There’s a traditional idea of the United States as a melting pot, in which immigrant groups assimilate into an unchanging national culture. That idea has more recently been supplanted by the concept of bidirectional assimilation, the theory that just as immigrants adapt to their new country, its institutions adapt to them. And, Cristina Lash found in an ethnographic study of a school with a heavily immigrant student body, when institutions don’t move to include immigrants, it may make their development of an identification as American more difficult.
Lash conducted ethnographic observation and interviews at a California middle school with a 55 percent Latino, 25 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, 10 percent African American, and 7 percent white student body. The staff emphasized the importance of diversity, with one African American teacher saying, “I really am a firm believer that teachers in this day and age with our changing population, not only in California but all across the United States, really need to be culturally sensitive, respectful and use materials that reflect the classroom.”
In practice, though, the school’s curriculum and practices didn’t fully reflect its student body.
That’s not to say that the school’s celebration of diversity explicitly rejected inclusion of immigrant populations. But in practice, the diversity incorporated into the curriculum and school activities centered around Black history and culture. Classes included Civil Rights Movement history, literature by Black authors, and assignments focusing on noteworthy Black Americans. There was a school-wide Black History Month assembly as well as family engagement events aimed at African American parents.
By contrast, there was no observance of Latino or Asian heritage months, despite being the two largest ethnic groups. The walls of the school, used to display images of prominent Black Americans, didn’t include Latino or Asian Americans. Most strikingly, they were rarely included in the curriculum. In months of observing multiple US history and English language arts classrooms, Lash saw Latino figures included in the curriculum only twice. Asian Americans and their history and literature were included even less.
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Students Lash interviewed had absorbed the message. In interviews, Black students expressed a sense of belonging and national identity, with only one even mentioning race as a factor in her understanding of being American. By contrast, “Latino and Asian–Pacific Islander students most often described Americans in ethnocultural terms, specifically as white and English monolingual.”
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Describing how he could tell that someone is American, one US-born child of Mexican immigrants said, “Usually everyone is white. My friends that are American, fully American, they’re all white.… Their accent is full-on English. They don’t have an accent.” A mixed-race Pacific Islander and white student whose family had been in the US for three generations nonetheless said, “I don’t think I’m just straight American, like straight white people. I’m mostly Pacific Islander, and so that’s why I like, tend to not think that I’m American.”
Lash’s research highlights how “[e]ducators must also reflect on how their model of diversity may exclude students from full membership in the national community based on race, language, or culture,” an exclusion directly relevant to education since the “student’s sense of belonging is significantly linked to academic achievement and motivation.”
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