Chapter 8: Addressing the Professional Development gap for Civic Educators of Immigrant Youth

In this conceptual piece, I argue that the “civic opportunity gap” confronting many immigrant youth is exacerbated by a persistent professional development gap for social studies educators. Educators’ capacity to interrupt patterns of immigrant disenfranchisement depends upon their ability to recognize and reckon with deeply rooted narratives about immigrant youth that position them as civic novices and political outsiders. I contend that, to enact reforms aimed at immigrant students’ civic empowerment, educators need access to specialized professional development models, designed to cultivate reflexivity, collaboration, and awareness of social positioning. I examine three orientations for such professional development: dialogic, inquiry, and design approaches. I consider the animating ideology of each model, and how it aligns with a goal of disrupting status quo social arrangements in civic education. I describe how each approach might enhance educators’ ability to (a) surface and examine individual and collective conceptions about immigrant youth as civic and political actors, (b) account for their own role in the civil and political enculturation processes, and (c) develop practices that symbolically and discursively reposition immigrant students in social studies classrooms. Finally, I examine potential limitations of each model related to external constraints to implementation.