Chapter 16: The Iowa Administrators’ and Educators’ Immersion Experience: Transcultural Sensitivity, Transhumanization, and the Global Soul

In her concluding chapter in Education in the New Latino Diaspora (2002), Gibson cautions against subtractive acculturation in Latino schooling. Instead of practices that serve, explicitly or not, to pressure Latino youth to assimilate by devaluing their cultural and linguistic identities, Gibson offers a vision of educational policy and practice guided by an understanding of acculturation that is additive. Summarizing the findings of both quantitative and qualitative research indicating that, “[i]n fact, immigrant students who feel they must shed their home cultures and languages may be at greater risk in school,” Gibson then describes the need for a “major reorientation” of this country’s teacher professionalization programs around the goal of equipping educators with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enable Latino youth to “remain securely anchored in their home communities and cultures” (p. 247), while also enjoying academic success. She points to the development of joint U.S.-Mexico programming as a promising means of such educational reorientation.