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Transnational Messages: What Teachers Can Learn from Understanding Students’ Lives in Transnational Social Spaces
- The High School Journal
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 92, Number 4, April-May 2009
- pp. 100-114
- 10.1353/hsj.0.0026
- Article
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This study investigates how comments that Mexican nationals made about U.S. schools influenced Mexican immigrant adolescents’ perceptions of and experiences in U.S. schools. I investigated the diffusion of this information at three specific points in time—prior to immigration, upon entry to the U.S., and after a few years of living in the U.S. and attending schools here. By sharing information across borders, these Mexican immigrant students and their co-nationals formed a transnational social space, where immigrant children established and maintained productive ties between their country of origin and their receiving country. The themes that these transnational messages revealed included issues of cost of education, concerns with academic quality, value of the English language, social struggles, and racial confrontations in U.S. schools. This article also addresses how U.S. teachers can develop a teaching agenda that addresses the concerns revealed by these transnational messages.