Public Education, Immigrants, and Racialization: The Contemporary Americanization Project
Discusses the "segmented assimilation" of immigrant students arriving in the US as exemplified by a CA high school with a rapidly increasing immigrant population & how it has responded to issues of race, class, culture, & language. An ethnographic study conducted 1992-1994 focused on 10 immigrant students & their experience of their new country. The author also designed projects to involve students & teachers in related studies of immigration. Immigrant students found themselves caught between the need to gain acceptance by becoming American & the need to remain themselves. Nonimmigrant students had similar concerns, but their problems were related to race rather than national origin, & they tended to ignore immigrants. The article discusses teachers' attempts to deal with the needs of both groups. The author discusses this school as a microcosm of the US immigrant experience. 1 Table, 25 References. J. R. Callahan