Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action through Literacy by Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso, and Bethany J. Welch (review)

Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action through Literacy Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso, and Bethany J. Welch Teachers College Press, 2016, pp. 177

Much of U.S. literacy belief and policy is driven by the deficit model myth. The myth is not only ideologically problematic, but its dispersion also has very material consequences for minoritized populations, often contributing to their precarity. Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action through Literacy works to challenge harmful deficit beliefs, especially those targeted at immigrants. The work by Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso, Bethany Welch, and their team of graduate students examines ways immigrant communities develop necessary literacies and therefore agency for accessing and navigating the complex institutions of the United States.

Their work narrows in on the literacy practices of the diverse ethnic/racial immigrant communities of the St. Thomas Aquinas parish, school and community center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In just ten compact chapters authored by various members of the research team, Campano et al. share the first five years of their study and partnership with the parish. The ethnographic study is a look at the literacy-learning strategies that Latinx, Chinese Indonesian, African-American, Vietnamese, European-American, and Filipino communities at St. Thomas Aquinas develop to mobilize themselves and fight for educational access in a variety of contexts. Through their critical analysis, the research team explicates ways that St. Thomas Aquinas community members, often stereotyped as embodiments of the deficit myth, push back against the social pressures that reinforce the myth and develop agency through the social support of their community.

In the first chapter, Campano et al. set up their goals, concerns, and focuses for working with the immigrant communities at St. Thomas Aquinas. They center their work on the question, "how might language and literacy curricula […] become a vehicle for investigating and taking action on issues that impact the lives and learning of immigrant youth?" (10). Campano et al. are highly aware of the community's ontological precarity and note the delicate nature of conducting community-based, participatory research. The team members continually return to this tension in their recurring accounts of building the trust necessary to observe and contribute to the literacy learning practices of each group.

In chapter two, Bethany Welch, founding director of the Aquinas Center, and researcher María Paula Ghiso describe how St. Thomas Aquinas' unique, by-design environment facilitates its parishioners' literacy learning. Functioning in a space heavily impacted by the pressures of gentrification in Philadelphia, St. Thomas Aquinas remains a marker of "radical hospitality." Few resources remain for peripheral communities, like the immigrants who find support through the parish. Ghiso and Welch identify the heart of radical hospitality as "a religious discourse community that urges empathy for those most vulnerable and attempts to transcend unjust human laws by appealing to a higher morality and a more universal ethos of human dignity" (31). This invocation of empathy is an important reflection of the Catholic social teachings and ethics that constitute the very fabric of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas leaders enact radical hospitality for their diverse immigrant population by making decisions about allocation of space, service-learning experiences, and art primarily through community input. The parish houses a multicultural garden, various service-learning initiatives, and racial/ethnic group-specific workshops and resources—all elements borne out of collaboration. Collaboration is an important thread through the book; it is at the heart of the ethics, the methods, and the orientation of the work.

Chapter three is the first of several chapters focused on participatory action research done at the center. The chapter focuses on the team's year and a half long work with ethnic Chinese Indonesian (Indo-Chinese) families. The families were concerned with mobilizing social capital to open up educational opportunities for their children. Researchers Mary Yee, Karim Mostafa, and Gerald Campano begin the chapter by dispelling the myth that immigrant and/or poor parents...