Lessons from an Expert Teacher of Immigrant Youth: A Portrait of Social Justice Teaching

ABSTRACT With approximately 40 million foreign-born people in the United States, US classrooms are witnessing an intense concentration of newcomer students and a persistent achievement gap between immigrant students and their English-speaking, US-born peers. Yet, some teachers are consistently successful with “those” children typically marginalized by schools. In this article, we describe, analyze, and theorize the practice of a master teacher who has spent over 20 years working with newcomer immigrant youth in the United States. Daphne invites her students to co-create the curriculum with her around their pressing questions, driven by her strong belief that her students are full of capacity, woke to the world around them, and thinking deeply about issues that affect them. Daphne’s practice demonstrates the power of critical pedagogy, funds of knowledge, and learning communities when they are enacted consistently as an ongoing and regular practice. Her students become agentic learners who thrive in ways we would wish for all students.