Translating Ethnic Studies: Examining the Racial Literacies of Multilingual Newcomer Immigrant Youth and Their Ethnic Studies Teachers

Rita Kamani-Renedo

In 2021, California became the first state in the United States to require Ethnic Studies (ES) for its high school students. This mandate will go into effect in the 2025-2026 school year amidst a complex political climate. ES has been recognized for its transformative impact on youth whose cultural, linguistic, and epistemic legacies have long been marginalized within U.S. schools. Nevertheless, we know little about what it means to teach ES, and other critical pedagogies centering race and racism, to students who are navigating new racial and linguistic landscapes as recently-arrived immigrants ("multilingual newcomers"). To address this need, this study explores the experiences of ES teachers in newcomer-serving classrooms and the ways their students make sense of this educational space. I bridge educational research on racial literacies and sociological theories of transnational racialization to examine the racial ideologies that migrant youth carry with them into classrooms, and how teachers attend to them. I employ a multi-sited ethnographic design that observes students' and teachers' discourses and practices across three sites: 1) a 12th grade newcomers ES classroom, 2) a 9th/10th grade newcomers ES classroom, and 3) a Collaborative of six high school teachers of multilingual newcomers. I draw on over eight months of participant-observation, interviews with teachers and students, and artifact analysis to examine how students and teachers interrogate race and racism across borders of language and geography. Findings will help attune critical pedagogical approaches to the dynamic and nuanced ways that young people make sense of today's world.

About Rita Kamani-Renedo

Rita Kamani-Renedo is a PhD Candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and Curriculum and Teacher Education at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. Her research interests lie at the intersections of im/migration, education, racialization, language, and literacy. Broadly, she is interested in the critical literacies, racial sense-making, and political lives of im/migrant and transnational youth, and the role of educational spaces in their lives and learning. An interdisciplinary scholar, she draws on sociology, anthropology, critical theories, and cultural studies in her educational research. Her dissertation project examines the experiences of multilingual, recently-arrived im/migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking youth ("multilingual newcomers") in high school Ethnic Studies classrooms and their teachers. Prior to her doctoral studies, Rita spent over a decade teaching in various contexts, including K-12 settings, adult education, and teacher education, and organizing around educational, racial, and migrant justice. For five years, she was a humanities teacher at a public high school for multilingual newcomer youth in Brooklyn, New York. Her community-engaged dissertation project has been supported by the Research, Action, and Impact for Strategic Engagement Fellowship, the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Graduate School of Education's Dissertation Support Grant, and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. She holds a BA in Educational Studies and Political Science from Swarthmore College and an MA in Bilingual/Bicultural Education from Teachers College.