My Country, 'tis of Thee: Examining the Relationship Between Immigrant Students' Political Socialization and Their Feelings of Belonging in the United States and Canada
Open Access
- Author:
- Brezicha, Kristina Franciska
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Education
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 02, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Dana Lynn Mitra, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Gerald K Letendre, Committee Member
Erica Frankenberg, Committee Member
Stephanie Cayot Serriere, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Political socialization
Belonging
Immigrant Students
Citizenship
Education Policy - Abstract:
- While political scientists have long described the choice to engage politically as a rational decision, we consistently see evidence of individuals participating because they value the community they live in, and the identity they gain by belonging to a community. The political socialization literature, which studies the knowledge, attitudes, habits and dispositions that motivate young people to become politically active, continues these individualistic assumptions by focusing on individual students’ thinking rather than the school and community context where students live, learn and interact. By excluding students’ feelings of belonging to the school and symbolically the broader community, political socialization scholars miss a crucial element of students’ political socialization. This failure is particularly problematic for immigrant students whose first experiences of in/exclusion in their new countries’ governments come from the schools that they attend. I use an exploratory, comparative, embedded case study of two school districts: one in Pennsylvania and the other in Manitoba, Canada to examine the unexplored relationship between immigrant youths' political socialization process and their feelings of belonging to their school community. Using document analysis, observations, interviews, surveys and reflective writing, the study contextualizes a previously largely undifferentiated model of political socialization. Students described feelings of belonging which largely aligned with the literature on belonging. These feelings included feeling comfortable, accepted, known, trusted and cared for. Many students relied on a thin sense of belonging to maintain a feeling of connection even when the students’ experiences with school and community did not warrant feelings of belonging. This thin sense of belonging allowed them to justify and claim their right to be somewhere even when the people and policies of that place did not warrant a feeling of belonging. In school, the study shows that teachers’ responses to the students shaped the students’ experiences of schooling. Such that when students forged caring, responsive relationships with teachers, students’ feelings of belonging to the school existed even as those same students recognized the myriad of problems in their school such as bullying or the academic failures of many of their peers. School-level policies also influenced students’ feelings about their relationship with adults and others in the schools. These policies communicated school officials’ assumptions to the students and this helped or hindered students’ feelings of belonging to the school. Lastly, the findings highlight the varying understanding of citizenship that students’ hold. One group of students tended to define citizenship in legal terms of the rights and responsibilities entailed in citizenship. The other group of students focused on the relational aspects of citizenship. However, while the students differed in their various emphases on the priority of citizenship, they shared a similar understanding of what the characteristics of good citizenship entailed. The relationship between belonging and citizenship became the most clear when students discussed the characteristics of a good citizen and those that they considered citizen role models. These good citizens shared the characteristics with people who helped creates places of belonging for the students. We see that the students’ role models exemplify individuals who both help students feel a sense of belonging to their schools and communities as well as model good citizenship for the students. The findings show that immigrant students’ feelings of belonging relate to how they conceptualize the concept of citizenship and whom they find to be good citizens. This dissertation will add an important but absent element to the political socialization model, the role of belonging to the school community. Lastly, it challenges the rationalistic assumptions undergirding much of political socialization research. Given the burgeoning population of immigrant children, the study explores fundamentally important relationships between schools, immigrant children’s feelings of belonging and their political socialization.