational projects, they do so collectively, with commitments to the projects and experiments they join.

Teachers or students might set the conditions, develop new projects and set the conditions for educational encounters. They might also simply toss someone a book and ask if they have read it. Some of these educational projects may be sequential, linear, and sustained. It takes time to learn cultural histories or calculus. Learning together or finding avenues of resources requires a commitment. Others may burst forth from circumstance or dreams and evaporate into memory. No regulations or standards force continued learning along one line. It is not a curriculum of consensus. Achievement has not be abolished but it fades into the background. Maybe some people never want to learn

English. Desire moves the curriculum forward.

The school of otherwise is a radically alternative space. That means, though, that school is still a specific place. Maybe Mateo and Miguel do not arrive at the same time every morning. Perhaps projects spill from the school doors out into the neighborhood.

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Education flows throughout the day, a confusing, entangled understanding of inside and outside. The outside is not only a place, but a refusal of enclosure. It is outside of confinement, spatially and intellectually. The outside is not only in relation to inside. The school building might be overcrowded, like those pictures of occupied universities. There may be an issue of resources, but those who enter the space forge a right to make it together.

At the same time, even as space moves, school can still be separated from other spaces. Regardless of space, the event of schooling is, at times, “suspended” (to use

Masschelein and Simon’s (2013) notion of schole, which describes times of study or free time) from the demands of the rest of everyday life. A car engine becomes a thing to play with rather than fix and use. One can be in the school, playing without the utilitarian demands of the world. But this can also happen on the subway. It is the undertaking of education that becomes suspended. At times, to use Matias’ notion of a space of refuge, school is a place apart, protected by and for its occupants. The suspension becomes physical, guarded and cared for by its occupants.

At other times, school is very much within the world and all its dangers. There is a curriculum and pedagogy born of students collectively organizing, the dreams of those students who say “I am undocumented and unafraid.” That means that the space of school must be a physical space, one used to suspend education and protect its occupants, but one that breathes with porous boundaries, allowing borderless movement and collective belonging.

The school of otherwise is fun, playful, and experimental. Yet, the formation of this school is not an apolitical generality but an imagining of an education that can freely

243 practice equality. It is an imagining of an education that persistently challenges the social order. How it looks, what happens in it, and who is there might be forever changing. But, its permanency rests on the imaginings of wild imaginings.

Teaching In the School of Otherwise

Teachers take on strange roles in this school. The school of otherwise does not emerge in an otherwise politically stable world. In other words, it comes about within and against other societal changes. So, perhaps this school exists in a different societal configuration, where jobs and salaries do not dictate how one spends their day. The school of otherwise could have a similar structure of bells and isolated classrooms, with students and teachers just controlling the structure and flow of the day. This does not seem likely. How would that work with Pablo and Matias starting their own investigation of reggaeton history? That would not leave as much space for improvised conversations or adaptations that respond to other demands. The school would likely be much more blobby and amoebalike. Regardless, teaching in this school would still be a craft and a political role. A school needs teachers. They can be caregivers, cultural workers, activists, and instructors. But, how are they neither masters of knowledge nor interchangeable with students, only with the benefit of a salary?

This question is deeply linked to the idea of how teachers can teach ungovernable subjects in ways that refuse new governing logics. Teachers welcome and include any student who arrives at the school, but the goal is not to include new bodies in existing structures. As with the school and the students, teachers must teach otherwise. They affirm values of shared equality and provoke students toward exploration without coercion. Listening and questioning dominate, but teachers are active participants in

244 education. They can be anchors, beacons, or the ignition of intellectual adventures. They seek out situations, events, and encounters that can blossom into such adventures.

Teachers still know things. Teaching is situational; no codebook of curriculum and pedagogy guides the way toward otherwise. Sometimes, Ximena wants someone to tell her an answer or explain how to solve a problem. Teachers are not just ignorant schoolmasters (a la Rancière). They might share a passion for U.S. history that provokes a study of the topic. But, it is not their knowledge leant to students. They build it together, question it, tear it apart and remake it.

Teachers welcome in a group with different needs and different ideas. They do not get to tame them, to say no. The school has cast out that kind of authority. The pedagogical position shifts, but still we find teachers thinking of new situations, new ways of asking questions, new ways to affirm and make space for daydreams. Teachers participating in and supporting a wild school where they verify difference in itself and routinely push out the idea of normal.

Educational Leaderlessship and Policymaking

Councils might form, committees might come about. In the chaos of different ideas and pushing freedom to its limits, even within mutualist frameworks, identities and interests might be lost. The school of otherwise always needs time to reflect. Folks still need to take up specific roles. Yet, there is no administration. No boss. How can one become one’s wild self with a hierarchical structure disciplining behavior and thought?

There are, however, leaders. Leaders are anyone in the school. Abolishing hierarchy means no leadership roles in bureaucratic forms. Leaders instead emerge in moments, take on temporary roles, and contribute in specific, contextual ways. Leaders see

245 problems with the school. They are very much like Jacotot, leading from ignorance, seeing a problem and posing an adventure to pursue it. They ask and advocate and support. Are we being what we hoped to be? What kind of networks can we build to forge new paths of support? How is Luna doing today? What new structures and projects can make sure the school of otherwise continues?

Policy is a strange term to consider when imagining a school grounded in daydreams. When I talk about policy, I do not mean the funding structure or programmatic aims of the school. These aspects of the school will always be contingent on who is in the school, where they are, and what it looks like. As Moten and Harney

(2013) argue, this kind of work escapes institutional forms. At the same time, they will be essential. Policies must take shape to support immigrant youth in their language practices and yet not dictate how or what they learn. They explore how an anti-institutional institutional formation might appear. Rather than focus on the development and entrenching of specific policies for the school of otherwise, I here focus on how such a school would break down the divide between policymaking and the intended subjects of policies.

In We Have Never Been modern (Latour, 1993), the notion that truth is configured through laboratories and a scientific method and that discourse has been set as truth before it reaches a public reflects the notion of education as something to access. It presents educational discourse and notions of who counts as educated as things already determined. The only role of students then becomes how to navigate, contest, or interpret.

Modernity, and the bureaucratic policies that emerged with it, placed educational specialists into the role of dictating children’s needs. In the school of otherwise, these

246 divides would break down. Occupying groups like Leo’s political action group would investigate and make policies. Policy would be about the active, co-constructed idea of how the school would run and what it needs.

Importantly, policies and leaders remind that school and education are not everything. The boundaries may become blurred, the life of school breathing, opening into other parts of life just as everyday life moves into the school. Yet, the school of otherwise is no utopia. It is no panacea. In a flowing, open space, it respects its limits.

Perhaps, the best role of policy or leadership would be to safeguard these boundaries.

Wildness, equality, daydreaming. These things can be provoked in a school of otherwise, but school is one place among many where such events occur. The question for leaders

(and educators) is how to make the subjects daydream and tell truths about who they are.

It is about making non-ideal subjects while holding fast to the limitations of any space.

Conclusion: The Schools of Otherwise, Realized

This is a daydream about daydreams. It is important to note this fact as well as to remind that there are many schools of otherwise, already out there in the world. Whether schools in Rojava, Zapatista schools, the free school movement, or anything else, people all over are engaged in questions of how to rethink who counts and what counts in education. In the process, they aim to remake the very understanding of equality and search for the possibility of other worlds. They do so by opening questions rather than imposing new frameworks. As the Mississippi Freedom Schools curriculum poses, “It is not our purpose to impose a particular set of conclusions. Our purpose is to encourage the asking of questions, and hope that society can be improved.” (Mississippi Freedom

Schools, as cited in Miller, 1992).

247

The question of this work has been to ask how to make and sustain such possibilities for youth considered “at-risk” in positions already considered precarious.

Short of dramatic societal change, there is no singular way to approach this question. Yet, some possibilities exist. A first step is to open more space to listen to them, to hear the unruly shouts that students are already taking up educational practices and challenging given structures. They are already striving for the lives they want; building creative, playful ways to make new possibilities. This work does not always take place in school.

Often, it is unrelated or counter to school. Another step would be for educators and researchers to take a step back, to realize the ever-expanding space of schooling may offer new opportunities and mechanisms of inclusion. It also imposes specific ways of being and intrudes on already-present educations. It invites in and gives students permission to join a given structure, one bound to whiteness, capitalism, and coloniality.

In doing so, the evidence of possibility is all around. Learning with youth in their everyday lives challenges ideas that schools and other educational spaces simply need to improve or transform. The everyday lives of those considered marginalized, dispossessed, lost, or “at-risk” of losing education shows educations that challenge the foundations of schooling in the U.S. There are many examples already present and many others could have participated in this study, but in this work it has been Luna, Leo,

Miguel, Mateo, Ximena, Felipe, Pablo, Matias, and Sofia. They showed not only is education a practice of equality already happening, but education is something to make other worlds possible.

248

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Appendix

Appendix A: Recruitment Script and Questionnaire

Jordan Corson

Teachers College, Columbia University

IRB 18-191

RECRUITMENT SCRIPT:

Hello, my name is Jordan Corson. I am a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia

University in the Curriculum and Teaching department. I am conducting research on the everyday educational lives of students enrolled in a newcomer school and I’m inviting you to participate in the research. Participation in this research is voluntary. Participation will not affect your place in this school.

Participation in this research will last for a year and includes 3 interviews and inviting me to join you in public spaces where your education continues outside of school. These places might include your commute on the subway or place where you go after school like a library. If you agree to participate, there will also be a monthly focus group with other participants where we talk about issues of education outside of school. If you participate, the interviews will take about an hour each. The research outside of school

268 will take about 2 hours every other week. The focus groups conversations will take 2 hours once every month.

I’m handing out permission forms for parents in both English and Spanish. If you’re interested, please ask a parent or guardian to read them, reach out to me with any questions, sign the form, and return it within the next 3 weeks.

If you have any questions or would like to participate in the research, I can be reached at

(610)246-6126 or at [email protected]

Following is an outline of the 15-minute conversations to be held with potential participants after initial introductions. The conversation is not rigidly scripted, but includes points needed to cover in each main category.

1. Introductions

• As Mx. ___ mentioned, I’m Jordan Corson, a researcher from Teachers

College, Columbia University. I thought you might be a good match to be part of

a research project I’m starting

• This project looks at the kinds of things kids from this school learn every

day, looking at the things you learn outside of school

2. Outline of research

• Yearlong project with 4-10 people joining

• You would simply show me some of the things you learn once a week for

a couple of hours

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• Examples of maybe you practice English with friends in a neighborhood,

maybe you’re learning to take care of someone in your family. I would spend 2-3

hours with you while you do that, mostly just hanging out and also answering

questions

• This would last for a year

• Also, once a month, you and the other participants would talk about

education, school, and things you are learning outside of school in a 2-hour focus

group which will be held here at the school

3. Questions of match

• Could you commit to a full year?

• Would you want to show me some of the things you learn outside of

school? Do you have any ideas or examples of things you learn outside of school?

• Would you prefer to talk about what you learn (staying in school during

conversation)

4. Questions for researcher

• What questions you have about the research?

• Anything confusion? Anything need clarification?

5. On 1 to 10, how likely are you to participate in this study?

• Remind of 12-month commitment

• Remind of monthly group

• Ask what barriers to participating

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Appendix B: Interview Script

Overview Questions:

Could you describe a typical day for yourself?

What kinds of tasks or activities are enjoyable or difficult for you?

Types of Education Questions:

What are you learning or doing outside of school?

Where do you feel successful in doing and learning these things?

• Is there anything special about that place that contributes to your sense of

success?

• What is it that makes you feel successful in these places?

What kinds of things you’re learning feel most useful?

• Why do you think these are most useful to you?

• What makes them useful to you?

Do you have any struggles with things you’re learning outside of school?

Comparison to School Questions:

How do you feel about what you’re learning in school?

How are you feeling about school in general?

In what ways are the things you’re learning outside of school similar to or different from what you’re learning in school?

Are there lessons from school that you use in your everyday life?

Are there lessons from everyday life you use in school?

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Appendix C: Observation Protocol

Date and Time of Observation:

Participants Involved: (use pseudonym)

Location(s):

Description of setting (commuting space, cultural center or institution, etc.):

Description of actions taking place:

(relate descriptions to those described in interviews, e.g. practicing English with friends)

(partial) Things to look for:

• Language practice

• Interactions with others/space/etc.

• Appearing engaged, successful

• Other emotions on display, hidden

• Observable skills, changes in skills

• Practice or expression of particular knowledge

Reflections: