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.
About the Author: Jill Koyama is Assistant Professor in Educational Policy Studies and Practice at the University of Arizona. Her publications include her 2010 book, Making Failure Pay: For-Profit Tutoring, High-Stakes Testing, and Public Schools and articles in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Journal of Education Policy, and Educational Researcher.
Mathangi Subramanian is a writer, educator, and activist. A former Fulbright Scholar, her work has appeared in academic and mainstream publications including Gender and Education, Current Issues in Comparative Education, The Hindu Sunday Magazine, and the anthology Click!: The Moment We Knew We Were Feminists. Her book, Bullying; The Ultimate Teen Guide, will be published in 2014.
