“My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration”: A Civics Teacher's Breach of Silence in a Mixed-Citizenship Classroom

Abstract

In this article, Dafney Blanca Dabach investigates how teachers and their students of different citizenship statuses navigate tensions in formal state-sponsored citizenship education. In traditional US high school civics courses, undocumented immigrant youths' liminal status is often invisible and overlooked as undocumented youth are educated alongside their peers who have full citizenship rights. Disjunctures between idealized rights and structural exclusions become barriers to meaningful civic education. Through this qualitative case study, Dabach examines the possibilities of a teacher's brokering role across different forms of knowledge and experience in a classroom that included undocumented immigrants, naturalized immigrants, and US-born students whose parental origins spanned twelve countries across five continents. She asks: How do civics teachers who are aware of their students' varied citizenship statuses discuss political participation in mixed-status classrooms during nationally focused events, such as elections? And, how do students of differing citizenship statuses respond during such times? Dabach demonstrates how the teacher apprenticed youth into practices of political participation while recounting narratives about the impact of immigration deportation policies at the local school site. In doing so, the teacher breached norms of silence, interrupting norms that contribute to maintaining status quo exclusions. This case study documents how the teacher simultaneously socialized youth of different citizenship statuses in ways that they found meaningful—across citizenship types. This work contributes to conceptualizing how civic education may be more inclusive in the face of systematic exclusions.

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