This week we read Unauthorized Immigrants Students in the United States. The article was about how immigrants, especially those who are illegally here in the country, struggle with education. When the children come to America from any country there are always struggles and problems. Some of the problem that illegal immigrants children face when they are here are a potential loss of their parents because of deportation, increased risk in mental health issues, psychosocial problems, and they struggle to preform in the classroom. If or when their parents are deported it affects the child in a couple of ways. Whether they only had one parent with them, they will have to take responsibility for their whole family if they are the oldest. Sometimes these kids are no older than 12. Outside of their family situation, the kids can struggle too well in school. This can either be just being able to perform or making new friends.Since the kids have immigrated to America, they are more susceptible to bullying.Also, most kids do not speak English that well so it creates a barrier for the kids when they try to learn the content in their classes. The kids have forged identities in super hostile environments. School is supposed to be the safe space for the kids, but it ultimately does the opposite. Teachers also have no way of knowing what the students issues and problems are. They are prohibited from asked students about immigration, so teachers can make assumptions, but in most cases making assumptions hurts the kids. All the teachers can do is support the student and give them everything they need inside of the classroom. In some cases, this results in the student sharing with the teacher what is going on. In that case the teacher can try and help the student.
The next part of the article talks about how there is a way to gain citizenship for the families. DACA and DAPA were created during the Obama administration. DACA protected undocumented children from deportation, while at the same time providing them work permits, higher chances of receiving a drivers license, a trust in the authorities and allowing them to seek preventative health care. Even though it is such a helpful tool, many undocumented families and kids can not afford it because the application costs $500.Also, there was a Supreme Court ruling on whether DACA should be expanded. The vote ended in a split decision.This ultimately resulted in DACA remaining the same. Another crucial part of that helps immigrant children succeed is the McKinney-Vento act. This act allowed students with no medical records or identification to enroll at school. Schools require many different immunizations and forms of identification to allow the kids to be there. This would mean that all undocumented kids would never attend school, but the act allows them to bypass having documentation, immunization, and identification.
Each of us in the Learning Community focused on our part that we thought was crucial to the article. Together though, we focused on the four main parts of the article. Separately, we focused on the specific part and within that part were more detailed sections of the article. When creating our lesson plan we were taking bits and pieces from other groups, but at the same time we wanted to be creative and do our own thing. So we did a spin-off of the four corners activity where each of us came up with a different question to have our classmates answer. This was like an exit ticket, but after they wrote their answers on the board we went over them and gave our thoughts on the questions.
My contribution to the learning experience was I created a slide on the families pathways to citizenship, a slide on what DACA is, and a slide on school enrollment and participation. I also created my question for the four corners activity and found a video to show the class, but we ran out of time so the video could not be shown. Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItWweMVi41s. My responsibilities were to present my slides to the class and go over the question I had created as well. I used one source while learning about DACA. My source was https://undocu.berkeley.edu/legal-support-overview/what-is-daca/ .
Ambrose Blogs 