Imagined Community of Education: Voices From Refugees and Immigrants

Abstract

To challenge deficit thinking concerning immigrants and refugees in urban schools, we engaged members of local immigrant and refugee communities from China, Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan in focus group discussions about their prior educational experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they encountered in their perceived reality of PK-12 education in the United States. In an effort to promote asset-based approaches, we employed Yosso’s framework in our analysis to highlight the community cultural wealth and to describe the process of creating an “imagined community” of education shared among our participants.

Keywords

refugees immigrants community cultural wealth education asset-based education

According to the recent census data, the number of foreign-born U.S. residents grew from 20 million to 40 million between 1990 and 2010, increasing the total population by one third (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). The growth rate of this population is especially significant in states that are not traditionally considered immigrant gateway states, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, or New Jersey (Fortuny & Chaudry, 2011). North Carolina, the location of this study, is one of the states with the fastest-growing foreign-born population. This population in the state rose from 1.7% in 1990 to 7.3% in 2011, and more than 1 in 10 people are either Latino or Asian (Migration Policy Institute [MPI], 2013). The growing number of this population adds to the cultural and linguistic diversity, especially in our urban schools. In the county where this study took place, for example, there are more than 150 languages spoken at home by children attending PK-12 schools.

In addition to immigrants, more than 14,000 refugees have resettled in North Carolina in the last decade with the support of local public and private refugee resettlement agencies (Walker, 2011). The state is among the top 10 states that received the largest number of refugees in 2011 (Martin & Yankay, 2012). Different from immigrants who may come to the United States for various personal or professional reasons, refugees are those who have been forced to flee their home countries due to persecution, war, or violence, and most likely, they cannot return to their home countries. While many refugees arrived from Southeast Asian countries such as Burma and Bhutan in 2011, since the early 2000s, more refugees were from African countries such as Liberia and Sudan (Patrick, 2004).

Growing diversity in our region offers new opportunities for all students to learn from their peers’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and for teachers to internationalize the curriculum by using students’ and families’ funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). At the same time, however, deficit thinking is still prevalent in educational settings. Deficit thinking is the mind-set through which the differences between marginalized/minority groups and traditionally identified norm groups (e.g., White, middle-class families and students) are perceived as gaps that need to be filled or problems that need to be fixed. For example, deficit thinking may be reflected in teacher-student interactions where teachers may hold low expectations of students from different linguistic or cultural backgrounds (Milner, 2010) or blame low achievement on factors associated with the socioeconomic, cultural, linguistic, and prior schooling background of the children (García & Guerra, 2004; Shields, Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005; Valencia, 1997). Deficit thinking may also be evident in the family involvement efforts of schools where immigrant and refugee family members may be excluded from family engagement activities due to cultural or language differences, which leads to their voices not being heard (Auerbach, 2007; Delgado-Gaitan, 1994, 2001; Lopez, 2001).

To promote an asset-driven perspective and reject deficit thinking, it is important to highlight voices from traditionally marginalized groups, such as immigrant and refugee populations (Shields et al., 2005). To accomplish this, educators must learn about the resettlement of refugee and immigrant families to better leverage families’ assets and heritage as funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth assets that can be used in enriching the educational context (Bal & Artiles, 2007, Bal & Arzubiaga, 2014; Moll et al., 1992; Yosso, 2005). Engaging educators with immigrant and refugee families in exploring these assets is especially meaningful in such urban districts as ours where some of the local immigrant and refugee communities may not be as well-established as those in traditional gateway states.

In this article, we report findings from a larger emergent, ongoing, qualitative study sponsored by the Coalition for Diverse Language Communities (CDLC) at our university¹. The goal of the larger project was to better understand the views of education held by local immigrant and refugee communities. For this study, we invited members of two large immigrant groups and two refugee groups, who either attend or have family in our urban school system, to share their perspectives on education in the United States. We focused our data analysis to address two research questions:

Research Question 1: What supports and challenges do immigrant and refugee families identify based on their perceived reality of education?

Research Question 2: What forms of cultural wealth do immigrant and refugee families bring to U.S. schools?

Educational Experiences of Chinese, Mexican, Liberian, and Sudanese People

To better understand the stories shared by the adults and students from each of the diverse language communities we learned from during focus group discussions, we reviewed relevant research about educational experiences in their homeland and in U.S. schools. Research about each group varies in depth and breadth, and we recognize that individuals’ experiences with education vary within each group; therefore, we synthesize here key points in the literature that are most relevant to this study.

The Chinese are the largest ethnic group from Asia with the longest immigration history in the United States. Not surprisingly, their experiences vary greatly based on generational, economic, language, gender, and political differences, which is also true for the other refugee and immigrant groups in this study. Nevertheless, Chinese immigrants are generally invested in having their first- and second-generation children maintain their language and culture and have very high academic expectations; these desires serve as major forces shaping the schooling experiences of Chinese children in U.S. schools (Barth, 2003; He, 2014). Conflicts arise when students are placed in tracked classrooms with low expectations and are not encouraged, and sometimes discouraged, from maintaining their language and culture (Barth, 2003; Xu, Connelly, He, & Phillion, 2007). Furthermore, the research indicates that Chinese American families have promoted their children’s success in school through personal, family, ethnic community, and mainstream community resources based on the parents’ experiences with education in the United States and China (Siu & Feldman, 1995).

Currently about 20% of students in U.S. schools are children of immigrants, and 62% of these children are Latino/a: 41% have parents who are from Mexico, 11% from countries in Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and 6% from South American countries (Valladares & Ramos, 2011). These statistics are similar in North Carolina where this study took place, although the remaining immigrant and refugee communities in our region are even more diverse. Much research on Mexican heritage children and families has focused on their migration history, citizenship status, English language proficiency, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and U.S. immigration policies (e.g., Olivos, 2010; Olivos & Mendoza, 2009; Stamps & Bohon, 2006), as well as on how American schools can reach out to Latino/a parents (e.g., Jasis & Ordoñez-Jasis, 2012; Nievar, Jacobson, & Dier, 2008; Zambrana & Morant, 2009). Research comparing parents’ schooling experience in Mexico with the United States (Harper, 2008; Perez, 2009) implicates the influence of their English skills, understandings about parent involvement, financial limitations, and a fear of the unknown. Perez (2009) called for more research to help educators better understand the personal experiences, cultural values, and different needs of all immigrant families.

Wannah’s (2007) study of government policy documents revealed that Liberian parents were expected to participate in school governance, such as serving on committees and joining the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) in their home country, but not helping with homework, attending parent–teacher conferences, or volunteering as is typically expected of parents in most U.S. schools. Related to the current study, research on the experiences of Liberian immigrants and refugees in the United States includes a focus on men’s struggles to find work in the United States based on their education and qualifications, thus affecting their sense of identity (Dolo & Gilgun, 2002), and on expectations of Liberian women who often became the family breadwinners in the United States, which upsets gender-linked expectations and traditions in many Liberian families. Also related to this study, Weine et al. (2011) found that while Liberian parents felt that moving to a new, chosen location after migration to the United States enhanced family stability, their children felt moving disrupted their schooling and attachment to peers and the community.

Much of the research related to the education of Sudanese refugees is about the “lost boys” and girls without parents or guardians who were resettled in the United States with foster or adoptive families. Studies reveal their personal attributes, including resilience and personal agency, and describe mainly supportive relationships that helped them overcome challenges they faced to obtain an education in the United States (Luster, Qin, Bates, Rana, & Lee, 2010; Meenal, Johnson, Bates, Qin, & Saltarelli, 2012; Meenal, Qin, Bates, Luster, & Saltarelli, 2011). Refugee youth also experienced racism, discrimination, marginalization, and lowered expectations in American schools (Roxas & Roy, 2012). Kingsbury’s (2007) study of refugee parents from Sudan focused on goals they held for their children and on the language and literacies used at home, school, and in social settings. Several themes that emerged from Kingsbury’s study that are similar to research with parents we interviewed who are originally from China, Mexico, and Liberia: They (a) actively pursued educational advancement and support from other members of their ethnic group; (b) were multilingual, and most were multiliterate, and all used multiple languages in the home; (c) wanted their children to be competent in English; and (d) wanted their children to maintain the family’s language as part of their culture.

While there was a great diversity within each group’s experience based on racial and ethnic, generational, economic, language, gender, political differences, and the immigration status of the members of each community (Dolo & Gilgun, 2002, Olivos, 2010; Olivos & Mendoza, 2009; Stamps & Bohon, 2006; Valladares & Ramos, 2011), there were several themes noted across the research literature for these groups: (a) experiences of discrimination but also resilience and personal agency (Dolo & Gilgun, 2002; Luster et al., 2010; Meenal et al., 2011, Meenal et al., 2012; Njue & Retish, 2010; Roxas & Roy, 2012; Weine et al., 2011), (b) differing experiences between education in their home country and the United States (Chuang & Moreno, 2011; Harper, 2008; Huntsinger & Jose, 2009; Pang & Cheng, 1998; Perez, 2009; Siu & Feldman, 1995; Wannah, 2007), (c) lowered expectations and little support by schools but high expectations and support from families (Barth, 2003; He, 2014; Kingsbury, 2007; Njue & Retish, 2010), (d) strong cultural and familial values including high expectations regarding education and multilingualism (Barth, 2003; He, 2014; Kingsbury, 2007; Kwong, 2000; Ma, 2010), and (e) their desire to access and capitalize on family, ethnic community, and mainstream community resources (Barth, 2003; Kingsbury, 2007; Siu & Feldman, 1995; Weine et al., 2011).

Theoretical Framework

To challenge the existing deficit-based perspective, we reviewed the literature on both the “imagined community” of education (Norton, 2010) and the “community cultural wealth” framework (Yosso, 2005), which comprised the theoretical framework that guided the data analysis in this study. We combine two main theories in our analysis and interpretation of the data. Kanno and Norton’s (2003) notion of “imagined community” helped us think through how participants view their education goals—their imagined community of education, while Yosso’s (2005) theory enabled us to uncover participants’ “community cultural wealth.” We ultimately propose this framework as a tool for educators to work with local immigrant and refugee communities from an asset-based perspective.

Imagined Community of Education

The definition of community can be elusive and the creation of communities has both intended and unintended consequences. Critiques have been leveled against conceptions of community that are created through sameness and unity (Phelan, 1996; Stone, 1992; Young, 1990). When communities are conceptualized through sameness, community has the potential to exclude as much as it might include. Cognizant of this critique, scholars have articulated more nuanced possibilities for community (Hall, 2007; Pharr, 2010). For this project, we conceive of community as, “continually shifting groups of people that dialogue with, actively listen to, and support each other, through reciprocal responsibility and accountability, regarding a common interest or concern. Community in this sense is both a process and a goal” (Bettez, 2011, p. 10).

Following Kanno and Norton (2003), as university-based teacher educators who help prepare future generations of teachers, we wanted to not only engage in communities of practice but also initiate the process of imagination together with our community partners to create “new images of the world” (Wenger, 1998, p. 176). The imagination process engages community members to co-create a shared futuristic outlook based on our past experiences and current perceptions. Building upon Anderson’s (1991) notion of imagined communities, Kanno and Norton (2003) defined the imagined communities as “groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of imagination” (p. 241). This imagination can extend both in a spatial and temporal sense. In this study, the imagined community describes immigrant and refugee parents’ reconstruction of their collective past experiences, perceptions of current reality of education, and their collective vision for ideal educational environment for themselves and their children. We appreciate that participants in our study have educational goals that they are constantly striving for as they negotiate the U.S. educational system. Other actors in their current and imagined communities—teachers, administrators, school counselors, other students, and their families—may help, hinder, and/or alter their imagined community goals. At the same time, the imagined community is influenced by the sociocultural context and reveals the community cultural wealth all community members bring.

Based on educational experiences in their home countries and in the United States, immigrants and refugees bring a variety of perspectives into the U.S. educational system. Even though they may not have had experience as students in U.S. school settings, immigrant and refugee parents learn about the U.S. educational system through their children’s schooling experiences. In this study, we consider how these parents’ personal experiences, together with the projected future they have for their children, form an “imagined community” of education, “a community of the imagination—a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future” (Norton, 2010, p. 355).

Community Cultural Wealth Framework

One of the major purposes of engaging in envisioning the potential for the imagined community of education is to uncover assets and strengths that may not be currently recognized. Building upon the tenets of critical race theory, Yosso (2005) criticized how Bourdieu’s (1986) work on cultural capital has been used to privilege White, middle-class culture as the standard in education. Yosso (2005) proposed the notion of community cultural wealth as “an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (p. 77). Yosso (2006) also pointed out that “cultural capital is accumulated, like a deposit in the bank, but cultural wealth is meant to be shared” (p. 77).

The notion of community cultural wealth is an extension of the funds of knowledge concept in recognizing and privileging assets from students’ interactions within local communities beyond traditional school settings (Yosso & García, 2007). As articulated in Yosso’s (2005) framework, community cultural wealth depicts the interconnected forms of several types of capital, including aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capitals. Aspirational capital refers to the ability to maintain aspirations even when facing challenges; linguistic capital refers to skills to use and navigate multiple languages; familial capital refers to the cultural knowledge gained through community shared history and cultural traditions; social capital refers to the community network; navigation capital refers to skills to negotiate different social situations; and resistant capital refers to the knowledge and skills gained through challenging inequalities.

Yosso’s framework has been applied in various educational settings to explore different assets students and families have that can be leveraged to enhance their academic success. For example, Valdez and Lugg (2010) examined how teachers and administrators can better serve Latino/a communities by identifying their specific assets. Martinez (2012) applied the framework to explore how Mexican American students utilized their assets in navigating the college choice process. Similarly, Liou, Antrop-Gonzalez, and Cooper (2009) uncovered resources Latino/a students used to assist them in obtaining school-related information and in meeting their college-going aspirations. Applying the framework to parental involvement programs, Larrotta and Yamamura (2011) reported the development of community cultural wealth through specific parental involvement activities. Most of these studies focused on learning from Latino/a students and parents within school settings. In this study, we applied Yosso’s (2005) framework to unpack what we learned from our engagement with local immigrant and refugee participants. By listening to the voices of Chinese, Mexican, Liberian, and Sudanese immigrants and refugees, we highlight various forms of capital based on their prior experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they face in their perceived reality of education in the United States.

Using Yosso’s (2005) framework on community cultural wealth to guide our data analysis, we examined the educational experiences shared by the participants in this study, including the supports and challenges they faced in their educational pursuits for themselves and their children in our local district, the third largest in the state. We envisioned an imagined community (Norton, 2010) of education that empowered us to recognize the assets, values, and experiences of these refugees and immigrants. Given that deficit-based thinking still permeates teaching and learning, we heard how it often limits educational opportunities for adults and children from marginalized cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However, using the community cultural wealth framework, we propose how some perceived challenges may be potential opportunities for learning when taking an asset-based approach. Thus, we believe that the process of uncovering community cultural wealth and exploring the imagined community of education, which we discuss in more detail below, may offer a pathway process for educators to collaborate with local immigrant and refugee populations and operationalize asset-based thinking.

In the next section, we describe our community-engaged research methods, our interpretation of what we learned by engaging with members of our local refugee and immigrant communities living and attending school in an urban context, and implications of our findings.

Method

For this article, we contacted the leaders/elders of established refugee and immigrant communities in our urban school district to gather people willing to participate in focus group discussions. Our long-term personal and professional relationship with the Center for New North Carolinians (http://cnnc.uncg.edu) aided us in making these contacts. Four separate focus groups with participants from the same country of origin were conducted with people from China (n = 4), Liberia (n = 10), Mexico (n = 3), and Sudan² (n = 5) who have been living and working in our region for between 5 and 27 years. They ranged in age from 16 to 53 years; the average age was 33. All Liberian participants speak English as their native language. Among the rest of the participants, all but two participants, both Mexican, reported speaking both English and their native language at home. All participants were educated in their home country, with some participants in the Chinese and Liberian groups also receiving education in U.S. schools, typically as adults completing college or graduate school. The Liberian group included a local high school teacher and a high school student, while the other focus groups included both parents and more senior community leaders. The participants who were parents reported having children between the ages of 2 and 26 who had already completed their K-12 education in the United States or were still attending local public schools. The participants from China and Mexico represented the two established immigrant communities in our region, while participants from Liberia and Sudan represented two relatively large refugee communities in the area.

Each focus group lasted between 1 and 2 hours, and the questions we asked centered on the educational experiences, challenges, and perceptions of the participants themselves and their children. Two researchers led each focus group, and both were English-speaking professors of education. Participants had the choice of whether to use English or their home language. In each focus group, with the exception of the Liberians, interpreters were available. Audiotapes of each focus group session were later transcribed into English for analysis.

Data Analysis Procedures

As illustrated in the Data Analysis Map (Figure 1), our initial analysis was an inductive, thematic within-case analysis of each focus group transcript (Johnson & Christensen, 2004; Yin, 2008), conducted separately by each researcher. Three general themes emerged from the initial exploratory analysis: (a) background and educational experiences of the participants in their home country and in the United States, (b) their expectations for education both as learners and as parents (where appropriate), and (c) what the participants saw as challenges and supports regarding education within the local, urban context.

Figure 1.

Data analysis map.

Following meetings to discuss and compare our initial inductive analyses, we conducted a second, more deductive within-case analysis using pattern matching (Yin, 2008) to code the focus group data based on the theoretical framework of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). During this iteration of data analysis, each researcher concentrated on one of the focus group transcripts for in-depth analysis of (a) examples of different types of capital (aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant) as defined by Yosso’s (2005) work on community cultural wealth; and (b) participants’ perceived reality of education. Even though familial capital was listed as one form of capital in Yosso’s (2005) discussion, it was not ultimately included as a separate form for capital in the write-up of this study because we consistently double-coded familial and social capital when analyzing our data.

After completing and discussing these within-case analyses, we undertook a theory-driven, cross-case analysis during case analysis meetings (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to highlight convergent patterns across cases along the two major themes noted above. Participants’ experiences, engagement, appreciation, and imagination were also noted to inform our discussions on the imagined community of education shared by our participants.

Researchers’ Positionality and Trustworthiness

As university faculty members in education, we entered this study recognizing the multiple positionalities of both the participants and ourselves. We are a group of three faculty researchers representing distinct cultural backgrounds: one U.S.-born, White woman; a Chinese woman born and raised in China; and an ethnically Colombian/French Canadian woman born in Colombia and raised most of her life in the United States. Throughout the study, we sought to be critically self-reflexive (Pillow, 2010) while interpreting the data we collected, and we attended to issues of trustworthiness with peer review and debriefing (Glesne, 2006) and through member checks (Glesne, 2006; Lather, 2003); that is, we asked members of each community to review our interpretations of what we heard.

Interpretation of Findings

In this section, we share our interpretation of our findings using a theoretical framework comprised of “community cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2005) and the “imagined community” (Norton, 2010). Based on the highlights of perceived challenges reported by the participants, we first reveal thematically the assets participants shared across focus group discussions in terms of the various forms of capital. As Yosso (2005) pointed out, “these various forms of capital are not mutually exclusive or static, but rather are dynamic processes that build on one another as part of community cultural wealth” (p. 77). Thus, the separation of each form of capital, although written as such for reading clarity, is somewhat artificial because the forms of capital are interlinked. Participants did not always name the highlighted assets below as assets; however, the community cultural wealth lens uncovered participants’ strengths that might otherwise have been overlooked. We then interpreted the data further considering what the findings of assets and perceived challenges revealed when interpreted through a lens of the “imagined community” (Norton, 2010) to consider “new images of the world” (Wenger, 1998, p. 176), in this case, new potential images of education (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Overview of findings.

Participants’ Perceived Challenges Regarding Education and Work

During focus group discussions, we heard numerous challenges that the refugees and immigrants faced upon arriving in the United States, especially in terms of their learning experiences and their ability to help their children negotiate the school contexts in the United States. All groups felt the loss of family support when moving to the United States, even when immigration was a choice. In addition, prior to arriving in the United States, the Liberians and Sudanese faced traumatic experiences because of civil strife, including civil war in their home countries, and while living in refugee camps. Challenges faced by participants related to their interface as parents with the schools and their children’s experiences. These included difficult cultural transitions, bullying, teachers’ low expectations, teachers’ unrealistic expectations of parental involvement, and the unavailability of translated materials. Using examples, we highlight these challenges below. In addition, many of the participants from Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan shared stories of discrimination in the workforce due to limited and/or “accented” English; although this does not relate directly to schools, we include this information regarding participants’ perceived challenges because it is part of the larger sociocultural context of these parents’ lives.

Almost all focus group participants commented on the various challenges faced in the cultural transition from their home country to the United States. As one of the participants from Sudan commented,

Maybe one thing is culture and religion affect a lot of our education system in Sudan, and the way kids are brought up in the home and there is a lot of conflicting issues and culture shock when you come here, so that’s a major issue.

Using dress code as an example of cultural differences, participants from Sudan also shared the challenges they experienced negotiating the home culture and the learning environment in the United States:

. . . especially the major issue is dress code, like, for example, when I was here, like, in our Islamic dress code, you don’t wear shorts for females, for example. And I remember, like it would be blazing hot outside, and I’m in long sleeves and pants and everybody is looking at me like, “Aren’t you hot? It’s hot outside. Now why are you wearing this?” There is no understanding. And that affects a lot. Some students kind of get affected and go with the flow . . . And the newcomers, we just have difficulties trying to explain, “This is our dress code,” or “This is our culture, our religion.”

Related to feeling discriminated against based on their religion and mode of dress, several participants described incidents of bullying at school and outright ignorance on the part of adults in the schools. Many of their children, including Liberians whose native language is English, were placed in English as a Second Language (ESL) or lower level classes. This story, from a Liberian mother, is one of many similar stories we heard:

My little daughter when she came in the third grade the teacher called me at the school that my daughter is slow and need to put her on medication. I said, “No, she’s not slow.” I said, “Take for example if you went to Africa, where she comes from, I said you have to be integrated into our culture because you don’t know my culture, you don’t understand my culture. You don’t understand my daughter . . . you will have to give her time to, you know, to get changed from our culture to the American culture, to integrate to the American culture.” “Well,” she said, “she needs to go on medication.” I said, “No, my daughter is not going to be on medication.”

These explicit challenges parents experienced were coupled with concerns expressed by almost all focus group participants regarding teachers’ lack of high expectations. Participants recognized the importance of students receiving compliments at school for their growth and achievement, but worried about their children not being challenged enough to reach their highest potential. A parent from China, for example, commented, “In China, they always say you are not doing enough. In the United States, it’s always good job, good job.” Similarly, participants from Sudan commented that while praise has its positive side, “But on the negative side of it, is that some of the students might just abuse that freedom.” Sudanese parents were concerned that teachers’ low expectations of their children might lead them to use their free time in ways that could be harmful; “students just didn’t do well and at the same time, they ended up just falling into the hands of, I would say, probably, not the right people.”

Participants also shared challenges they face regarding the expectation in the United States that parents assist their children with homework. One participant, for example, commented that sometimes teachers assign homework and expect the parents to check with their children and help them complete the homework. But if the parents do not speak English or do not realize it is expected that they help with the homework, then the child would more than likely not be able to complete the assigned homework. Another challenge was parent–teacher conferences. Participants commented that if both parents were working, then they wouldn’t have time to attend these meetings with teachers at the school. When asked about the availability of translated school materials, participants acknowledged that there were some materials that were translated, but generally they were about logistics rather than instruction or homework.

Although interview questions focused on parents’ thoughts regarding their children’s education, many participants discussed challenges they themselves faced related to employment. With the exception of the participants in this study from China who have prospered as a result of completing advanced degrees in the United States, other focus group participants reported facing prejudice and discrimination in the workforce. They attributed this to their “accented English” and a chronic problem of not having their credentials, education, and experiences in their home country recognized by U.S. employers. Because the mothers from Mexico were less formally educated in their home country than the males in their families, their ability to find skilled labor was limited by their lack of education as well as by expected gender roles in their culture. Even in some of the refugee groups, despite coming to the United States with strong educational backgrounds and both credentials and experience in their home countries, they continued to experience discrimination in the workplace. For example, several people told stories similar to these two we heard from Liberians. One Liberian man commented,

My wife is an educator, okay, and the school system in Liberia is [the same as] the American system . . . And the school that she went to, it was an American staff school. Her father was the principal of that school. She went to the university [and] now she came here, okay, and evaluated her transcript and the evaluator said it’s incompatible with the United States. And she applied to be a teacher and they said to her that . . . “you cannot receive any employment because there are no evidence that you’ve got a license.” So as a result, we will be here 3 years. She couldn’t get another job, [even] substitution. No substitution work.

Another Liberian participant stated,

Let me say that I came here, I went to, I did robot, I’m a robot technician . . . and after I got my certificate, I work in my area, but I will not promote it. Why? Because our accent. That’s a big problem right there. . . . They just don’t give us the respect because of our accent. They don’t want to make us boss. They know we do a good job but they don’t want to make us boss. Why? Because of our accent.

The participants from Sudan shared similar concerns about the lack of job opportunities for immigrants in the United States and employers’ assumptions of the relationship between English language proficiency and one’s competency in completing the job:

Sometimes, the assumption is, that this person doesn’t speak that fluent English, definitely is not going to do a good job. But usually, that is definitely not the case. Somebody might not be speaking English, but, at the same time, technically, when you get them whatever they do, they just do it well . . . So that part, I’m saying, the language is a big portion of it . . .

Overall, participants shared their perceived challenges for their children’s safety and success in schools and for themselves in their quests for fair treatment in the workplace and gainful employment. Related to education, their stories reveal difficulties of cultural transition, language and “accent” discrimination, unrealistic teacher expectations of parental involvement, and teachers’ low expectations. Workplace stories exposed employers’ discrimination against employees based on prejudices against the ways non-native speakers use English and institutionalized dismissal of credentials gained outside of the United States. These challenges reflected the deficit perspectives in our educational settings and other institutions, but in the imagined community of education, teachers wishing to best support their students and their students’ families can take measures to actively work against these challenges.

Community Cultural Wealth Among Participants

In addition to challenges, participants also shared individual, family, and community resources and support that sustained their pursuit of education and their support for their children’s education in the United States. As the participants shared their stories of navigating the local, urban school system in the United States, they illustrated the aspirational capital, social capital, navigational capital, and linguistic capital they bring into education.

Aspirational capital

Even though many of the focus group participants talked about the challenges and cultural differences they faced, participants from all groups also shared their aspirations, hopes, and dreams about education for both themselves and their children. A participant from China commented that “99.99% of parents came here whichever grades they are, they want their kids in school to get a better education, just as much as you can afford, as good school as you can go.” Participants in other focus groups echoed this comment. A participant from Mexico, for example, commented that, “for my children I want it [education level] to be much higher than what I got.” Participants also commented on their hope to further their own education to “get new credentials or degrees in order to get jobs” (Liberian Focus Group). Almost all participants expressed that their desire to obtain better education and career opportunities for both themselves and their children was one of their major motivations for coming to the United States. Thus, aspirational capital, the ability to maintain hope for a better future even when faced with challenges, was strong across participants in all groups.

Social capital

In addition to attending schools, participants also shared their efforts to draw on community resources to achieve their educational goals. One participant from Liberia, for example, emphasized that, “it takes a village” to provide education and wanted to have “a kind of study center where African immigrants can be helped in the area of computer literacy and other [areas].” Similarly, recognizing that computer literacy is a challenge for many Sudanese newcomers, a participant shared that “we started to create our Sudanese community here,” and the organization the participant worked for experimented with offering computer classes for community members. Although it was a small group, he saw its benefits: “ . . . those people who attended it, actually, they used it, and it’s benefited them . . . in their school, and there is one guy who is—he got his own business. He’s able now to use it in his business.” Drawing upon their social capital to achieve their aspirational goals in education, participants also commented on how they were able to utilize community resources, such as English tutoring programs at the local library and multicultural programs offered at the schools. One participant served as a tutor working with Congolese families:

We have a center for the kids to come do their homework, help them, teach them computer literacy. We have programs for the parents and we have Congolese, Montagnard, and Vietnamese families, so we have all these things for them to get together to understand with Americans and know the different cultures.

This participant further expressed her desire to see “something like that for all cultures or most cultures and people from different countries.” During the focus group discussions, participants shared many existing resources in our local community. For example, the North Carolina African and World Services Coalition (NCAWSC) is very active in supporting refugees from all over (Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Iraq, Myanmar [formerly Burma], Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Vietnam, etc.) who settle in our city. Churches and other support groups are also active, and each immigrant community has developed its own support systems for newly arriving immigrants.

Navigational capital

With experiences navigating the educational system in their home country and negotiating learning experiences for themselves or their children in the United States, participants shared not only strategies they used to transition into the U.S. culture but also ways to balance it with their own cultural heritage. Navigational capital reported by the participants was connected with their social capital in terms of networks and community resources. Liberian immigrants who have had more time and experiences negotiating various transitional issues in the local area told stories of helping more recent arrivals. As one Liberian participant commented, “with people immigrating themselves is the understanding they can learn something from you and your experiences to help them figure out how to make the adjustments they have to make in a new place.” Participants felt they had gained insights through their own experiences balancing their home culture with American culture that they wanted to share with their children. One participant from China, for example, reflected,

I think for cultural difference, if I understand better by that time, and understood better, a lot of things could be different. I could have done differently. Now I understand a lot. For example, normally, when we Chinese go to places—’cause I do Chinese ways in Chinese organization and I do American way in U.S. organization. When you deal with the thing, we build relationship first. So a lot of things, [to] deal with things, with problems, was relationship, while the U.S. way, I wouldn’t say [it’s] always that way, but most of the time, you deal with things through systems . . . . There’s a big cultural shock.

The participants from China also shared their strategies to prepare their children to become “global citizens,” emphasizing the importance of having children who are “well-rounded” and able to “get along with other people, different people, no matter [if they are] in China or in the States or in Korea.” One participant commented,

Cultural value is important too. Each culture has its good point and bad one. Chinese and American value, I think so too. I want to provide my son the chance to learn Chinese culture and also to learn American culture and background. I try my best to have him both, to have the good points of both cultures.

Learning to navigate the U.S. schooling experiences for their children is another important aspect where participants demonstrated their navigational capital. One participant from Mexico, for example, shared how she stayed involved at the school to support her daughter’s learning and encourage her daughter to negotiate any challenges she may encounter at the school.

And I’m always aware of everything at school. I go and talk a lot to the teacher. And now [name] who is my daughter, she has improved a lot with this new teacher, and I hope I have the same teacher next year because she is really good. I think that as we went through very difficult situation in the past, children have to go through them as well. . . . I always tell her that there are always things that could happen to her here, or anywhere else, and if something happens to her at school, she should look for help at school or she should tell me because I always have told her that she should have a goal and that she should always fight to reach her goals that if she has some problems on the way of reaching her goals she should try to go over them and go on to reach her goals.

Other participants from Mexico also shared similar experiences and emphasized the importance of making connections with teachers and becoming directly involved in their children’s learning experiences:

I have always told the teacher that the education starts at home and continues at school. So I think the teachers play a very important role. For example, me, I always try to be in contact with the teacher so the teacher knows I am concerned and want to support my children because as parents we have the responsibility to encourage our children to study. . . . Because if you’re not constantly going to school and trying to find out with the teacher what’s going on with your child, then we can’t blame it on the teacher. Sometimes we want to blame everything on the teacher and that’s not right. It’s hard for us with one or two children. I can’t imagine how the teacher feels with 20-something kids! It should be like a team: teacher, student and parents. Yes, because if someone doesn’t work as a team then you can’t do anything.

Thus, we heard in these stories of navigational capital about strategies the participants learned for negotiating the institution of school and finding solutions for clashes between home and U.S. cultural ways of being.

Linguistic capital

Among the four groups in this study, Liberian participants were the only group of native English speakers. Even though they reported that sometimes they were not recognized as fluent speakers of English due to their accent, they emphasized that they speak “good English” and “clear English.” The other three groups of participants were native speakers of their home languages, and most of them studied English prior to coming to the United States. Participants from Sudan, for example, reflected that both English and Arabic were used as instructional languages in college at home. One of the participants also pointed out that for some Sudanese, their first language was their local dialect and Arabic was the school language they needed to learn.

For participants who speak multiple languages, it was not surprising to learn of parents’ aspirations for their children to not only become fluent in English, but also be able to leverage their home languages. The participants from Mexico, for example, shared the importance of using both English and Spanish at home, “I know I have to learn English . . . so I can teach her both languages at home, so we can speak both languages at home, I don’t want to confuse my daughter, but that’s the way it is.” Another participant from Mexico shared her son’s desire to learn Spanish.

And he is also trying to read in Spanish by himself. Nobody’s pushing him, he wants to keep his Spanish as well. And he always says, “I don’t, I don’t want to be um, want to be dumb. I want to learn both languages, Spanish and English.” Yes, I’m very proud of him because he really does his best . . .

Similarly, the parents from China also shared their efforts to teach their children to become bilingual:

I try my best to use Chinese at home. Before six years old, my son couldn’t speak Chinese. I know for kids, seven years is the language window. So I switch my time to bring my child to China. After one week, miracle, he could speak some words and after one month, he can express himself. Then I came back here, I sent him to the Chinese School. I am so proud of him that he can speak Chinese and can write some now.

Whether speaking English or other languages as their home languages, participants clearly demonstrated their desire for themselves and their children to communicate fluently and effectively with other English speakers in the United States. Except for the Liberian group who are English speakers, all the other participants also indicated the various languages and linguistic capital they could leverage to facilitate their own learning and the learning of their children.

Resistant capital

Among the four groups of participants, those from Liberia illustrated the strongest resistance capital in facing discriminations they encountered. They offered numerous examples where their expectations were a mismatch for the reality faced by their children and themselves when trying to access what they needed educationally. Frustration with the system sometimes led to resistance, as described in this story.

And then he asked the boy . . . why don’t they have help at the school? The boy said, yea, he said, you know they have help at the school but when I went there they say it’s [tutoring] only for 30 minutes . . . someone was going to be there to give him help for 30 minutes. He said, no. He said I need more than 30 minutes. So they said, no, it’s only for 30 minutes. So the boy said, because he got frustrated, he said, forget about it, I’m not going to go because it’s a waste of my time and what my needs are, they are not really addressing those needs. And I think, that was just an example of what I see happening to a lot of these immigrant kids . . .

Furthermore, the Liberians told us about their children being placed in ESL classes, even though their native language is English, which they resisted.

When you come from Africa, they always put you in an ESL class. And the thing about it is, because ESL is not bad, but this is a frustrating thing because you know . . . we Liberians, we have an accent and we’ve got a way of pronunciation might be different, . . . It makes it very difficult because our kids who speak English are sitting there and these are the kids who are struggling. And so they’re saying, oh my goodness. This is a joke. You know, this is a joke. So I mean . . . yes obviously if you put them in the regular class they’re going to have some difficult time because you know they are not up to, you know, the standard with these other kids, so it takes some time before they can catch up. So you’ve got those kids that are in that gap, that really don’t, are not receiving the help they need to receive and they get frustrated. The teachers get frustrated. The students get frustrated. The parents get frustrated.

Our findings across the focus group discussions of participants from China, Liberia, Mexico, and Sudan clearly illustrated that various forms of aspirational, social, linguistic, and navigational capital were used to support the education of learners from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, we saw evidence of resistance capital expressed only by the Liberians, which we speculate may be due to their longer history in our community.

Imagined Community of Education

Drawing upon the experiences, challenges, and assets that participants shared in our focus groups, we can extract their imagined community of education. While the “community cultural wealth” framework (Yosso, 2005) allowed us to look retrospectively at participants’ past experiences to reconstruct individual and group assets and existing community resources, the “imagined community” outlook engaged us in exploring prospectively a shared vision of educational practices that empower all community members (see Figure 2). Both the cultural wealth and shared vision inform us as educators ways to better engage local immigrant and refugee communities in education. In this section, we share three key features of this imagined community of education as expressed by our participants, and discuss how community cultural wealth may be leveraged to achieve this vision in urban education settings.

First, a respectful learning environment is one of the key features of the imagined community of education. As was revealed in this study, while parents appreciate their children being guided by teachers and peers in their transition to the cultural practices in American schools, it is important that the students also develop a sense of respect and appreciation for their own culture and others’ diverse culture backgrounds. At the same time, there needs to be a sense of respect among all teachers, parents, and students for one another so that students and families from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds do not fear bullying and teasing.

Second, closely related to the respect and appreciation for cultural and linguistic differences is an educational environment that supports both students’ and parents’ multilingual and multicultural growth. The Mexican mother’s pride in her son’s desire to learn Spanish and the Chinese parents’ efforts to create a bilingual environment for their children illustrated the desire of students and families from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to experience the additive acculturation process instead of subtractive assimilation (Cortes, 1993). This aspiration, coupled with families’ existing linguistic and cultural capitals, signals great potential for developing community-based bilingual or heritage language education efforts.

Finally, family is an integral part of the imagined community of education. The focus group discussions revealed both the perception of parents’ “big role” (Sudanese focus group) in this imagined community, as well as some current issues and challenges families face. Specifically, educators are challenged (a) to empower parents to actively participate in their children’s learning process by offering strategies for those who may not be fluent in the English language or familiar with the American education system so they can offer academic support for their children at home, (b) to understand parents’ needs for translation support and be considerate of parents’ work obligations when scheduling parent–student conferences, and (c) to differentiate the involvement of families in school activities based on an understanding of their cultural traditions and their individual talents and expertise.

With these key features of this imagined community of education in mind, here are some recommendations for urban educators working with immigrant and refugee families to achieve this common vision:

Identify and highlight immigrant and refugee families’ cultural wealth, especially their aspirational and resistant capitals, through dialogues and discussions to unpack ways to show respect for heritage cultures in various education settings;

Host local forums within and beyond school settings for students, families, educators, and community members to share their understanding of respect, experiences with discrimination, and differences in cultural practices;

Engage students and families in reconstructing their experiences, struggles, and challenges in positive ways to uncover shared community assets and resources;

Leverage the cultural and linguistic diversity in urban settings to celebrate and embrace students’ multilingual development as one of the key missions in education;

Collaborate with community experts and organizations to offer facilities, curriculum development expertise, tutoring, computer skills, and teaching resources to support home language and academic English development;

Encourage teachers, families, and students from English language backgrounds to participate in heritage language learning opportunities, to develop their understandings of other languages and cultures, and enhance their intercultural communication and collaboration skills;

Invite community liaisons and leaders in designing and implementing family engagement activities to expand the opportunities for families to be directly involved in the teaching and learning practices; and

Establish a wider support network for education in urban settings where many community-based associations already exist.

Ultimately, through this study we see that participants shared a vision for a strong imagined community of education in which parents’ assets could be recognized and promoted to work with teachers and students to create opportunities for immigrant and refugee children to thrive in school while maintaining their home languages and cherished ethnic cultural ways of being. We also recognize that to challenge and problematize existing deficit perspectives, prejudice, and discrimination in education, it is critical to engage all community members in both positive retrospective reconstructions of past educational experiences to uncover assets and resources and prospective imagination for a co-constructed educational community to create a shared vision. The increasing diversity in urban education settings affords educators a unique opportunity to engage and empower community members from various cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds to share and work together toward a mutually beneficial “imagined community of education.”

Conclusion

It is undeniable that one of the major hopes of refugees and immigrants who come to the United States is that their children will receive quality education in a welcoming and nurturing environment. Participants across focus groups described how they played an active role in their children’s educational experience in a variety of ways, including teaching language skills and valued cultural ways of being at home and working directly with teachers in the schools. Participants’ stories revealed not only a wealth of tools and assets—aspirational, social, linguistic, and navigational—among the groups but also a shared imagined community where they are active participants in the educational efforts. The process of recollecting participants’ past experiences and imagination of their ideal engagement offered us ideas to better leverage participants’ cultural wealth and assets to achieve the groups’ common vision.

Battling a long historical mainstream anti-immigrant sentiment, much work still needs to be done on both systemic and individual levels to move away from unintentional and intentional racist practices toward an appreciation of various communities’ cultural wealth and actions to promote equity. We see from the literature (Kumashiro, 2012) and know from experiences that a vast number of educators, parents, professors, and other community members care about providing a quality education to all students. Building upon this common goal, all community members—parents, students, teachers, university professors, administrators, and other interested community members (grandparents, community leaders, etc.)—could intentionally and systematically engage in conversations that would lead to the reconstruction and imagination of a shared imagined community of education that challenges the existing status quo in current educational practices. We believe that a framework of community cultural wealth combined with explicit discussions of the imagined community could open up new possibilities—at both individual and systemic levels—to help us collectively reimagine what education could become.

Footnotes

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.

Notes

Author Biographies

Ye He is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Higher Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Her research focuses on strength-based and community-engaged teacher education practices. Her recent publications have appeared in Teacher Education Quarterly, Teacher Development, The Teacher Educator, and Teachers and Teaching.

Silvia Cristina Bettez is an associate professor in the Cultural Foundations Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting equity through intercultural communication and engagement. She has published articles in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Educational Studies, Equity and Excellence in Education, and The Review of Education, Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and published a book titled But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics (Sense Publishers).

Barbara B. Levin is a professor in the Dept. of Teacher Education and Higher Education and Director of the Teachers Academy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Her research interests include teacher development, teacher beliefs, technology leadership, and preparing teachers to work with diverse language communities. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of School Leadership, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, The Teacher Educator, and Educational Leadership.

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