Full Description
How can social studies education move beyond deficit-oriented and assimilationist views of immigrant students and instead recognize them as producers of civic knowledge? This book offers a research-based roadmap for creating social studies classrooms that affirm and draw on immigrant students' experiences and knowledge as essential resources for teaching and learning.
As classrooms across the United States become increasingly shaped by migration, multilingualism, and transnationalism, traditional approaches to social studies remain rooted in U.S.-centric, monolingual, and assimilationist frameworks. These approaches not only marginalize immigrant students' identities and lives, but also limit what counts as civic knowledge and participation.
Bringing together leading scholars in social studies education and drawing on cutting-edge research and classroom-based examples, this volume bridges theory and practice by offering research-informed, practitioner-ready approaches for K-12 classrooms and teacher education. Chapters center diverse immigrant youth, including Latinx, Asian, African, and Arab communities, showing how teachers and teacher educators can design social studies classrooms that honor and build on students' lived realities, everyday experiences, and civic practices.
In a political climate marked by intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric and contested understandings of citizenship, this book provides educators with the tools, frameworks, and practical examples needed to create classrooms that are not only inclusive and relevant, but transformative, centering immigrant students' ways of knowing and being as foundational to social studies.
Key Features:
Repositioning Immigrant Youth: Recognizes immigrant youth as civic knowers whose lived experiences expand what counts as knowledge in social studies classrooms.
Youth-Centered Narratives: Features rich examples of immigrant youth activism, identity and belonging negotiation, and everyday civic engagement across diverse communities to help teachers better understand students' lives.
Asset-Based Pedagogy: Draws on frameworks such as community cultural wealth, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and transnational citizenship to move beyond deficit perspectives and toward asset-based approaches to teaching immigrant students.
Classroom-Ready Practices and Actionable Resources: Offers concrete lesson ideas, discussion prompts, and instructional strategies that teachers can use with and for immigrant students.
Teacher Education and Professional Learning: Provides specific recommendations and guidance for preservice teachers and teacher educators to teach immigration and civic issues in ways that are responsive to and grounded in immigrant students' realities and lives.
