"Just like Me": How Immigrant Students Experience a U.S. High School

Using a qualitative bricolage approach (Kincheloe, 2008, 2010), this study explores the school life of immigrant students enrolled in an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom in a high school. The overarching objective of this study is to examine how these students--five from Mexico, three from Honduras, and one from China--experience and use the school space. Figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) and positioning theory (Davies, 2000; Harre 8r van Langenhove, 1999) provide analytical frameworks to present how the students rely on their positions as English language learners in an ESL program, on the ESL faculty, and on one another to co-construct a variety of practices that create opportunities for agency and success in the school space. The manuscript describes how students co-construct a world in and through which they (1) navigate the institution, (2) meet academic needs, and (3) establish networks of care. The study also includes the dissonant threads--elements of data that resist perfect codification--to deepen analysis and to portray a complex portrait of ESL II (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Keywords: ESL, immigrant students, figured worlds, positioning theory ********** When the bell rings to announce the end of lunch, the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom erupts with activity. Ilyn, Genesis, and JanCarlos (1), who eat daily in the ESL classroom, jump up and throw away their cafeteria-issued Styrofoam lunch containers. They brush crumbs off the table and go out in the hall to chat with friends before the second bell rings to announce the start of class. Chuy and Jackie Chan enter and plop down on the second-hand sofa that sits along the maroon cement wall. Chuy's routine question, "What are we going to do today, Ms. Esperanza?" is followed by Jackie Chan's half-moaning, half-laughing, "That's too much!" to Ms. Esperanza's reply, regardless of actual amount of work described. While they relax on the sofa, Audelio enters the room. He goes to the back of the room and fiddles with papers on Ms. Esperanza's desk, quietly talking to her while she gathers materials for class. Adriana and Diana enter, lay their binders and well cared-for imitation designer purses on the table, and continue their conversation in hushed Spanish. Venus shouts last- minute comments in Spanglish--a mix of English and Spanish--to friends in the hallway as she breezes in just before the bell. She places her binder on the back table where Ilyn, Genesis, and JanCarlos join her as the bell rings. Jackie Chan, Audelio, and Chuy gather at their table and the ESL II class begins. In this qualitative study, I examined the school experiences of nine immigrant English language learners in ESL II, an advanced English as a Second Language class in a high school in River Town, Virginia. The class, represented in the vignette, consisted of five students from Mexico, three from Honduras, and one from China. The following questions guided this study: 1. How do these students experience and use the school space? 2. What alternative paradigms regarding student success and agency emerge from the study of students' experiences and interactions? I frame these adolescents as active agents who were able to reflect and act on their own experiences. Instead of framing young people as passive subjects that are socialized upon (Thorne, 2004], I took "[their] experiences and values ... seriously," which in turn presented "new paradigms for understanding human experiences" (Moinian, 2006, p. 231). There is clearly a need for alternative paradigms that value and affirm the rich, diverse experiences of immigrant youth. I build on a growing scholarly tradition that resists framing students of color and immigrant students as deficits to be made whole, delinquents to be controlled, dropouts to be remediated, and speakers to be corrected (Darling-Hammond, 2007; Freire, 1998; Giroux, 2011; Grill, 2010; Kincheloe & hayes, 2007; Nieto & Bode, 2008; Noguera, 2009; Souto-Manning, 2006, 2009). …