| United States of America |
• History of Immigration
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• Researchers
| History of Immigration |
The United States, the self-proclaimed “land of immigrants,” is experiencing an upsurge of immigration, leading to a dramatic recent rise in the percentage of children in U.S. preschools who are children of foreign-born parents. The estimated foreign-born population of the United States in March 2000 was 28.4 million. This proportion increased from 6.2 percent in 1980 to 7.9 percent in 1990 to 10.4 percent in 2000. Half of the foreign-born population in the United States is from Latin America, the majority of who are from Mexico; one quarter is from Asia; and one-eighth from Europe. Twenty-six percent of the population of California and 20 percent of the population of New York is foreign-born, as are one-third of the people in Los Angeles.
But the percentage of Americans who were born in another country is just part of the story. Fifty-six million people, or one in five people in the U.S. today, are of "foreign stock," which is defined by the U.S. Census as foreign-born plus children of foreign born. This means that in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix a large proportion of the young children attending preschool come from Spanish speaking homes.
The U.S. has a long history of immigration. Immigration rates, though high now compared to thirty years, are not as high as they were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Debates about strategies for incorporating new immigrants into the fabric of American society have been going on for over a hundred years. Early education and care settings in the U.S. have played a key role in these debates. Indeed, the history of ECEC in the U.S. can be traced back to the settlement house preschools begun in New York and Chicago and other large cities to serve the children of recent immigrants from Italy, Germany, Ireland, and Eastern Europe. From its beginnings, ECEC in the U.S. has been focused on providing children of recent immigrants with the kind of education and cultural and linguistic socialization they would need to become American citizens. The central idea behind the original settlement house programs was that recent immigrants could not be expected or entrusted with this critical task.
The discourse of Americanization of young children has changed considerably over the last century. In the contemporary period, the goal of Americanization in U.S. ECEC settings coexists, sometimes in tension, with the goals of maintaining cultural heritages and celebrating diversity. One of the key debates raging in the U.S. around early education concerns language policy. After a couple of decades of developing bilingual education programs designed to help young children learn English while maintaining their heritage languages and connection to their heritage culture, the pendulum has recently swung in the other direction, towards English-language immersion programs and an emphasis preschools as sites to get children of recent immigrants and other young children defined as “at risk” off to a good start academically. California was the first of a series of states to pass “English Language Only” policies for its schools. The “No Child Left Behind” legislation that President Bush has made a cornerstone of his domestic policies has put much greater emphasis in early childhood education on academics and on testing, which is having the effect of adding to the pressure on preschools to emphasize early reading and English language instruction for recent immigrants, often at the expense of bilingual programs and multicultural curricula.
Within progressive academic circles, the dominant discourse for working with the children of recent immigrants remains multiculturalism. But multiculturalism in the U.S. is a very diverse and often contentious construct. It is challenged on one side by Afro-centric and anti-colonialist critiques of the liberal embrace of the fantasy of the nation as a melting-pot and on the other by conservative and racist critiques of multiculturalism as a weakening of academic standards and as entitlement programs that favor foreign born over native born Americans.
Currently, approximately 70% of children in the U.S. have a year or more of center-based care (e.g. in a preschool) before they enter kindergarten, at age five. But because the U.S. lacks a national system of ECEC, the experiences of young children in American preschools are highly diverse and not very well understood. ECEC in the U.S. is a crazy-quilt of programs that are private as well as public; run by religious organizations, local governments, and for-profit businesses; ranging from free to $1000 a month; with a dizzying variety of curricula and philosophies. In this study, the focus will be on the kinds of programs that most typically serve the children of recent immigrants, which are programs supported by federal and local tax dollars, often run in conjunction with schools.
Although multicultural education and bilingual programs are currently out of favor politically, it is nevertheless the case that programs serving the young children of recent immigrants that are considered to be of good quality are characterized by the inclusion of a multicultural curricula and support for bilingualism. Programs where a majority of the children are Spanish speakers, as are found, for example, in many communities in Phoenix, often have a bilingual staff. Thus even during an era where multiculturalism is under attack in some quarters, American ECEC programs nevertheless are much more guided by multiculturalism than are those in Italy, where the guiding principle is integration or in France where it is republicanism. The degree to which the multicultural approach being followed by ECEC program in the U.S. is consistent with the multicultural approaches used in Germany and the U.K. is one of the key questions of this study.
| School Info |
Coming soon...
| Researchers |
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Joseph
Tobin
Joseph.Tobin@asu.edu
Joseph Tobin, the Director of the Children Crossing Borders project, is the Nadine Mathis Basha Professor of Early Childhood Education at Arizona State University. His research interests include cross-cultural studies of early childhood education, children and the media, and qualitative research methods. Among his publications are Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the U.S.; Good Guys Don't Wear Hats: Children's Talk about the Media; and Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon.
Angela
Arzubiaga
Angela.Arzubiaga@asu.edu
Angela Arzubiaga is Assistant Professor in the Division of Psychology in Education at Arizona State University. She earned her PhD from UCLA. Dr. Arzubiaga has been awarded the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and been recognized, for her work on family policy matters, by the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD). Dr. Arzubiaga’s research focuses on immigrant families’ adaptations. She is interested in eco-cultural and sociocultural models to understand family life and home-institution connections. Currently she is a Spencer Grant investigator on the Children of Immigrants in US Preschool: Parent and Teacher Perspectives study. She is also working on Effective Preschooling for Latino Children – Identifying Discontinuities Between Home and Preschool.
http://pace.berkeley.edu/pace_effect_presch_latino.html
Jennifer
Adair
Jennifer.Adair@asu.edu
Jennifer Adair is part of the Children Crossing Borders project and works as a researcher on the US national team. She also oversees the international coding process for the project. Jennifer has taught pre-service teachers at Arizona State University for over four years and in 2003, received the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award. She has published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Education Review, and the National Society for the Study of Education’s yearbook. Currently, Jennifer is living in Bangalore, India where she teaches preschool at the Ashraya Children’s Home and continues her work on the CCB project.
Gaby
Santiago
Ana.Moralessantiago@asu.edu
Gaby Santiago, member of the US team in the project Children CrossingBorders, is currently working on her MA thesis at Arizona State University. Native from Oaxaca,an indigenous southern state in Mexicoand being an indigenous immigrant herself, her research interests are focused on migration and transnational studies, discourse analysis on language and race discrimination, and bilingual education.
Joseph
Tobin, PR Director, Joseph.Tobin@asu.edu
Fikriye Kurban Coordinator, Fikriye.Kurban@asu.edu
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