US Education in a World of Migration

Book excerpt: Given the protracted, varied, and geographically expansive changes in migration over time, it is difficult to establish an overarching theory that adequately analyzes the school experiences of immigrant youth in the United States. This volume extends the scholarly work on these experiences by exploring how immigrants carve out new identities, construct meanings, and negotiate spaces for themselves within social structures created or mediated by education policy and practice. It highlights immigrants that position themselves within global movements while experiencing the everyday effects of federal, state, and local education policy, a phenomenon referred to as glocal (global-local) or localized global phenomena. Chapter authors acknowledge and honor the agency that immigrants wield, and combine social theories and qualitative methods to empirically document the ways in which immigrants take active roles in enacting education policy. Surveying immigrants from China, Bangladesh, India, Haiti, Japan, Colombia, and Liberia, this volume offers a broad spectrum of immigrant experiences that problematize policy narratives that narrowly define notions of "immigrant," "citizenship," and "student."