This paper presents a female Iraqi student’s perceptions of how mainstream U.S. high school content classrooms function as a contested space for multilingual and multicultural immigrant youth. This space, which is constituted by a lack of support, in turn affected the academic achievement and overall well-being of such youth.
Addressing the fast growing diverse student population in the U.S. K-12 settings, there have been recent calls to adopt asset-based approaches to teaching such as culturally and linguistically sustaining (Paris, 2012) and translanguaging (Vogel, Ascenzi-Moreno & García, 2018) pedagogies that disrupt the “directionality” of the classrooms (Seltzer & de los Ríos, 2018. p. 74) and promote counter-hegemonic (Metz, 2019) views towards standard language ideologies (Lippi-Green, 2012). Disturbingly, research has shown that English language learners in mainstream classes are not adequately served by the public school system due to limited implementation of culturally relevant pedagogical practices (Burden et al., 2012; McGlynn, 2009; Sato & Sutherland, 2013). The data in this study come from a longitudinal multi-case ethnographic study at a midwestern U.S. public high school. Adopting narrative inquiry (Benson, 2014) as a research method, the study investigates how the focal participant, Zaynab, a female immigrant and multilingual youth from Iraq, perceived her inclusion and exclusion in mainstream high school classrooms. Our findings revealed three main themes: 1) a shift in her beliefs about her multilingual and multicultural identities; 2) a gap between her perceived ideal teaching learning environment and her actual reality; and 3) a perceived absence of an asset-based pedagogical environment. Significantly, although Zaynab passed all her requisite classes in the first year of her high school, she was not satisfied with the overall results. She disclosed that she would have flourished more if her talents (e.g., painting, free writing, creating videos) had also been measured and recognized through the mandatory standards-based tests administered by her school. Based on these findings, we will discuss ways to maximally utilize immigrant youth’s multilingual and multicultural assets, and to mobilize digital literacy practices in order to support their learning.
