The educational disadvantages of migrant students are a persistent problem in many Western countries. Against this background, policymakers often call for more diversity in the teacher workforce, arguing that migrant students might benefit from being taught by migrant teachers. Despite the popularity of this claim, there is almost no…

This dissertation investigated the academic performance of immigrant high school students in urban settings, focusing specifically on mathematics. Drawing on Bandura's self-efficacy theory and Zea and colleagues' acculturation framework, the study explored the complex interplay between sources of self-efficacy, acculturation dimensions, and other…

Purpose: This study explores the community-building practices of a school leader at a middle/high school in a Latino/a and African American community. I analyze how the principal leveraged his immigrant identity and experiences to connect with immigrant families and adapt to their needs to form a sense of belonging in the school and neighborhood.…

Scholars have argued that, on average, immigrant students are 'optimists' and have higher educational aspirations than non-migrant students after accounting for students' socio-economic background and educational performance. However, ethnic minority groups, which proxy the different origin backgrounds of migrants, may show mixed findings in terms…

For ethnoracially minoritized and immigrant youth, identity formation involves efforts to integrate social identities that are derived from their ethnic-racial group memberships (i.e., ethnic-racial identity) and their connection to the country in which they reside (i.e., national identity). This study investigated the extent to which these two…

Newcomer immigrant adolescents (NIA) represent a particularly vulnerable group in the United States, facing numerous stressors placing them at risk for social-emotional and academic concerns. Schools play a critical role in supporting NIA in the United States. Despite this, insufficient research addressing the needs of this group within schools…

Can immigrant school students profit from an immigrant teacher sharing their minority background? We investigate preservice teachers' (Study 1; M[subscript age] = 26.29 years; 75.2% female) and school students' (Study 2; M[subscript age] = 14.88 years; 49.9% female) perceptions of a teacher as well as immigrant school students' learning gains…

A quarter of all US students are immigrants, children of immigrants, or immigrant-origin youth. In this article, we examine how school practices can either support or hinder these students' feelings of belonging. Given the important relation between students' feelings of belonging and a range of academic, motivational, and socioemotional outcomes,…

Immigrant-origin (I-O) youth face increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States, including in their schools. School-based intergroup dialogue programming may help I-O youth and their peers build a more inclusionary culture. We qualitatively examined how I-O youth and their peers experienced a week-long school-wide intergroup dialogue…

This qualitative dissertation study explored how multilingual/multicultural immigrant high schoolers' multilayered identities intersected and shaped their experiences and imagined futures. I used intersectionality as a social action theory (Hill-Collins, 2019) as a theoretical lens to examine how multiple aspects of multilingual/multicultural…

Second-generation Latinx immigrant students in middle school and high school may experience language and reading barriers in education resulting from their cultural upbringing. This study examined the language and reading scores of 2,107 bilingual dominant second-generation Latinx youth participants enrolled in 8th and 9th grade in the states of…

Given their lower socioeconomic background and achievement, immigrants and their descendants have been shown to make more ambitious decisions regarding educational transitions. While previous research has extensively analysed transitions within and after compulsory education, research on late transitions is scarce. This study focuses on the…

In this paper, I used small stories narrative to understand how educators work with and care for immigrant and undocumented students and to examine the educator's experiences as it relates to her personal and professional identities. Data included in-depth interviews, observations, and artifacts. By using small narrative stories, my research was…

This study examines the effect of race/ethnicity, immigrant status and the role of school belonging on the academic achievement of Mexican, Filipino, and white students. We focus on school belonging and peer influences in concert with immigrant generational status and family income to predict students' academic achievement at the end of 9th grade.…

Australia's colonial past and subsequent propagation of the White Australia policy in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 has meant that 'Whiteness' remains central to the national imaginary. Consequently, racial-colonial discourses axiomatically regulate scholarly and societal understandings of racial minorities through two unique but…