Thesis advisor: Maria E. Brisk / First and second generation immigrant youth constitute 20 percent of the children growing in the United States (Suarez Orozco et al., 2008), a population struggling to gain access to educational and professional institutions. This ethnographic study of the daily lives of recently-arrived immigrant youth in high school takes a transnational point of departure to look at how opportunity and restriction are structured in the lives of 12 male immigrant youth, revealing two fields which have a high incidence in the investment and attainment of status in the field of education: the migration process and work. Through the description of their daily practices, the study reveals how this population navigates access to social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). A major factor in the educational success of immigrant youth is not present in educational research: the role of documentation status. By describing the cultural practices of young migrants and their families prior to, during and after the migration process, the study shows how the migration experience produces capital by placing youth in a variety of migration statuses. Their status in the migration process, in turn, structures opportunities to professional and educational experiences in order to affect their social mobility. This also work highlights the dynamic interaction between the fields of migration processes, work and education for immigrant youth, where status in each field transfers to each other and multiplies. While many of the scholarship on Bourdieu focuses on a particular field and argues the `relative autonomy of each field', this works shows that in order to describe the structural barriers to mobility for immigrant youth, we need to take into account the integrated nature of these fields. This study has major implications for schools, communities and teacher training programs that serve the growing population of immigrant students as well as how immigration is discussed both in the context of education and in the public sphere. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101603 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Jefferies, Julian |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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