Abstract
Responding to recent reports that Latina students often lack feelings of belonging at school and are dropping out in increasing numbers, this study explores how classroom environments influence engagement or disengagement among Latina students. Through case studies with five Latina 10th-grade students, this research examines how variations in the learning environment along three dimensions influence variations in classroom engagement as students travel from class to class in a given school day. Marshaling interview and observational data, the author demonstrates that Latina students experience the greatest levels of classroom engagement in learning spaces that are safe, affirming, and productive.
The puzzle of how and why students become engaged in high school classes is particularly critical in regards to Latina students because Latina/os are expected to comprise 34% of our nation’s children by the year 2050 (Passel & Cohn, 2008), yet many U.S. schools struggle to serve Latina/o students well. Within U.S. high schools, the needs of Latina/o students are often unaddressed by traditional schooling practices, which emphasize mainstream culture and values and which can be particularly alienating for Latina/os 1 (Carter, 2005; Gándara & Contreras, 2009; Herman & Tucker, 2000; Nieto & Bode, 2008; Valenzuela, 1999). Valencia (2002) argues that, among the many systemic problems that underscore “school failure” for Latina/o students, psychologically unhealthy learning environments—characterized as those that engender feelings of inferiority or that convey racial or ethnic prejudice—create stress that interferes with engagement, persistence, and learning. Furthermore, a 2009 study conducted by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) found that Latina students in particular face specific ethnicity- and gender-based challenges in school—rooted in stereotypes, discrimination, and family responsibilities, among other factors—that contribute to increasing drop-out rates among Latinas. They note that nationwide only 59% of Latina students in the class of 2006 graduated on time with their freshmen cohorts. Although this rate is higher than for Latino males, of whom only 50% graduated on time, Latinas without high school diplomas are more likely to be unemployed, underpaid, and relying on public financial support than Latino males (NWLC & MALDEF, 2009). The National Center for Education Statistics also reports that Americans of Hispanic origin are less likely than other demographic groups to earn diplomas or an equivalent by the age of 24. In October 2007, 21.4% of Hispanic Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 were status dropouts—not enrolled in high school and without a diploma or GED. This is more than double the status drop-out rate of 8.4% for black Americans and more than quadruple the rate of 5.3% for white Americans (Cataldi, Laird, Kewal Ramani, & Chapman, 2009).
Although there are many factors at play in these statistics, one key ingredient for increasing educational attainment among Latinas is better engaging Latina students in the classroom. Gandara, O’Hara, and Guitierrez (2004) found that, among 580 survey respondents in two racially mixed high schools, Latinas were the demographic group most likely to report wanting to be viewed as smart by teachers and peers, but least likely to report feeling like they belonged in the school environment. Although there are conflicting findings about the relationship between gender and school experiences across studies (Cólon & Sánchez, 2010; Sánchez, Colón, & Esparza, 2005; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008), the discrepancy that Gándara and her colleagues found between what Latina students desired and what they felt suggests a need for learning environments that better meet the psychological needs of Latinas. Indeed, research shows that students’ emotional and attentional responses to classrooms influence the skills, knowledge, and interests they develop—along with the grades they earn—which shape their perspectives and options regarding high school graduation, college enrollment and completion, career paths, and ultimately, quality of life (Davidson & Phelan, 1999; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Hondo, Gardiner, & Sapien, 2008; National Research Council, 2004; Rumberger, 2004).
Addressing the issue of how to more effectively engage Latina students begins with recognizing that engagement is malleable and responsive to context. Yet much of the existing research considers general engagement with school as a whole. Such studies link school engagement to a number of individual-level factors (such as prior achievement or parental involvement), school-level factors (such as tracking or peer behavior norms), and community-level factors (such as gang prevalence or poverty rates; Carter, 2005; Davidson, 1996; Johnson, Crosnoe, & Elder, 2001; Mickelson, 1990; Moje & Martinez, 2007; Rumberger, 2004; Valenzuela, 1999). For example, in their study of academic engagement among recently immigrated youth of Latin and other origins, Suárez-Orozco, Rhodes, and Milburn (2009) found that students’ perceptions of self-efficacy positively influenced relational and behavioral engagement in school, whereas exposure to violence in the school and community negatively influenced such engagement. Although such findings contribute immensely to our understanding of school engagement, such broad strokes fail to recognize that students—for whom individual, school, and community factors remain constant throughout the day—actually experience variations in engagement as they travel from class to class. As such, educators can garner critical information about contextual elements that influence engagement by looking at variations in engagement across classes for individual students. A deeper understanding of this within-student variation can shed much-needed light on strategies for increasing engagement within individual classrooms. Since it is within each classroom that students determine whether or not to do the work or devote the cognitive energy required to learn, broader considerations of engagement as a static condition over the course of the school day miss local, contextual factors that lead to variations in engagement across learning spaces.
These within-student variations in classroom engagement have been unutilized as a tool for understanding how contextual differences influence engagement and thus form the foundation of the present study. Here, I look within the experiences of five Latina high school students as they travel from class to class and examine how and why particular learning spaces engage or disengage them. These case studies reveal specific contextual factors that influence variations in engagement, some of which are likely to affect engagement for many high school students and others of which suggest that the classroom perspectives and experiences of Latina students are unique and worthy of particular attention. Across this analysis, I argue that classrooms that most effectively engage Latina students on an emotional level are those that students perceive as safe, affirming, and productive.
Understanding Emotional Engagement for Latina Students
In considering differences in classroom engagement for individual students across learning spaces, I adapt Connell’s definition of school engagement to define classroom engagement as “patterns of action reflecting acceptance of and commitment to the learning goals and expectations of success in a given class.” I focus on emotional engagement, which denotes students’ affect in class, such as happiness, interest, anxiety, or boredom and their emotional orientations, including values and interest in achieving (Connell, 1990; Finn, 1989; Fredricks et al., 2004; Voelkl, 1997). Psychological research on the relationship between affect and cognition finds that affective reactions often precede and influence cognitive judgments (Pekrun, 2006; Zajonc, 1980), suggesting that students’ behavioral and cognitive responses to classrooms rely, to some extent, on emotional filtering of context. Existing work on engagement operates from the premise that emotional reactions to contexts are rooted in three basic human needs necessary for growth and development: competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Caraway, Tucker, Reinke, & Hall, 2003; Connell, 1990; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Fredricks et al., 2004; Furrer & Skinner, 2003; Marks, 2000).
In this psychological framework, perceived competence is defined as feeling capable of reaching a desired outcome through confidence that one has both the required capacity and the necessary strategic knowledge (Connell, 1990; Newmann, Wehlage, & Lamborn, 1992). Theories on the need for competence originate in White’s (1959) concept of effectance motivation, whereby energy is driven by the pure pleasure of feeling effective (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Stipek, 2002). The importance of perceived competence underscores numerous ideas in human motivation, including self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997), ability beliefs (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), human agency beliefs (Ford & Smith, 2007), and subjective control (Pekrun, 2006; Skinner, 1996). Perceptions of competence among Latina students may reflect the broader experiences of Latina/os in U.S. schools. For example, in a study of attitudes toward academic success among 59 high school students in California, Nunn (2011) found that Latina/o students often internalized school structures, such as tracking and collaborative grouping, as indicating lower academic capacity and motivation among Latina/os. In her ethnographic study of achievement and schooling at a high school in Texas, Valenzuela found that disaffection among U.S.-born Mexican-heritage students stemmed from subtractive schooling—years and generations in a system that devalued biculturalism and bilingualism. Without feeling the competencies they bring to school are relevant to scholastic success, many Latina/os may feel ill-equipped for academic achievement. Indeed, more than one third of the 335 Latina students surveyed in the NWLC and MALDEF (2009) study did not believe they had the ability to reach their educational goals. Theorists and researchers argue that students who fear incompetence sometimes shield themselves from discovering their intellectual limits by rejecting schooling through nonparticipation or rebellion (Alonso, Anderson, Su, & Theoharis, 2009; Connell, 1990; Hurd, 2004; Kohl, 1994). Stereotypes regarding the academic abilities of Latina/os may further cloud perceptions of competence (Valenzuela, 1999). Aronson and Steele (2005) assert that competence is threatened when individuals fear confirming a group stereotype; such stereotype threat can affect performance, thereby reinforcing the stereotype and one’s compromised self-concept.
The second psychological need, autonomy, refers to feeling choice in, and agency over, one’s activities and alignment of those activities with personal interests and goals (Connell, 1990; Ryan & Deci, 2000). For example, when Valenzuela (1999) observed a “great number” of students who regularly skipped most classes but religiously attended one “meaningful” class (p. 102), these students expressed both types of autonomy—choosing how to allocate time and identifying one class as relevant. Similarly, in a qualitative case study of U.S.-born Latino students in different academic programs within an urban high school, Conchas found the highest level of engagement among Latina/os in a Medical Academy. As a voluntary program offering internships, mentoring, and observations in medical settings for students anticipating medical careers, the Medical Academy allowed students to choose coursework that aligned with their interests and which they saw as highly relevant to their futures. Emphasizing the role of autonomy, Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1995) found that in survey-based comparisons among 189 adolescents in California, Mexican-heritage students demonstrated a greater need for self-initiated achievement than white students. Sociologists also assert that low-income students of color often witness limited employment opportunities and low wages for local graduates and come to question the benefits of education (Alonso et al., 2009; Conchas, 2001; Fine, 1991; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Mickelson, 1990; Wilson, 1991). Thus, Latina students’ understanding of the opportunity structures for Latina/o graduates might affect the perceived relevance of coursework. Davidson and Phelan studied the schooling experiences of 55 urban high school students in Northern California and found that Latina/o students, among others, experience more engagement with teachers who share critical information about planning for the future (Davidson & Phelan, 1999). For these reasons, we would expect that teachers who provide choice and explicitly address postgraduation realities would inspire high levels of emotional engagement for Latinas.
Relatedness, or the need for belonging and secure interpersonal connections, is the third psychological need for engagement (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Connell, 1990; Osterman, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000). This need can be particularly salient for Latina students due to Latina/os’ history of marginalization in the United States and the group-oriented cultures in many Latin American countries (Vigil, 2004). Indeed, a central theme in Valenzuela’s (1999) analysis was the need for Mexican-heritage students to feel their teachers cared about them in a manner congruent with educación, a Latin American conception of education in which respectful, reciprocal, and caring relationships form the foundation of academic, moral, and social education. Conchas (2001) similarly found that Latina/o students in the Medical Academy valued the program’s small “family-like” community of teachers and students. In a study comparing conceptions of teacher care between 49 Latina/o and 44 white students in a Texas high school, Garza (2009) found that the Latina/o students highly valued teacher caring in the form of academic scaffolding and support, whereas white students prioritized caring through teacher actions that reflected kindness. This work differed from that of Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, and Martin (2009), who found that among 309 immigrant youth (187 of which were Latina/o), emotional support from school-based adults significantly predicted engagement but tangible support such as help with homework did not. Although these studies diverge, they reveal that research has begun to examine cultural differences in how students of various ethnicities understand and experience their relationships with teachers.
Other factors beyond student–teacher relationships also contribute to feelings of belonging. For example, in his analysis of Latina/o peer culture in three English language development classes in northern California, Hurd (2004) observed that acting-out, teasing, and refusal to learn dominated classroom interactions, such that students who sought peer acceptance were inclined to adopt these behaviors. Over the past three decades, researchers have also argued that Latina/o students often reject school in response to experiences of racism, discrimination, and cultural divide—a sense that the school is not a place where they belong (Kohl, 1994; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999). In their 2009 book chronicling “the Latino education crisis” from the 1970s to the present, Gándara and Contreras assert that a cultural divide between self and school still permeates the experiences of many Latina/o high school students. As contributing to these perceptions, they cite cultural mismatch between students and teachers and a shortage of safe spaces in which students feel understood and free to discuss sensitive issues like undocumented immigration or discrimination. Critically, as noted above, Gandara et al. (2004) found that, among all students, Latina females were the least likely to report feeling they belonged at school, suggesting that greater feelings of relatedness with peers and teachers could be critical for increasing engagement and persistence among Latina students.
Almost all of the research described above examined differences across students who were engaged with school to different degrees and the factors that explained those differences from student to student. Here, I capitalize on the structure of U.S. high schools to examine the experiences of individual students as they travel from class to class over the course of a school day and engage to differing degrees with different classroom spaces. Using a framework focused on context-based feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, this study employs variation across classes as an investigative lens on engagement.
The Present Study
This study emerged from a conversation with a district administrator over a conference dinner in 2008. As the former principal of Santa Linda High School 2 (SLHS), this Latino administrator was concerned about engagement among Latina/o students at SLHS, who were enrolling in challenging courses and entering college at rates significantly below their Asian peers. In exploring this issue, I opted for case study methodology focusing on one narrow group of students to better understand the nuances and variations in classroom experiences among a cluster of students who might otherwise be considered collectively. Given recent concerns about increasing drop-out rates among Latinas, I chose to focus on Latina students, and I homed in on those who were in the middle of high school—the spring of 10th grade—when high school is no longer new but when graduation or college admission would not yet be a central motivation for engagement. In this way, my participants served as “instrumental cases” (Stake, 1995) of classroom engagement among Latina students at SLHS. I examined each student’s engagement and experiences in each of her six or seven classes to address the research questions: How do 10th-grade Latina students perceive the different learning environments in each of their high school classes? How do these perceptions influence emotional engagement or disengagement in each context?
School Site
Located in the Greater Los Angeles Area, SLHS had a 2008 student body of just under 2,500 students who were 55% Asian, 39% Latina/o, and 2% white, with 4% of students reporting multiple races or having missing data in the California Department of Education database. By contrast, the 101 teachers at SLHS in 2008 were 53% white, 22% Latina/o, 21% Asian, and 3% African American. Among the students at SLHS, 82% received free or reduced-price meals, and 30% were English Language Learners, with the most common native languages being Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Mandarin. Illustrating the district administrator’s concern that Latina/o students at SLHS were performing below their Asian peers, 10th graders in the two groups had starkly different passing rates on the 2008 California High School Exit Exam. Among Asian students, 63% scored proficient or above in English Language Arts and 81% were proficient or above in math. Among Latina/o students, these passing rates were 34% in English Language Arts and 32% in math. In addition, the percent of 2008 graduates who had completed the required courses for admission into the University of California and California State University systems were 61% for Asian students and just 24% for Latina/o students. These statistics suggest that the administrator’s concerns about the differences between these two student groups were warranted.
Student Participants
I collaborated with SLHS’s Spanish-speaking Home/School Coordinator to identify and recruit five Latina 10th-grade students to participate in the study. Our goal was to include five young women who represented different academic profiles, including at least one student taking multiple advanced courses and at least one student primarily enrolled in Structured English Immersion classes for English Language Learners, with the other three students falling somewhere in between. The coordinator drew on her relationships with students and families to recruit five Latinas of Mexican descent—alphabetically pseudonymed as Ana, Beatriz, Carolina, Diana, and Esme—who were interested in participating. Table 1 provides an overview of these students, including each student’s immigrant status and the educational attainment of her older siblings to illustrate that, in addition to varying by course enrollment, the sample also varied along both of these dimensions, which have been shown to relate to school engagement (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008).
Overview of the Five Latina 10th-Grade Students in the Sample.
Second-generation immigrants had parents born in Mexico, the 1.5-generation immigrant moved from Mexico in early childhood, and the first-generation immigrant moved from Mexico in her teens.
Case Study Classes
Because each student was enrolled in six or seven classes, I conducted embedded case studies (Yin, 2003) in which I considered each class to be an embedded case within a larger student case. Table 2 provides information on the teachers and peer groups in the full set of classes, showing that out of the 33 classes, just above half of the teachers (52%) were female and 30% of the teachers were Latina/o. Table 2 also supports the district administrator’s perception that the advanced classes more heavily enrolled Asian students rather than Latina/os. In representative examples, Ana’s Honors Chemistry class included 30 Asian students and 3 Latina/os, whereas Esme’s Elementary Algebra class included 4 Asian students and 23 Latina/os.
Overview of the 33 Embedded Case Study Classes.
Note: SEI = structured English immersion classes for English language learners; AVID = advancement via individual determination.
Races and ethnicities for teachers and students were inferred from observations.
Ana and Diana were both enrolled in the same band and AVID classes.
Data Collection Procedures
Because I am a white researcher and not Latina myself, I wanted these young women to understand my intentions. During my first meeting with each student in the spring of 2008, I explained that I had taught in Los Angeles for 6 years, where most of my students had been Latina/o, and that I was concerned about rising drop-out rates among Latinas. I expressed an interest in helping educators better understand and meet the needs of Latina students. During this initial meeting, each student completed a brief, 10-item emotional engagement survey for each of her 6 or 7 classes, which assessed her affective reactions to, values toward, and interest in each class (see Appendix A). These surveys enabled me to rank each student’s classes in order from highest to lowest emotional engagement.
I then spent 2 consecutive days with each student. On both days, I attended each of her 6 or 7 classes for the full 58-minute period and recorded detailed field notes. In the field notes, I documented the student’s behavioral engagement as indicated by her affect, work patterns, body language, interactions with teachers and others, contributions to discussions, and questions asked. I also noted behavioral patterns among other students to record peer environments, and I recorded the academic activities of each class, class-wide interactions, and comments made by the teacher—especially those signaling student competence. In most cases, I was welcomed into the class by the teacher and students, with the exception of Esme’s AVID class, where her teacher preferred that I did not observe. My impression was that most students and teachers carried on in my presence as they would on a typical day, and the interviewees confirmed this. The one notable exception was Carolina’s debate teacher, whom Carolina reported held class in a different classroom and used different instructional techniques due to my presence.
At the end of each day’s observations, I met after school with the student whom I had shadowed to conduct a 90-minute in-depth interview. During the first day’s interview, I gathered background information on the student, and we discussed half of her classes for 20 to 25 minutes apiece. During the second interview, we discussed new developments from the second day in regards to classes we had already discussed and then discussed the remaining classes. I used a semistructured interview protocol that drew on specific lessons and interactions I had observed in each class (see Appendix B). My purpose in grounding the interviews in the day’s events was to elicit specific details regarding the student’s perceptions of the class content, structure, teacher, and peer group, and I strayed from the protocol liberally to follow up on points of interest raised by the student. By contextualizing our discussion in particular events, students were able to cite evidence to help me understand their perspective (e.g., “you saw how . . .”). For my purposes, I drew on observations to inquire about specific events that could be relevant to emotional engagement (e.g., “I saw her talking to you. What were you . . .”). After spending 2 days with each student, I then composed a reflective memo of my impressions of that student and how and why her levels of engagement varied across classes. Over time, I also used the reflective memos to track how my ideas were changing as I collected additional data from new participants.
Analysis
Step 1: Ranking of classes in regards to engagement
My first analytic objective was to determine each student’s level of emotional engagement in each class by checking her survey rankings against my observations of her behavioral engagement and her comments during interviews. I also shared the survey rankings with each student during her first interview and asked whether the rank order matched her perceptions. I then categorized her classes into high, moderate, and low engagement by considering the level of enthusiasm or distaste she exhibited when discussing a particular class, the point spread between survey scores for different classes, and her observed affect in various classes. Final categorization for each class list reveals my subjective interpretation of relative emotional engagement in each class for that student. Because I wanted to understand how varying classroom contexts influenced engagement for a given student, I did not compare emotional engagement across students. Table 3 shows these results.
Emotional Engagement Rankings of Each Student’s Six or Seven Classes.
Note: AVID = advancement via individual determination.
Step 2: Analysis of interview and observation data
My second analytic objective was to understand how classroom context influenced students’ variations in emotional engagement across these 33 classes. To this end, I created a triangulated case report for each student-by-class case by summarizing and integrating the survey, observation, and interview data for that case (Yin, 2003). I then coded these 33 case reports through a first iteration using the theoretical framework concepts of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. During this process, I used analytic memos (Maxwell, 2005; Miles & Huberman, 1994) to track emerging thoughts on how these students perceived their classroom environments in regards to the three psychological needs and how their perceptions related to variations in engagement across classes. I paid particular attention to each student’s course rankings and how the contexts in high engagement classes differed from those of moderate- and low-engagement classes. I then combined my reflective memos from the field with the analytic memos from coding. Across these memos, I noted five prominent, recurring themes (Maxwell, 2005) regarding mechanisms that influenced students’ perceptions and engagement: identity support, value signaling, linguistic nurturance, caring, and safety. I wrote a brief memo about each theme to define the term and present key evidence. To address potential threats to validity posed by my singular vantage point, I shared these memos with my writing group, a racially and ethnically diverse cohort of six women (including one Latina) who all conduct research related to education and social justice. Through detailed feedback from my colleagues, who looked at both the data and my conclusions, I examined rival hypotheses and refined the themes.
I then revisited all 33 case reports and coded for these 5 themes. Finally, I analyzed the occurrences of each theme (for example, comparing all instances of identity support) to examine how and why each factor seemed to influence these students’ engagement or disengagement. Although I disentangled each concept for the purpose of analysis, these facets of classroom life clearly represent overlapping and interrelated dimensions that collectively shape a student’s orientation toward a particular class. In the final analysis, I distilled the five themes into three classroom dimensions—conceptualizing safety and caring as both pertaining to “safe” spaces, integrating identity support and linguistic nurturance as components of “affirming” spaces, and reframing value signaling to represent “productive” spaces.
Findings
Across the experiences of these five Latinas, three classroom dimensions seemed to influence emotional engagement: Safe spaces described those in which she felt comfortable and unthreatened, affirming spaces were those that positively supported her identity, and productive spaces were those that conveyed value and importance of content. Variations in the extent to which students perceived classrooms met these three conditions emerged as critical to variations in engagement across classes. Interestingly, different contextual dimensions featured more prominently for different students among the five, demonstrating that foundations of classroom engagement are not uniform across students even within a small, potentially homogeneous group. Figure 1 displays these findings.
Dimensions of engaging classrooms for Latina students.
Safe Spaces
Valencia’s (2002) observation that “school failure” among Latina/o students often reflects psychologically unhealthy learning environments suggests the critical role of safe spaces that offer psychological safety and interpersonal caring for Latinas. Defined as feeling comfortable, encouraged, and supported (Baker, 1998; Ladson-Billings, 1994), psychological safety empowers students to take greater academic risks because the potential dangers of failure or embarrassment are minimized. Regarding Valencia’s (2002) claim that Latina/o students often experience stress due to environments that induce feelings of racial inferiority or that signal prejudice, I found that these students experienced such perceptions due to an overall sense that Latina/o students at SLHS were academically inferior to their Asian schoolmates. For example, Esme remarked, “I know a lot of people say Asians are smart, you know, like great, you know.” As to whether she thought Asians were smarter than Latina/os, she commented, “I know in math they are.” She hypothesized why: “Cause we don’t challenge ourselves that much probably. I know that’s one reason.” Course enrollment patterns at SLHS reinforced these interpretations. For example, Ana noted the racial imbalance in her Honors classes: “In our English class, there are only two or three Hispanics. Everybody else is either Asian or . . . yeah, pretty much Asian. . . . In seventh grade when I started taking Honors classes—that’s when I started—I was like one out of three or two, and I was kind of like, ‘Whoa, where did everybody go?’” On why more Latina/o students were not in Honors, she theorized, “You can’t make them do what they don’t want to do.” It seemed that broad views of the differing capabilities, motivations, and expectations of Latina/o and Asian students was an unpleasant umbrella that settled over the entire school. Certainly, as Valencia (2002) suggests, this pervasive notion of Latina/o inferiority at SLHS cannot be without consequences for students’ perceptions of competence and belonging at school.
Perhaps because perceptions of Latina/os’ academic capabilities created psychological danger, classes that were unsupportive elicited particularly low levels of emotional engagement. The most instructive example was Carolina’s algebra class, where her engagement was very low and the context was unsafe in a number of ways. First, the teacher was harsh and belittling—often addressing individual students in a loud, rapid, impatient voice or blatantly dismissing students’ questions. At one point, I observed Carolina call the teacher over for help. While looking over Carolina’s shoulder, the teacher screwed her face up and remarked, “What’s wrong? You don’t know how to do that?” and walked away. In numerous instances, the teacher’s tone and behavior implied that students within her all-female, primarily Latina algebra class were incompetent. This class was also unsafe because the teacher and her student teacher ignored students who spent class time gossiping or tweezing their eyebrows. Although Carolina was a diligent student, the teachers’ behavior conveyed the potential of being ignored if she fell behind or got off task, which concerned Carolina. She recalled, “I lost all focus in algebra when I was in elementary through middle school, and that is why I’m in Elementary Algebra. . . . I don’t want to put blame on my teachers, but I felt like they didn’t put enough effort into me. They would start one lesson and if I wasn’t on track, they would ignore me and just move on.” Worried that she might be left behind, Carolina was in a class in which numerous other Latina students were continually ignored, reinforcing this likelihood. Carolina also fretted over the pace: “She goes way too fast, like the way she talks. She doesn’t give us enough time to process what she says, and then just because maybe two or three students aren’t paying attention, she doesn’t focus on everyone else, as like a whole, to see if everyone understands it.” On many levels, Carolina’s algebra class lacked reassurance that her feelings of competence were in trustworthy hands, and her low engagement reflected her panic and uneasiness.
Conversely, some teachers created classrooms in which supportive structures and tones created psychologically safe spaces for grappling with challenging content. In Diana’s geometry class, for example, students had small groups of four with whom they consulted on their work. The teacher would write a problem on the board (often commenting on how challenging the problem was), students would solve the problem independently then check their work with their group, and then the teacher would randomly call a student to the board to complete the problem. The fact that students could be called on at any point held them accountable for knowing how to do every problem, but their consultancy groups served to diminish the risk of failure. I noted exceedingly high levels of behavioral engagement in this class—complete with smiles, laughter, and students literally jumping out of their seats to volunteer, even among Diana’s classmates whom I recognized as having been passive and off-task in other classes. Diana explained that this teacher reacted calmly when students made mistakes: “He’ll point and say, ‘Oh well, you did this small mistake,’ and he’ll ask if anyone wants to do it, go ahead, or he’ll do it and explain it better.” Through structure and tone, this teacher created a space where students felt competent, even with challenging material. In fact, Diana, who often struggled in school, had skipped an available interim class between elementary algebra and geometry because she sought out the challenge of going straight to the more advanced class. She noted, “I wanted to take geometry, and I think I’m doing okay. I’m getting a C, and I thought I would get a D because I skipped a whole section. . . . I just wanted to see if I could do that, and I actually could.” Having exceeded her own expectations, Diana’s psychological safety and the resultant feelings of competence underscored her high emotional engagement in this class. As an important caveat, not all participants viewed earning a C as a success. Rather, students’ perceptions of their grades were relative to their personal expectations and past experiences. For Diana, however, a C in geometry reflected a newfound feeling of mathematical competence.
Across the five participants, a key element of psychological safety was the perception that a teacher cared for them, and these students were all more engaged in classes where teachers conveyed care by looking out for them, inquiring when they looked upset, acknowledging their abilities, and believing in their potential. For example, Beatriz noted of her writing teacher, “When I was failing his class, he told me, ‘You can do better.’ He knows us. He said, ‘I know you, and you can do it.’ And then after that, when he told me that, I started getting better and better, and I got a C.” A sense of caring included more than just concern and support; it also included genuine interpersonal connection and a sense that the teacher knew and appreciated the student’s unique qualities. The critical role of care was also evident in students’ frustration with teachers whom they perceived did not care. Carolina described her Latina English teacher:
She talks about the most pointless stuff ever, like about TV shows. Everyone starts talking about it with her, and there’s really no point in it. . . . It irritates me. . . . She said she went to Berkeley. I’m kind of interested. From what she told me, she went to Berkeley and took a loan out, but she never really told me about herself—like how she got to where she is now. That is important to me. . . . She seems like she’s pretty proud of where she came from. . . . She tells me that when she was growing up she faced a lot of discrimination because of how she looked and her heritage and stuff like that. That was one of the points where I really started to respect her a lot. But she ruins it when she talks about meaningless crap like TV shows, instead of like . . . well, she seemed real when she was talking about that.
Carolina was frustrated that her English teacher did not fulfill her potential as a role model and source of critical information about college—particularly because Carolina knew how similar this teacher’s background was to her own. Carolina seemed to feel that if the teacher cared about her, she would know that Carolina needed this information and would offer it.
Cultural differences also influenced perceptions of care, as some students perceived that white teachers did not understand them. Diana described her band teacher:
She gets really mad if you don’t come to a performance. You can just have problems, and she won’t understand. . . . One time she got really mad at me because it was a school district band performance, and it was next to my house, but my mom was really sick, and couldn’t stay by herself, so I stayed home with my mom to help her out. . . . She said, “Well you have sisters and other family members.” And I was like, “I know, but it’s my responsibility to help my mom.” . . . She was like, “Well, maybe she’s going to get better” and everything, and that’s it.
Clearly, Diana felt the band teacher was dismissive of her responsibilities, and the teacher seemed frustrated that Diana would prioritize family over her band commitment. Given the differing attitudes toward family between Latina/o and white majority cultures in the United States (Arnett, 2010), this incident revealed a cultural misalignment between Diana’s values and the teacher’s. Across the classes in which students experienced their lowest levels of engagement—such as Diana with band—caring relationships with teachers simply did not exist.
Affirming Spaces
In addition to responding positively to safe classrooms, these young women were also committed to classroom spaces that affirmed their identities. Nakkula (2008) defines identity as the ongoing process of “integrating successes, failures, routines, habits, rituals, novelties, thrills, threats, violations, gratifications, and frustrations into a coherent and evolving interpretation of who we are” (p. 11). I found that these young Latina women were more engaged in classrooms in which their experiences positively contributed to this evolving interpretation of who they were. I describe such spaces as affirming because each young woman had a particular image of who she wanted to be and how she wanted others to view her, and her engagement in each class reflected her perception of how strongly that class affirmed that identity. This finding reflects the assertion among developmental psychologists that identity development is central to adolescence and the adolescent experience in school (Arnett, 2010; Erikson, 1968; Nakkula, 2008; Sadowski, 2003). Accordingly, emotional engagement was highest in classrooms in which students’ positive conceptions of identity were salient and reinforced, and it was lowest in those in which students’ idealized identities were threatened or in which negative aspects of their identities were fore-fronted. As such, four key dimensions of identity emerged: self-concept, group identity, academic identity, and ethnic identity.
Self-concept is the set of ideas one holds about her attributes and characteristics (Tanti, Stukas, Halloran, & Foddy, 2008), and students reported high engagement in classes where meaningful aspects of their self-concept were relevant, acknowledged, and further developed. For Carolina, an award-winning member of SLHS’s debate team, engagement was highest in English and AVID, both of which utilized the recently acquired debate skills central to her self-concept. As such, these classes confirmed her developing competence in this area through opportunities to showcase and hone her skills and through teacher recognition of those skills. For example, during a debate in one AVID class, Carolina gave such a persuasive argument for abortion that a number of students moved from the “Undecided” section of the room to “Pro” seats behind Carolina. Such demonstrations were grounds for teacher recognition. Carolina said of her teacher,
She knows that we all have our own qualities and she points them out. . . . She knows that I debate, and when we’re doing our debating, I guess she doesn’t pick me because she goes, “No, Carolina, because you’re just going to go off on them and start dominating. Wait your turn.”. . . I guess that the qualities she has pointed out are that I’m outspoken, funny, and I’m a debater.
Through both direct statement of Carolina’s attributes and structuring debates so that Carolina could not “dominate,” the AVID teacher validated and reinforced Carolina’s self-concept.
Self-concept also influenced emotional engagement through its contribution to group identity—a sense of identity that emerges from membership in a social group (Chen & Li, 2009). Such group identities often arose in classes where students and their peers shared self-concepts that contributed to a sense of belonging. Ana, for example, had high emotional engagement in the band, where she was a concert soloist and the clarinet section leader. As such, band was a place where she fit in. She described, “We all have one thing in common. We can all play the music. So then we all want to do the same. It’s kind of like a family, I guess—where everybody just knows everybody, and you’re all comfortable with them.” For Ana, this sense of being part of a group with classmates who shared her musical skills provided her with a strong emotional link to this class.
Another critical element of identity was academic identity—the extent to which students considered school success central to who they were (Nasir, McLaughlin, & Jones, 2009). Carolina asserted, “I care a lot about how I’m perceived, like academically. I want to excel, and the way to excel is by going to the next level. I don’t want to be seen as someone who can’t.” She continued, “I’m embarrassed and ashamed of being in Elementary Algebra because all of my friends are in Algebra II Honors. I want to do it too, but I can’t, and it’s embarrassing.” Here, simply the course level—taking Elementary Algebra as a sophomore—affected Carolina’s engagement because it contradicted her desired identity as “someone who can.” Students were not always more engaged in advanced courses, but for those who held strong academic identities, the stress of failing to meet personal academic expectations contributed to low engagement in low-level courses.
Engagement also reflected perceptions of ethnic identity—the extent to which being Latina was central to a student’s sense of self (Nasir et al., 2009; Pizarro, 2005). In some cases, ethnic identity was a source of pride that supported engagement. For example, in describing her Latina English teacher, Ana noted, “She’ll point out, ‘Well, you’re Hispanic, and you’re doing well in school. You’re going to go far.’ . . . She said that kind of like ‘I’m proud of you in a way.’” For Ana, who was one of only three Latina/o students in her Honors English class, the Latina teacher’s affirmation that she was a positive representative of her ethnic group underscored her high emotional engagement in this class. In other circumstances, however, ethnic identity undermined engagement. Carolina commented on the cavalier attitudes of her Latina algebra classmates:
Some of the girls in there, I don’t like because they don’t put in enough effort. I don’t know if you noticed but a lot of them are Mexican, and it’s kind of a shame to see. I don’t know what happened to them, but they should start focusing to get better grades, and they are not. . . . Some of them piss me off. They just start talking about random, stupid stuff, and you’re trying to learn, and they’re talking about meaningless crap they did.
This all-female remedial class contained mostly Latinas, and I indeed observed that half of the class spent more time discussing weekend plans than completing assignments. Even though her classmates’ disengagement was likely a reflection of the unsafe and disaffirming context of this classroom, as previously described, Carolina’s anger with her peers revealed that their disengagement contributed to her low engagement in this class, in part because she saw their off-task behavior as a shameful representation of the academic potential of Latinas.
As a specific facet of ethnic identity, each young woman’s sense of linguistic competence—both her assessment of her actual linguistic capabilities and her expectations for what her linguistic capabilities should be—was critical to her experiences of affirmation. Bilingualism and its associated perceptions of self generated tremendous stress for Diana and Carolina. Diana’s anxiety was rooted in efforts to improve her English. Discussing her grades, she noted,
I want to do better, but with English for a second language, it’s harder for me. . . . I think I would have to put in more time. . . . Sometimes I think it would make me a better person. . . . I don’t know how to explain but I would like to not be like my parents, who went through a lot—like leaving their country and not going to high school. They only went to sixth grade or something, and I would like to do more than what they did.
Diana associated improving her English with being “a better person” and achieving “more” than her parents. Such links among language, ethnic identity, and family expectations seemed to explain why Diana’s engagement was lowest in classes centered on vocabulary, such as English class. Referring to Lord of the Flies, she noted, “I’m confused. . . . Some of the words—I don’t understand the words or their meanings.” Diana’s perception of her competence in this class appeared to be due to both her unfamiliarity with some terms and her teacher’s inattention to supporting her vocabulary development as an English Language Learner. Language also influenced Diana’s sense of belonging. She noted of her classmates: “The ones with English as a second language can’t speak that well, and other people make fun of them, and then they don’t like to speak out loud.” Although she used distancing language here, as though this was not about her, this comment explained Diana’s silence in this class. By contrast, she noted that in history, where most students were learning English, “People don’t really care if you can’t speak that well or not.” Although Diana’s history classmates were primarily Vietnamese or Chinese, so had different primary languages, she experienced a greater sense of belonging, competence, and engagement when less English proficiency was the norm. For Carolina, the language of contention was Spanish. In discussing her “Spanish for Native Speakers” class, where she struggled, Carolina expressed frustration with the teacher: “She just sits there and doesn’t teach as much as she should.” When asked if this made her mad, Carolina replied, “Not mad at her. More like mad towards myself. . . . I just feel that I should know more about this. I feel in a way that I’m letting myself and my culture down by not learning how to write [in Spanish] as well as my sister or someone else.” Feeling the pressures of adequately representing her culture through Spanish fluency, Carolina’s linguistic self-concept contributed to her low engagement in this class.
By contrast, Esme’s and Beatriz’s linguistic ambitions were rooted in autonomy and optimism. Esme, for instance, was bilingual in English and Spanish, so opted to take French to “challenge myself a little bit.” Already considering language a strength, Esme’s competence was reinforced by her success in French, where her teacher called on her frequently and joked that Esme and another student were so fluent in French one Monday morning that they had to have gone to Paris over the weekend. The teacher’s reinforcement supported Esme’s self-concept as a skilled linguist, and she theorized, “I think cause French is kind of related to Spanish so it helps me figure it out.” Also interested in learning sign language, Esme explained her desire to be multilingual: “I think it gives me a better opportunity to get up in the world to speak.” Beatriz expressed similarly positive levels of autonomy as she explained her decision to come to the United States: “I didn’t want to be in Mexico anymore. Because I was thinking, and I said, what am I going to do here? I wanted to have a career or something. So, I told my mom I wanted to come to be with my dad.” Beatriz explained, “I’m trying to stay here through college and university. I’m going to need to write a lot of things, and I need to learn English.” Having come to the United States of her own volition, Beatriz’s motivation to learn English reflected ambitions that were central to her identity. Enrolled in five Structured English Immersion (SEI) classes designed to teach English along with course content, Beatriz was most engaged in classes that aggressively furthered her English. She explained the importance of her reading class: “I have a lot of grammar problems. So when I read, it makes my writing better.” For Beatriz, the intense rigor of her reading class—as evidenced in my observation of an hour-long, three-essay test—furthered her personal goals, her sense of autonomy, and her desired identity as a strong English-speaking student. Unlike Diana and Carolina, who expressed feelings of ethnic obligation to be bilingual, Esme’s and Beatriz’s interests in bilingualism were rooted in their own ambitions, and their emotional engagement reflected allegiance to classes that advanced their goals and affirmed their identities as linguistically competent Latina women.
Productive Spaces
In classroom environments in which these young women felt safe and affirmed, the third contextual feature that seemed critical for engagement was an aura of productivity. Through the accumulation of daily actions and comments, teachers sent subliminal—or not so subliminal—messages about whether or not their classroom was a productive space. Messages around productivity conveyed the inherent value of each class and its content, which in turn influenced emotional engagement or disengagement among these five Latinas. A quick comparison of two classes illustrates variations in how teachers signal value through tone and expectations. In Esme’s Honors English class, I observed:
The teacher takes a big swig of coffee and begins class by announcing, “I was going to give a quiz today, but never mind.” On the board, he slowly writes four questions about A Tale of Two Cities. He tells students to answer them in small groups. Kids are coming in late—many toting breakfast trays from the cafeteria. The teacher announces, “Just look back over the chapters. You don’t need to write a half page or anything.” . . . [Later,] the teacher chats with a group of students about pictures on the wall, the contents of one girl’s bag, and hairstyles he’s had over the years. . . . [Much later], Esme comes into class. She’s 47 minutes late.
By contrast, in Beatriz’s reading class, I observed:
The teacher poses questions to the class—trying to get at the perspectives of the characters in Under the Blood Red Sun. Beatriz is very vocal. The teacher responds to her contributions with things like “Okaaay” and “Truuuue,” but always seems to be searching for more—the inflections in her responses have a hint of “What else?” . . . [Later,] the teacher stops the students from working on their scene projects to go over the directions and expectations. Tomorrow is an essay test for this book. Friday, they will work on these projects again, and on Monday she expects to receive typed-up copies of the dialogue for the scenes. She announces that they will be reading something else after this. The class gets upset. Teacher: “Stop your moaning and groaning. School goes until the 13th [of June]; we read until the 13th.”
Similar to the impact of tone on students’ perceptions of safety, these two teachers used tone to send very different messages about the seriousness with which they expected students to approach their work and the quality of work they expected. Most notably, Esme’s English teacher revealed minimal expectations—“You don’t need to write a half page or anything”—and spent most of his time distracting students as he mingled about and engaged them in off-topic conversation. By contrast, Beatriz’s reading teacher demonstrated a serious, focused orientation—clearly pushing students to think harder and work further into the school year than they seemed otherwise accustomed to doing. Beatriz noted that her classmates thought the reading teacher was strict, but she explained, “I told them that if she’s strict, it’s better for us. But they don’t understand; they want everything easy. . . . If she’s strict, I’m active. I do the things and stuff, but if she’s easy, I’ll be lazy and don’t do homework.” Here, Beatriz acknowledged how her orientation reflected the teacher’s.
In their differing instructional tones and in-class comments, these two teachers also sent different messages about the intrinsic value of the work they asked of students. Not surprisingly, English was the class in which Esme was least engaged, and on her survey she reported that what she learned in English made it the academic class least worth her time and in which it was least important to understand her work. Esme was also late to class on both days that I observed. Conversely, Beatriz’s reading class was the class in which she was most engaged, and she gave it the highest ratings possible on whether it was worth her time and how important she viewed the class to be. Although I noted above that Beatriz was intrinsically motivated to improve her English skills and was engaged in classes that enabled her to do so, classroom context was still important for her, and she mentioned multiple times that she had rarely wanted to attend school the year before. She described her previous reading class, “Last year, we had homework like once a week and that was it. . . . It was boring. Sometimes it was boring. Our final test was singing—sing a song, any song. That was all, and I thought it was Reading, not Choral, but we had to do it.” These comments suggest that, despite her intrinsic motivation, Beatriz’s engagement was still influenced by the level of productivity and value signaled by her teachers.
Teachers also conveyed productivity through efficient use of time and accountability for students to complete their work. Ana’s English teacher used both of these strategies. I observed,
Students are turning their projects in. The teacher says, “Have a seat. You need a sheet of paper.” The bell has barely rung, and she’s spilling out directions. They are to write a 1-page reflection on Simon’s death, which occurred in the last part of the Lord of the Flies chapter they read for homework last night. They have 20 minutes. “How did you feel about it as a reader?” . . . There is some light chatter as students work. The teacher is circulating and asking questions—“How did you feel?”—and clarifying details about exactly how he died. . . . [13 minutes into the period,] most everybody is writing. A student by me is looking at his book and rereading part of the chapter. Two boys at the middle back table are discussing the details of Simon’s death with the teacher.
By beginning instruction the instant the bell rang, this teacher conveyed urgency about what needed to be accomplished. Unlike most classes I observed, this teacher did not have idle time at the beginning or end of class. She also clearly expected students to complete their homework and held them accountable by asking them to immediately react to the prior night’s reading at the beginning of class. As such, this teacher conveyed high value of content and high expectations. Seemingly in part due to this use of time, both students who had this teacher—Ana and Carolina—were more engaged in English than Diana and Esme, whose teachers left large portions of class time unused.
Discussion
Not surprisingly, various findings within the three dimensions of safety, affirmation, and productivity relate to existing research on engagement and schooling for Latina students, validating the critical role of these facets in the classroom. However, the findings presented here make three new contributions to the literature. First, these findings delineate not only particular contextual elements that constitute safe, affirming, and productive spaces that engage Latina students but also confirm that variations in the extent to which classrooms contain these elements relate to variations in engagement for individual students. Quite distinctly from prior research that identified predictors of engagement across pools of different students, this work uses embedded case studies to identify the sources of variation in engagement for individual students across contexts—holding the individual- and institutional-level factors constant. Combined with findings from prior studies, these more individualized, contextual analyses strengthen the argument that educators can modify learning spaces along the dimensions of safety, affirmation, and productivity to increase engagement among Latinas. Engagement was not static across the day for these young women, and their fluctuations in engagement revealed the power of teachers to create starkly different learning contexts that induced different levels of engagement.
Second, looking across the experiences of these five students, it was clear that different dimensions among the three featured more prominently for different students. Carolina, for example, responded most strongly to messages about her identity, and she was highly expressive in describing her strong emotional engagement in her most affirming classes. Beatriz, by contrast, responded most strongly to messages of productivity conveyed by her classroom teachers, and she reported that her own emotional commitment to classes varied accordingly. These cross-student variations suggest that different students respond to classrooms differently—perhaps relating to their personality, prior experience, or temperament (among many possibilities). This finding suggests that teachers cannot emphasize any one dimension of an engaging classroom space and expect to reach all students. Rather, teachers must develop capacity to create classrooms that are safe, affirming, and productive to reach many Latina students, along with meeting the engagement needs of their classmates in other demographic groups.
Third, although the findings regarding safe and productive spaces mirror sizable bodies of prior research on psychological safety, teacher care, and value of academic tasks (e.g., Davidson & Phelan, 1999; Fairbrother, 2008; Garza, 2009; Noddings, 2005; Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel et al, 2009; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), the role of affirmation—and the various facets of identity that were prominent in students’ perceptions of affirmation—makes a new contribution to the literature on classroom engagement among Latina students. Specifically, I found that students assessed different classroom settings by considering how each space related to their identity and then devoted the highest levels of attention and allegiance to those spaces that most closely aligned with and supported their identity. Although other works have noted that schools play a role in shaping student identity (Davidson, 1996; Sadowski, 2003) and that Latina students’ perceptions of academic, ethnic, and linguistic identity influence their orientations toward school (Dietrich, 1998; Flores-González, 2002; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Tatum, 1997; Valenzuela, 1999), this study identified variations in engagement across different classes based on the extent to which students perceived that each class affirmed their identity along various dimensions. This context-specific application of identity as a tool for perceiving and responding to a particular class adds new insight to our understanding of the interaction between classroom engagement and identity.
In examining classroom engagement among these five Latina 10th graders, I have isolated and independently considered various contextual factors related to safety, affirmation, and productivity. In lived experience, however, these factors are deeply intertwined and interrelated. As such, the positive impact of one contextual element is likely tempered by the negative impact of another. Thus, students’ ultimate emotional orientations toward a particular class represent complex subconscious calculations that differ over time as various interactions, experiences, and activities draw out new emotions or make particular feelings more salient. More importantly, the contextual factors described here are likely not the complete set of contextual factors that can induce engagement among Latina students—particularly as prior research has shown the value of multicultural curriculum or culturally responsive pedagogy in engaging Latina/o students (Duncan-Andrade, 2005; Gay, 2000; Nieto & Bode, 2008; Sleeter, 2012). However, I did not observe such practices in my study (because teachers were not using them), so these did not emerge as variations across engaging and nonengaging classes.
There were a few other potential explanations for variations in engagement that did not emerge in this study. It is interesting that despite the focus on Latina students specifically, the study findings show that gender did not emerge as central to these young women’s experiences of classroom engagement—with the possible exception of Diana’s band teacher failing to understand her commitment to caring for her mother. Beyond that one instance where familial responsibility created a cultural divide, being female did not appear to shape these students’ classroom experiences and perceptions. However, without a comparison group of Latino males, it is difficult to discern more subtle ways in which gender may have influenced engagement. Certainly, other research has found that Latinas are generally more engaged with school than are Latino males (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008). However, without the comparison and without explicit mention by my participants, the role of gender did not emerge as relevant to variations in engagement. In addition, the content area of particular classes did not emerge as instrumental to engagement. Across the engagement rankings in Table 3, classes such as English, AVID, math, science, and even electives have differing levels of engagement across these five students, supporting the notion that differences in engagement are the product of contextual variations rather than uniform preferences for particular content areas.
Implications
This study’s focus on classroom context conveys a need for increased effort on the part of teachers to meet the psychological needs of Latina students. The findings on safe spaces suggest that teachers must ensure that students experience psychologically safe environments in which they are not teased and in which they can draw on one another for academic support. Furthermore, teachers can enhance engagement for Latinas by sending clear messages of care through inquiring when students look upset, getting to know students, identifying and bolstering students’ strengths or unique attributes, and sharing information relevant to students’ futures. Teachers can also help students connect with others who share similar identities by enabling students to recognize shared interests and discover commonalities. Such efforts might include having students work in partnerships or small groups or by providing opportunities for students to express themselves by sharing their writing with others, completing projects that allow for creativity and original ideas, and engaging in discussions with their classmates. Despite such specific implications for teachers, however, this study originated with the concerns of a district-level administrator looking for a system-wide approach to increasing engagement among Latina/os. I believe there are system-level implications of this research, and I pose two recommendations.
Building Linguistic Competence Through a Stronger Spanish Language Program
Undeniably, linguistic competence and the role of language in particular classrooms played a crucial role in engagement for the Latina students in this study—some of whom struggled with the logistics of language and attributed immense personal meaning to these struggles. Although the importance of language in school experiences for Latina/o students has been noted in prior research (e.g., Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orosco, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999), this study enables us to see exactly how issues of language play out for individual students in particular classroom contexts and in regards to particular languages. For Diana and Carolina, stronger instruction that better supported language development (in English and Spanish, respectively) could have engaged these young women by helping them to reframe their linguistic competencies—and themselves—in a more positive light. Given the salience of language identity for Latina/o adolescents (Tatum, 1997; Valenzuela, 1999), educators might focus on more strongly nurturing linguistic development in both English and Spanish. Ironically, however, SLHS cancels Advanced Placement (AP) Spanish each year due to low enrollment. Rather than seeing the potential of AP Spanish to increase Latina/o students’ feelings of competence and promote their identities as AP students—psychological impacts that might transfer to other domains—administrators at SLHS send repeated messages about the low value of advanced Spanish. Similar to Valenzuela’s (1999) observation that bilingualism is devalued in schools, this annual dismissal of AP Spanish implies that the competencies bilingual students bring to school are irrelevant to academic success. Even for students who do not take AP Spanish, low expectations in “Spanish for Native Speakers” classes do little to promote Latina/o students’ perceptions of themselves as academically capable. Considering that these students are, by definition, native speakers of Spanish, effective instruction might more closely mirror that of high school English—reading novels, writing essays, building vocabulary, and discussing culturally relevant literary themes. Instead, three fourths of the “Spanish for Native Speakers” classes I observed consisted of reading passages and answering fact-recall questions. As Carolina noted, her teacher did not “teach as much as she should.” Such minimal expectations do not promote perceptions of competence. Thus, I would suggest that schools with high percentages of Latina/o students devote considerable resources to developing strong Spanish language programs to capitalize on and elevate the Spanish language abilities of native Spanish speakers.
Increasing the Level of Academic Productivity Throughout the School
I would surmise that indicators of a class’s value—such as a productive tone, efficient use of time, and high expectations—are pertinent to emotional engagement for most students, not just Latinas. Indeed, this finding reflects Wigfield and Eccles’s (2000) notion that the perceived value of completing academic tasks is a motivating factor in schools. I suggest that schools address productivity through increased academic press (National Research Council, 2004), whereby teachers push students academically and convey importance of academic tasks and course content. Such press might come through increased rigor, higher demands of students, more brisk pacing, or explanations for how content is relevant to students and their futures, particularly when such actions send clear messages that students are expected to excel. In increasing the level of academic press, I advise teachers to be mindful of possible threats to psychological safety that could accompany increased rigor. Two effective strategies for fostering psychological safety amid rigor emerged from this study. First, I offer the example of the structured peer consultation groups in Diana’s geometry class that assured students of minimal risk during class participation. By tempering individual anxiety through allowing students to confirm answers with their peers, teachers can help students achieve greater feelings of competence. In addition, teachers must indicate and demonstrate that students will be supported if they fall behind. For example, Carolina’s perception that she might get left behind in her algebra class and the accompanying anxiety diminished her engagement. Thus, teachers who create focused and productive environments must also integrate strategies for supporting students.
Conclusion
This study confirms the malleability of engagement and finds that within-student variation in emotional engagement among these five Latinas was strongly linked to their differing perceptions of safety, affirmation, and productivity across classes. This work further illustrates heterogeneity regarding which contextual factor was the most prominent for each individual. Finally, perhaps this study’s greatest contribution to the literature is the finding that identity affirmation was central to within-student variation in engagement, such that students were more engaged in classes that supported and strengthened their identity along various dimensions and they were less engaged in classes that threatened, ignored, or highlighted negative aspects of their identity. Collectively, these findings suggest that greater attention to the psychological dimensions of classrooms is critical for increasing engagement among Latina high school students.
Unfortunately, however, attending to “psychological dimensions of classrooms” is not typically on the to-do list of most school administrators. Indeed, on the afternoon I returned to SLHS to share these findings, I waited in the conference room for close to an hour as school and district administrators dealt with a police-related emergency. When they finally joined me—standing in the doorway with walkie-talkies in hand—the concepts I described (psychological safety, caring, identity) seemed so soft in comparison to the harsh realities of police activity. Yet this contrast perfectly captures the central challenge of education in many urban schools—managing to solve pressing crises while also conscientiously shaping young lives. Emergencies on campus present immediate threats that require urgent attention, yet a slowly festering lack of engagement can be almost imperceptible as Latina/o students quietly and anonymously fade away from our schools.
Given the increasing drop-out rates among Latinas in the United States (NWLC & MALDEF, 2009), attention to the psychological experiences of these young women can no longer be pushed aside for more “pressing” issues. This is a pressing issue that requires immediate attention. Notably, each Latina in this study had particular classrooms that engaged her through safety, affirmation, and productivity. Yet each also spent part of her day in classes that felt unsafe, disaffirming, and unproductive. By heeding the lessons offered through comparison of these environments, I believe we can significantly improve the quality and outcomes of Latina students’ school experiences.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.