“Diles la verdad”: Deportation Policies, Politicized Funds of Knowledge, and Schooling in Middle Childhood

Abstract

In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and perspectives of one student, his teachers, and his parents to explore how his father's detainment and potential deportation affected his life and learning across educational contexts such as home, school, and alternative educational spaces. In attending to the ways that this student effectively developed and deployed his knowledge of immigration outside of his classroom spaces, the authors explore the possibilities and tensions of creating safe spaces for students to draw on immigration experiences for learning in school. Rather than maintaining silence around issues of difference like immigration, they call for educational practices and policies that will better prepare educators to recognize and respond to students' politicized funds of knowledge, the experiences, knowledges, and skills young people deploy and develop across learning contexts that are often not incorporated into classroom settings.

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