The Empowerment of Immigrant Students in School: Using Social Capital Research and Theory To Guide The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of A Comprehensive School Restructuring Initiative

The Empowerment of Immigrant Students in School: Using Social Capital Research and Theory to Guide the Design, Implementation,
and Evaluation of a Comprehensive School Restructuring Initiative
By Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar & Imelda Quintanar
Effective Strategies for Promoting School Success for Newly-Arrived Adolescent Refugees and Immigrants: New Directions for Research Presented at the Urban Institute Washington, D.C. May 30, 2013
Draft: May 17, 2013
Table of Contents Problem Posing..4 Defining Social Structure..6 Social Capital Defined..8 A Theory of Change & Mechanisms of Action..11 Our Theory of Change....14 The Influence of School Personnel on Adolescent Development & the Incorporation of Educators in Students Social Networks.14 Structural Changes: Focus on both Students & Teachers Social Support Networks..16 Fostering the Development of Student Social Networks Replete with Social Capital..17 Assessment Students Social Support Network17 Creating an organizational structure whereby students and teachers have authentic opportunities to forge meaningful and lasting relationships of support.18 An Exemplary Model of School Restructuring..20 The Help-seeking Orientations of Empowered Students...24 Student Social Embeddedness26 Gender Influences on Help-seeking Orientation30 Adolescents Positive Help-seeking Orientation30 Social Embeddedness and English Proficiency......34 Predictors of Help-Seeking Orientation (Stanton-Salazar, 2001)...35 Evaluating the Structure, Resourcefulness of an Agents Social Networks..37 The Structural Features of Educators Social Networks38 Directions for Restructuring & the Development of Design..39
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List of Concepts Defined and Discussed in Paper social capital social network egocentric network social structure institutional agent (Table 1: Different kinds of institutional agents) critical consciousness resources (social capital consists of resources) help seeking institutional support multiplex relations alienation empowerment help-seeking orientation theory of change mechanisms of action social integration social embeddedness weak ties alters
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The purpose of this paper is to explore one particular strategy for integrating social science research more fully into the design, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive school restructuring initiative. In the case presented here, we focus on a junior high or high school context that characterized by a mainly working-class ethnic minority student body as well as characterized by a high proportion of immigrant students. We examine here the social scientists role in the initial design phase of the restructuring project, and his or her role in collaborating with educators and other stakeholders in the dialogical process of design completion and in implementation. We move through various steps, sometimes nonlinearly, in (1), a critical analysis of the challenges currently faced by the school, (2), an examination of different phenomena relevant to life in schools, together with a brief review of relevant research studies and (3), an examination of different concepts and theoretical propositions, rooted in Stanton-Salazars social capital framework (StantonSalazar 1997, 2001, 2011), which, we believe, have strong implications for how to restructure urban high schools by enhancing the social support networks of both students and teachers.
Problem Posing Guided by the work of Paulo Freire (1993), we would begin by engaging in a critical examination of the challenges teachers and other school personnelas a community of educatorshave had to contend with, given the composition of their student body, specifically, urban students of color from working-class backgrounds, immigrants at different stages of adaptation, and refugees from different parts of the world. The problems include (1), the academic disengagement and underperformance of a significant portion of the
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student body, (2), the stress experienced by teachers who work hard to try to meet the many needs of their students, and (3), the distress experienced by large numbers of immigrant students due to rapid acculturation, the learning of a new language and academic discourse, and the tensions and conflicts these students experience as they navigate across different social and cultural worlds, usually without the support of the school. Echoing Freire, it can be said that a large segment of students are prevented from achieving a sense of empowerment, academic success, and a substantial measure of self-realization appropriate for their age. To arrive at a deeper understanding of student disempowerment and alienation, it is helpful to start with some elaboration of student empowermentas a concept. Empowerment is a multidimensional, social process of increasing the capacity of individuals to make sound choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. The student moves from an experience of alienation and disempowerment to a situation where they regularly experience more control over their lives and environment, where they discover new insights and abilities, and where they contribute their knowledge, energy and talent to both the school and their community for the purpose of social justice and the uplift or empowerment of others. In the process of empowerment, students have opportunities to develop social and analytical skills within a group/collaborative setting; they learn to collaborate with others, to provide sound support to peers and to significant others, to exercise interpersonal influence, and to make decisions and solve problems thru dialogue with others (Sadan, 1997). Finally, students become conscious of the strengths and temporary limitations of their social network and social support system and prepare to take decisive action; they develop a behavioral and linguistic repertoire and a network orientation which facilitates their simultaneous
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participation in multiple social worlds which embody different languages and discourses, along with competing norms, expectations, and socialization agendas; ultimately, this repertoire and network orientation allows them to build supportive relationships with teachers and other school personnel, and with resourceful and supportive adults in the community (Stanton-Salazar, 1997). The problems identified by educators as contributing to student disempowerment are framed in systemic terms, in the principal forms of stratification in society (class, race, and patriarchy), and in the constellation of organizational or structural aspects that make up the school, including the tacit rules, conventions, and forms of consciousness that are taken for granted or never examined as problematic. Educators and stakeholders therefore ask: Which routine practices and organizational features, as well as tacit ideologies, may in some way activate key mechanisms of action that produces distress and alienation in various groups of students, mechanisms of action that potentially undermine students academic and developmental empowerment. Various social science frameworks which provide a critical analysis of the schooling process as experienced by minority and working-class students would be useful in this endeavor.
Defining Social Structure A sociological approach to fundamental school restructuring, and to examining those features of the school that are disempowering, requires some sociological understanding of social structure, and school social structure in particular. School life is organized by specific features of the schools social structure, with each feature composed of spoken and unspoken cultural schemas or procedures that create cultural or normative patterns that
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define the expectations that agents hold about each other's behavior and that organize their enduring relations with each other (Lpez and Scott, 2000; Giddens, 1979, 1984; Sewell, 1992). Social structure is also seen as comprising the relationships themselves, understood as patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy (p. 3) (emphases mine) (Lpez and Scott, 2000). A Social Capital Framework for the Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Youth In this paper, we introduce a social capital theoretical framework originally developed to cast some light on various ways in which race, class, and gender inequalities manifest themselves in the school and school system, and how a typical school serving working-class minority students often unknowingly participates in the social reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Stanton-Salazar, 1997, 2001). As Stanton-Salazar writes (2001:17): The very texture of an individuals daily existence (and ultimately, his or her life chances) is fundamentally shaped by structured and accumulated opportunities for entering multiple institutional contexts and forging relationships with people who control resources and who generally participate in power. For adults, such opportunities to build social ties to institutional agents are largely shaped by societys social structure, and more specifically, by an individuals social class, racial assignment, and gender (e.g., women in the corporate sphere and the glass ceiling.) Following this logic, white males from the upper-middle and upper class possess the most social capital, cultural capital, and economic capital. In contrast, for immigrant adolescents from working-class backgrounds, usually the only context that provides opportunities to form relationships with teachers and other institutional agents is the schoolteachers,
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counselors, and administrators qualify as institutional agents given that they are college educated, licensed, formally form part of societys middle-class, and possess or have access to high-status resources and funds of knowledge (e.g., how to get into a university). We know that working-class people and middle-class people are embedded in different kinds of social networks. Again, Stanton-Salazar writes (2001:17): At the micro level, middle-class people have what we may call cosmopolitan networks, a set of relationships with a diverse constellation of people that translates into smooth access to the mainstream marketplace (meso level), where privileges, institutional resources, and opportunities for leisure, recreation, career mobility, and political empowerment are abundant (Fischer, 1982; Wellman, 1983). The networks of middle, upper-middle class, and upper class people, relative to workingclass and the poor people, are characterized by the exchange of social capital.
Social Capital Defined Although various academic camps provide different characterizations of the concept of social capital, we define social capital as consisting of highly-valued resources and key forms of institutional support embedded in ones network or associations, and typically accessible through direct or indirect ties to people able and willing to act in the capacity of an institutional agent (Stanton-Salazar, 1997, 2001, 2011). Writing in reference to workingclass minority youth, Stanton-Salazar (1997:10) defines institutional support as referring: to key forms of social support that function to help children and adolescents become effective participants within mainstream institutional spheres, particularly the school system. Such support enables young people to become successful consumers and
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entrepreneurs within the mainstream marketplace, to manage effectively the stresses of participating in mainstream settings, and, in general, to exercise greater control over their lives and their futures. The concept of institutional agent is also central to the framework introduced here, and is defined by Stanton-Salazar (2011: 2) as: an individual who occupies one or more hierarchical positions of relatively highstatus and authority. Such an individual, situated in an [individuals] social network, manifests his or her potential role as an institutional agent, when, on behalf of the [individual], he or she acts to directly transmit, or negotiate the transmission of, highly valued resources (e.g., articulating the various requirements and strategies for gaining admission to a Ph.D. program at a prestigious university). Thus, we can say that a group of students are empowered through their regular access to social capital, through personal connections to particular teachers and counselors, who activate their role as an institutional agent, and engage in whatever actions are necessary to either transmit to students highly-valued resources or provide important forms of social support. Embeddedness in a social network that is replete with social capital and with diversified sources of emotional and social support is highly consequential. In todays complex society, successful adolescent transitions require simultaneous participation in multiple sociocultural worlds and institutional domains where key resources can be found and valuable developmental experiences can be attained. For low-income racial minority youth, participation in multiple worlds includes the crossing of often stressful cultural and racialized borders; at every turn, key developmental transitions are made problematic by institutional forces which threaten to compromise or undermine their psychosocial
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development and school success. Empowering social embeddedness, the possession of a strong social support system made up of school personnel, proactive parents, community agents, and proacademic peers allows minority and immigrant youth to effectively participate in multiple worlds and to experience important developmental transitions (e.g., learning the principles of adult relationship). Empowering social embeddedness, where ties between students and teachers are salient, not only affords students academic support when needed, but also enables minority and immigrant youth to develop lasting forms of resiliency. Among other strengths, resilient youth are able to critically reflect on alternative courses of action when posed with difficult problems, to adapt quickly to new situations (Stanton-Salazar and Spina, 2000). They exhibit ingenuity in dealing with a complex role-set (role-sets increasingly similar to those of adults), as well as exhibit the ability to deal effectively with frequently incompatible expectations (Coser, 1975). When posed with a significant problem or challenge, resilient youth learn to quickly assess the resources in their network and effectively use those resources in resolving the issue (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Spina (1998) describes resiliency as a contextually optimal response to stress. Yet, Stanton-Salazar argues that in contrast to children and youth privileged by their class and race, many low-status young people are by and large embedded in social webs defined by the lack of social capital, and that schools with a high proportion of minority students and immigrants are socially organized or structured in ways that thwart access to social capital, including high-status funds of knowledge that are taken for granted by middleand upper middle-class youth (Stanton-Salazar, 1997). Structured also means that relations between school personnel and students are tacitly stripped of their capacity to act as conduits
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for the transmission of institutional support, social support, and emotional support. StantonSalazar writes (2001: 21): As formulated here, alienation is a condition of embeddedness in a social web that socially engages but does not nourish, a web that occupies and partially integrates but does not enable the young individual to actualize his or her full potential. How then does this critical perspective allow us to imagine a school environment where all minority students and immigrants are able to actualize their full potential. Indeed, we can imagine a school environment that is socially structured in ways where teachers and other school personnel are able, and are fulfilled by their potential, to manifest their role as institutional agentsto students and to their colleagues in the school; a school that is structured in ways where relations between students and teachers are organized to generously provide access to social capital and to key forms of social and emotional support. In this scenario, student empowerment is a condition of embeddedness in a social web that socially engages and indeed nourishes, a web that occupies and fully integrates, and that ultimately enables the young individual to achieve a substantial measure of self-realization.
A Theory of Change & Mechanisms of Action In any initiative aimed at fundamental school restructuring, the social scientists role is to help identify and articulate the theory of change underlying the programmatic practices to be instituted in the new school. Weiss (1995) defined theory of change as a theory of how and why an initiative works. (p. x; emphasis added). Such theories can come directly from social science, or the theory of change can come from those actors engaged together in school restructuring, and who use social science to test or determine whether their
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planned set of practices are going to produce the desired outcomes. Weiss (1995) and others (Connell, Kubisch, & Schorr) have argued that the design of effective programs need to be founded by a clearly articulated theory of change. According to Eccles, Gootman, and associates (2002: 207), the theory should explicitly state the components and mechanisms of action that are needed to be activated in order for the expected effects to occur. In the case presented here, we would need to ask how do specific aspects of our innovative school designfor example, assigning a group of students to a mentoring teacheraccount for the schools effects on such outcomes as increasing rates of school graduation or of college readiness). It should also detail the various characteristics of the schools organizational set of structures, and how different groups of students as well as the teachers are likely to influence these different instituted structures. At a more abstract level, the theory [of change] must also be plausible, taking into account current knowledge in the relevant social sciences, the nature of the target population, and the setting in which the school restructuring takes place. When properly developed in the design phase of a school restructuring, the careful elaboration of the designs theory of change, increases the likelihood that stakeholders will have clearly specified the key links between activities, outcomes, and contexts of the initiative (Eccles and Gootman, 2002, p. 207). It insures that the school design is founded upon solid social scientific evidence that clearly suggests why organizational features and programmatic activities can be expected to lead to desired outcomes. It also insures that the theory or framework is specific and complete enough for an evaluator to track its progress in credible and useful ways (Connell and Kubisch, p. 2).
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The reality, however, is that many programs and school reforms have designs and theories which are underspecified at the outset of the initiative, thus making the early stages of an evaluation difficult. Lisbeth Shorr, in her book, Common Purpose (1997), refers to the theoretical ambiguity that characterizes many programs which are nonetheless effective: We underestimated the subtleties of effective interventions. Even the best practitioners often cant give usable descriptions of what they do. Many successful interventions reflect the secret the fox confided to Saint Exuperys Little Prince: What is essential is invisible to the eye. In the words of MIT professor Don Schon, [practitioners] operate with an iceberg of tacit knowledge and artistry beneath the surface of readily accessible descriptions of effective practices (p. 219). Two principal objectives drive the present paper; first, we shall examine the implications of our social capital framework for the development of organizational features, innovative practices, and forms of consciousness that foster the development of student social networks characterized by access to institutional agents that provide highly valuable intellectual and social resources and forms of support (see Table 1 for forms of support). Also, in this collaboration between social scientists and educators, there will be proposed innovations that represent an iceberg of tacit [experiential] knowledge, innovations and alterations that reflect the genius that teachers and other educators bring to the table. The task here will be to rely on the social sciences to articulate the mechanisms of action, so that when the implementation begins, everyone knows that the proposed new practice has to be manifested in a certain way with a particular set of students in order for the desired mechanism of action to be fully activated, and for the desire outcome to become manifest.
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Our Theory of Change Our second objective is to come to a clear understanding of our theory of change underlying the school restructuring changes suggested in this paper. At its core, we hypothesize that certain changes in social competencies and in consciousness in both teachers and students, and in the organizational structure of the school, particularly those changes that affects teacher-student contact and interaction, will lead to the development of student social networks characterized by strong and weak ties to teachers and school personnel that will serve as conduits to highly-valuable resources and forms of institutional support. In turn, we hypothesize that the consistent provision of resources and key forms of support will lead to various manifestations of student empowerment, resiliency, academic success, and forms of self-realization that will forever alter students destinies.
The Influence of School Personnel on Adolescent Development & the Incorporation of Educators in Students Social Networks Empirical studies on the presence and influence of nonparental adults across the stages of adolescence continues to grow. The evidence emerging from these empirical studies provides a mixed picture. Woolley and Bowen (2007), working with a sample of more than 8,000 middle school students, many of them with significant risk factors in their lives, demonstrated that of the variables examined, it was social capitaldefined here as the number of supportive adults in students livesthat had the strongest relationship to school engagement. Another study reported that four out of five 11th graders reported having a nonparental adult who played a very important role in their lives; included were older siblings and extended kin (Beam, Chen, & Greenberger, 2002). While a bit more than half
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identified kin (57%), a bit less than half (48%) identified nonkin as their VIPs; most importantly for us, however, is that only 7% of nonkin were teachers. Measurement issues stand out in a review of the literature (Stanton-Salazar, 2011). Interview protocols where adolescents are able to identify the existence of a very important nonparental adult do not give us data on the extent to which nonparental, nonkin adults are either regular sources of social support or are tacitly yet extensively involved in providing very valuable institutional resources to adolescents. In a study by Stanton-Salazar (1995), the social networks of 145 Mexican-origin high school students with working-class immigrant parents were examined (Bay Area Study; total sample size was 205 Latinos). Of particular importance in the study was the prevalence of school personnel as sources of emotional, personal and informational support. Only 6.2% of the sample elected at least one school staff member as a source of emotional support. In terms of material support, help with schoolwork, advice regarding personal matters, only slightly more than 1 in 4 elected at least one school staff member as a source of such support. In terms of seven different forms of information (including personal advice on academic decisions), the findings are more reassuring, with 71% electing a school staff member as a source of such support. Yet, close to 30% did not identify at least one school staff member. The question emerges as to how to socially engineer students school-based networks so that school personnel become sources of emotional, personal, and informational support. Such engineering not only entails altering students networks, it also entails creating the conditions and environment that motivate teachers and other school personnel to step into the role of institutional agent and be a provider of various forms of social support. Such question
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leads us to the reconfiguration of the social structure of the school. The list below are some of the things we suggest would have to be attended to.
Structural Changes: Focus on both Students & Teachers Social Support Networks (1) Assessment of students support network. Using standard structured interview protocol, survey students and convert data egocentric network diagrams and have students see and discuss their own social network. (2) Assessment of teachers support network. Using standard structured interview protocol, survey teachers, convert data into egocentric network diagrams and have teachers see and discuss their own social network. (3) Create a complex organizational structure in the school whereby students and teachers have authentic opportunities to forge meaningful and lasting relationships. (4) Create and implement a curriculum (one for students, one for teachers and school personnel) that addresses help-seeking and networking in the fields of education, business, health, and social services (e.g., how social workers help their clients by relying on their personal network of colleagues and providers; social support and surviving cancer; social support and mental health; networking and the successful job search)1 (a) Include in the curriculum the necessary aspects of effective network relationships (e.g., ethical standards and the vital role of reciprocityor reciprocal exchange). (b) Include in each curriculum effective strategies of problem solving that entail an appraisal of ones network to see which people might have the needed resources, or, who might be available to provide a particular form of support (See section below about how teachers and counselors mobilize on behalf of a particular student by
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surveying their own network and tapping the shoulder of colleague in their network and requesting assistance in helping the student). (5) Assess students help-seeking orientation, then institute school norms that cultivate in students a positive psychological orientation (Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Stanton-Salazar, Chvez, & Tai, 2001). (6) Evaluate (at years end): (a) Survey a cluster sample of students, using an assessment of students support network. (b) Survey entire student body using an inventory producing a measure of perceived support of teachers.
Fostering the Development of Student Social Networks Replete with Social Capital Assessment Students Social Support Network An assessment of students current support networks would be a good place to start. Researchers who have studied the social support networks of adults and adolescents have typically relied on a standard structured interview protocol that reliably provides data on the size and composition of a respondents support network (Barrera, 1986; Cochran 1990; Fischer, 1982). Stanton-Salazars (1990) survey of 205 Latino high school students from six high schools in the San Francisco-San Jose Peninsula Area (conducted in 1989) used this standard protocol (1990). A few years later, in 1991, in San Diego, Stanton-Salazar used the same network survey to interview 75 students (see Stanton-Salazar, 2001). He inquired about four principal classes of social support: (1) Social / Material Support, (2) Emotional / Crisis Support, (3) Peer Interaction and Recreation, and (4) Informational Support, such as Technical Information Related to Students Educational / Occupational Future. Following standard protocol, respondents were asked to elect those people they would seek out with
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confidence if they needed specific forms of support. The criterion of confidence or confianza was emphasized. After each question, respondents were asked to specify which people, among those elected, they had actually gone to in the past year for this type of support. Using this protocol, a student could have elected a particular teacher (1), as a source of information about college admission, (2), as someone sought for a referral to an immigration attorney, and (3), as a source of emotional support after a family crisis. When a teacher or another adult serves as a source of multiple forms of support, we call this a multiplex relationship.
Creating an organizational structure whereby students and teachers have authentic opportunities to forge meaningful and lasting relationships of support Our task here is to create an organizational structure whereby students and teachers have true opportunities to forge meaningful and lasting relationships or ties; some of them weak ties, similar to adults casual relationships with well-regarded acquaintances, and some of them strong ties, or relationships with teachers that are reliable, defined by trust, and that serve as regular sources of emotional, social, and informational support. Weak ties is a term coined by Granovetter (1983) to draw attention to these relationships because, as well-regarded acquaintances, such individuals are situated in different social networks (i.e., different social circles), and thus, they can offer novel information that ego would otherwise not have received; they also are in a position to introduce ego to key people he or she would not otherwise know. Finally, adults, in the context of weak ties, tend to speak in explicit elaborated codes for meaning to be fully communicated. When people switch into this code or discourse, they have more scope for
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creativity, and the thought that it stimulates provides opportunities to see things in a new perspective and to accommodate new, often sophisticated ideas. The instructional organization of your typical large urban middle school or high school is an historical artifact that does not provide an environment for many students to experience either authentic weak ties nor strong ties with teachers. Although students typically have opportunities to interact with six to eight teachers a day, weak ties are formally relationships that are conversational, and in these interactions, one learns important things about the other. In middle and high school, some degree of trust and mutual affect is frequently a requisite even for weak ties. The formation of social ties with teachers and other school professionals that become sources of support is quite problematic for a wide spectrum of students. If we take a typical urban high school organized around an eight-period day, students have moved to seven different classrooms, plus PE, and worked with eight different teachers. Over a three-year period, students have had a least 48 teachers, and have changed classes more than 4000 times. With students moving from teacher to teacher so much, receiving instruction in forty-five minute blocks, and with classmates changing every class, many students get lost in the flux, particularly recent immigrants who become incorporated into the larger student body. Such mobility is simply not conducive to students forming lasting and supportive relationships with teachers. Those involved in extracurricular activities (e.g., theater, student government) do have an advantage, but they are a minority. With regard to student/teacher ratios (in the classroom), much research has been conducted on the relationship between different ratios and student learning. The evidence so far suggests that a only a dramatic decrease in students per teacherfor example, cutting the
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ratios to 15:1has positive effects on learning (The Institute for Research and Reform in Education, 2003).
An Exemplary Model of School Restructuring Reform models for breaking down large schools into smaller learning communities have emerged. One notable example is First Things First, a school reform model developed by the Institute of Research and Reform in Education (IRRE). The Houston Independent School District adopted First Things First as part of a district-wide high school restructuring effort under the Carnegie Corporations Schools for a New Society initiative, which was launched in 2000 (Hood, 2003). Two critical and overlapping elements underlying this initiative were district-community involvement and parental involvement. One school within the school district that epitomizes the great diversity found in many urban high schools is Houstons Lee High School. Most of the 2,077 students come from 70 countries and speak 42 languages; and many of the students come from countries marked by political turmoil. Guided by First Things First, the superintendent dramatically restructured Lee High School, breaking it into 10 self-contained communities, each with anywhere from 173 to 224 students (Hood, 2003:7). Whether social scientists were involved in crafting First Things First is unclear; regardless, one of the consequences of creating these communities of learning is that teachers really get to know their students. As Lucy Hood (2003) writes: They see the same kids all day, every day and can call them by name. Theres a closeness and a sense of belonging that wasnt there before, say Garret Reed, an
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English-as-a-Second-Language teacher at Lee. I know all 200 kids I teach, he explains. The superintendent of Houstons urban school district, Steve Amstrutz, fully realized the all students would benefit from Lees restructuring; but he was particularly attuned to the impact on immigrant students. He states, for immigrant kids, it provides for continuity and it makes sure theyre not anonymous. It provides them with support systems for navigating this thing called high school (Hood, 2003:7). An added structural feature further fostering teacher-students relationships at Lee is the Family Advocate Program. Advocates include teachers, coaches and administrative staff who are assigned to assist a group of 12 to 18 students (i.e., one to a group of students). As Lucy Hood (2003) explains, advocates meet one-on-one with each student at least twice every nine weeks to talk about schoolwork and/or personal issues. As an advocate, Debbie Lee, a culinary arts teacher in the Health and Human Services Communityone of the 10 units in the schoolsays she does stuff you would do for your own child or a neighborhood kid. Advocates are connected to parents as well, meeting with each students parents at least once a semester, providing them with a progress report, letting them know how well their adolescent child has been doing in their classes and what requirements their child needs to fulfill in order to graduate. Hood (2003:7) explains, the advocates also make sure both students and parents know about the schools college center, geared to steer immigrant students toward a college degree.
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Lee High School has instituted an organizational structure that establishes an identifiable community, a community of learning; it establishes a kind of insidership that informs students that this assigned group of teachers forms an alliance organized around them, and that the 173 to 224 students in their unit form an identifiable peer community. In this scenario, eight or nine teachers interact and share information about commonly shared students. Students begin approaching teachers with a sense of familiarity and a sense of trust, or confianza. Teachers become familiar with their students and learn about both their academic progress and key aspects of their personal lives. In time, teachers become sources of information and social support, and on occasion, emotional supportwhether its because a student seeks out the support of a teacher, or a teacher responds to signals that a particular student is in need of help. A critically-important structural feature at Lee is that every student has a formal advocate, be it a teacher, a coach, or an administrator. These supportive connections, highlighted here as multiplex relationships, are not solely the consequence of shared or enforced norms, or simply the actions of very caring educators; rather they are a consequence of explicit and sanctioned features of the schools new social structure. This raises a point we wish to emphasize here; something important happens when certain activities, rolesets, and mindsets, become the function or outcome of planned, sanctioned and explicit features of a schools social structure. They become conventions consciously and collectively followed with an some understanding that certain desired mechanisms of action will be activated, and that educators will, in turn, be more successful in their efforts and more fulfilled by their work. Sole reliance on norms and guidelines does not produce success across the board; and so, our argument in favor of integrating the assistance and direction of a social scientist familiar with youth, schools, and the schooling
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process. The job of the social scientist is to make explicit all that is entailed in producing certain outcomes; the task is to make that which is tacit and outside of conscious awareness, explicit, thus amenable to intervention based on social science. The ability is to interweave a social support system with both strong and weak ties to teachers, counselors, coaches, and administrators, is in reality, a set of social competencies that vary across the student population. While such competencies can be developed through role modeling, as one finds in upper middle-class families, schools, and communities, for working-class students, time is of the essence, and such competencies, to become characteristics of all students, must be explicitly taught (Stanton-Salazar, Vsquez, and Mehan, 2000). Networking for the purpose of building a sound support system is a cultural activity familiar to immigrants (Stanton-Salazar, 2001); the problem is that while it remains mainly a cultural activity, a discourse usually does not emerge that allows one to critically reflect upon the many developmental challenges entailed in building a social network: (1), the competencies needed, (2), the necessary opportunities to engage potentially supportive people, (3), the need of internalizing ethic of reciprocal exchange, the complexities and risk-taking entailed in help seeking, and simultaneously managing a constellation of relationships across institutional contexts and sociocultural worlds. These are some of the things missing from even the most inspiring school reform models that attempt to create community within the school and supportive relations between teacher and student. Teachers in turn, must become critically conscious of any aspects of the current social structuremost especially, that which is latent, that may be obstructing the ability of students to construct an empowering social support networkincluding avenues to accumulating social capital across school contexts. Teachers must also become critically
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conscious of their own buried ideologies and assumptions about students and the school process that might also be obstructing or sabotaging the networking attempts by students. Ideally, teachers and school personnel develop into a sociological community, where there emerges a discourse for interrogating organizational structures and forms of consciousness, and for sharing successful strategies for both supporting students and for facilitating their network-building efforts (Freire, 1990, 1993).
The Help-seeking Orientations of Empowered Students Sociologists have traditionally been interested in how the systemic forces of social class, racial assignment, and patriarchy exercise their power on people, both directly and indirectly. One way these systemic forces exert their influence is through shaping peoples adaptation to the structural constraints and possibilities which normally characterize their environmentincluded here is their adaptation to the constraints and possibilities that characterize the [individual or egocentric] social networks of their specific status group (e.g., working-class, adult Latino immigrant males; upper middle-class Anglo males). Also of interest to sociologists are those mediating entities (e.g., cultural norms, church, temple, mosque, civic organizations, membership clubs and societies, school) which either serve to facilitate systemic forces, or in the case of lower-status groups, mitigate or diminish the deleterious effects of systemic forces while bringing resources and opportunities to a group (e.g., Civic or church organizations that provide free or low-cost child-care for working mothers). Here we examine a particular feature of the coping and adaptation process as exhibited by adolescents enrolled in schools that have a history of serving students from
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working-class and poor immigrant families. Specifically, we look at young peoples proclivity (or disinclination) to resolve personal, academic, and family problems through the mobilization of relationships and through the seeking of social support (i.e., coping by seeking help) (Stanton-Salazar, Chvez, and Tai, 2001). Serious scholarly attention to this aspect of consciousness, termed here as help-seeking orientation, originated in social anthropology (Barnes, 1972; Katz, 1974), then eventually emerged in the scholarly work conducted by community psychologists, epidemiologists, and sociologists who study mental health (e.g., Lin, Dean, and Ensel, 1986; Vaux, Burda, and Stewart, 1986; Wallace and Vaux, 1993). We propose here that students help-seeking orientation, particularly as it is exhibited by working-class minority and immigrant students, provides one insightful indicator of their social integration within the school--with integration (of the individual) reconceptualized below in network-analytic terms. Students with a positive help-seeking orientation are more socially integrated in the school and do better academically; newly arrived immigrants experience an easier transition and experience more opportunities to learn a new language. Before we introduce our network-analytic version of social integration, we first entertain one classical rendition of social integration found throughout the educational literature. Taking from the work of Wehlage et al., (1989), classical depictions of social integration of students have emphasized the social psychological states of group membership, consisting of (1), students attachment to school personnel and to peers, (2), a commitment to the norms and values of the school, (3), involvement in school activities, and (4), belief in the legitimacy and efficacy of the institution. Indeed, Wehlage and his associates (1989), in their study of 14 schools, found that the most effective schools in their study exhibited high
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degrees of student integration (termed school membership embodying the four psychological states above). However, what we do not learn is what kind of social support networks did different groups of students have in these effective schools, and, what level of help-seeking behavior they exhibited.
Student Social Embeddedness In contrast, we define social integration in terms of a group of network processes nicely captured in the term social embeddedness, a concept taken from the work of Mark Granovetter (1985). We present our version of embeddedness, and highlight the associated processes, in terms of four principal dimensions. The first dimension of embeddedness pertains to a students integration in the various social networks dispersed throughout the school, networks that function as conduits to vital institutional resources, privileges, and knowledge-formsor in different terms, integration various network of that serve as conduits to social capital (see Table 1 in Appendix). Social ties are formed and activated in a number of ways within resource-rich school-based networks, including membership within prestigious school organizations (e.g., ASB) and participation in the sphere of high-status and exclusive academic courses (e.g, AP English). Once integrated in a resource-rich network, such ties can be activated by help-seeking behaviors enacted by a student as part of a consistent coping strategy for meeting an array of challenges associated with life circumstances, school, and academic performance (see Frydenberg, 1997). The second dimension of embeddedness entails students individual or egocentric networks characterized by social ties to teachers and other school personnel that serve as conduits to highly-valuable resources and various forms of social support not only vital to
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academic success, but also to students mental health and overall well-being. In this sense, a school exhibits a high degree of social integration (social embeddedness) when the majority of its students have personal networks characterized by supportive ties to at least three or four teachers and are engaged in active help seeking. Given that supportive ties are sustained by reciprocity, students are also conscious of the various ways they may be of service to the teachers that provide them social support. The third dimension of embeddedness is associated with the systemic forces of class stratification, racism, and patriarchy on those schools situated in working-class and poor communities, made manifest in a myriad of ways, including the prejudice and hostility felt toward immigrants and undocumented students observed through the society (Prez, 2012). This is to say that many minority students, including immigrants, enter school already psychologically burdened and distressed by racial and class segregation and by forms of racial discrimination against their community. Adolescents also increasingly become aware that the adults in their community do not have the financial nor political clout to pressure those who participate in power in their city to invest in the revitalization of their community. In the school environment, these systemic forces play themselves out in the relational dynamics between students and teachers, counselors, and administrators; in the worst cases, these dynamics obstruct the development of trust and authentically supportive relations. Teachers and other school personnel, by remaining silent, or ignoring such dynamics in the school, usually only exacerbates the situation. Many students, whether fully conscious or not, are sensitive to the psychological orientations and gestures exhibited toward their group or community by staff members (as individuals or as groups)signals that are usually communicated tacitly: (1), negative perceptions and prejudices toward their group, (2),
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lowered academic standards and expectations for academic performance, (3), social awkwardness exhibited by some teachers in establishing rapport with marginalized groups of students, (4), a consistent pattern of punitive action against particular students and others like them, and (5), a sense of futility and resignation toward the education and life chances of a particular group of students. Cumulative experiences across the school and other institutional sites that inform students of (1), their low-status and constricted opportunities for advancement in the school system and in society, (2), the aggression and hostility sometime expressed by police as they patrol their neighborhoods, and (3), experiences with denigrating signals from some teachers and other school staff members, however, tacit, eventually shape students perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions that impact the development of trust toward those adults that could become sources of social capital and of social and emotional support. A fundamental aspect of this third dimension of social embeddedness, then, is a cognitive orientation that allows a student to defuse or neutralize those latent yet imposing structural dynamics responsible for engendering social distance and distrust between the students social group and the schools constellation of potential institutional agents. Such an orientation permits a student to take account of those positive, non-prejudicial, and supportive interactions with teachers and other school personnel, to maintain high self-regard and high levels of academic motivation, and, in spite of the psychological risks, engage school agents as key sources of social and institutional support (Valenzuela, 1999). Many students from immigrant families and communities, may very well exhibit cognitive orientations that enable them to perceive and interpret the discriminatory forces of class and race in community and society through a cultural framework that sustains their
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optimism and high aspirations (Ogbu, 1991; Stanton-Salazar, 2001). Also, while many nonimmigrant minority students distance themselves from teachers and other school personnel they have come to distrust, many immigrant students once they are proficient in English not only exhibit strong inclinations to seek support from available school personnel (StantonSalazar and Dornbusch (1995), they may also find that their distinctive psycho-cultural features make them particularly attractive to school agents (i.e., as safe, nice kids). [T]his is especially the case when contrasted with the often defiant and distrustful orientations of their non-immigrant and low-achieving peers (Matute-Bianchi, 1991; Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999; Stanton-Salazar, Chvez, and Tai, 2001). This leads us to the fourth dimension of social embeddedness, represented here as a critically important aspect of individual agency in institutional life, and captured in this paper in terms of students help-seeking orientation. We know from the research conducted on adults that help-seeking orientation matters. Vaux, Burda, and Stewart (1986), using four samples of college students and one sample of adults, found that persons with positive helpseeking orientations, relative to those with negative orientations, reported significantly larger networksin other words, a greater number of people they could potentially draw upon for social support. Unsurprisingly, those with positive orientations revealed that when posed with personal challenges in their life, they exhibited a greater likelihood of seeking assistance from significant others; in turn, they generally enjoyed more advice and guidance, and more material, financial, and emotional support, relative to those who registered less than positive orientations. Vaux and Wood (1987), in a similar study, found that relative to persons reporting a negative orientation, those with positive orientations were more likely to feel
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socially connected and cared for, more likely to actively cultivate support ties with significant others, and less likely to experience psychological distress. Research shows that across studies, without the intervention of ethnic cultural forces fostering resiliency, low-income status and lower educational levels adversely affects coping behavior. Eckenrode (1983) investigated the help-seeking behavior of a group of adult women with children, with coping behavior measured following stressful events. As expected, income and educational level (i.e., SES) registered a positive statistical association with help-seeking beliefsin other words, the lower womens SES, the less inclined they were to resolve personal and family problems through the mobilization of relationships and through the seeking of social support. Furthermore, measures capturing the number of potential supporters, locus of control, and help-seeking beliefsusual predictor variables had much less impact on the help-seeking behavior of those of lower SES and for those of Spanish-speaking background. Referencing Pearlin and Schooler (1978), Eckenrode states that lower-status groups appear doubly at risk for experiencing psychological strain because they are exposed to more stressors as well as having fewer effective coping resources (p. 524). [Studies on Latino immigrant adults would probably provide more complex findings: a high degree of familism, being embedded socially in an extended kinship network, and the practices of compadrazco.] Gender Influences on Help-seeking Orientation Considerable attention has been paid to the effect of gender on help-seeking behavior (see Stanton-Salazar, Chvez, and Tai (2001 for review). Overall, many studies have shown that females, compared to males throughout the life-span, are more willing to seek help from both informal (friends, family) and formal (i.e., professionals) sources in times of need or
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distress Stanton-Salazar, Chvez, and Tai, 2001:10; see Feiring and Coates, 1987, for a review; Turner, 1994). Researchers have identified a number of explanatory factors. Genderrole expectation and socialization play a definitive role. Help seeking among women doesnt carry a stigma. Among men, the intensity of negative or ambivalent dispositions toward seeking support vary according to the individuals adherence to traditional male gender roles usually learned during early adolescence. Together with what we know about the impact of lower SES on help-seeking behavior, low-status males may be particularly at risk of having to confront life stressors without being embedded in a social network that functions as a social support system.
Adolescents Positive Help-seeking Orientation As stated above, we argue that adolescents positive help-seeking orientation, when manifested as a generalized coping strategy, is a critical indicator of their social embeddedness within the school (the fourth dimension described above). This is particularly the case when the school establishes clear norms for help seeking as both a coping strategy and as an effective pathway to academic success. Social support and help seeking become topics to study in the classroom through the social science literature. Complimenting these norms and classroom study of these phenomena is a pattern of teacher behavior that positively responds to students help seeking, by either providing the help that is needed, or personally linking the student with a colleague in the school who can help. In a comprehensive study of the social networks of Mexican-origin students in a southern California urban high school, Stanton-Salazar (2001) devised three measures of help-seeking orientation and examined the predictive value of perceived support (study
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conducted during 1991-1992). He also devised two measures of actual help seeking, which when analyzed together, were considered as the second dimension of Social Embeddedness in the school. A description of these measures are provided below. These measures were developed as part of a school-wide self-administered questionnaire survey. The high school was divided into three grade levels, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Two-thirds of the official school enrollment (N=1,513) were Latino (67%), mainly of Mexican-origin; 20% were White, 11% were Black, and 8% percent were Asian and Pacific Islander. Due to the high number of absences on the day of the survey, the research team was able to survey 78% (N=1,187) of the entire student body. That left 772 Latino students that took the survey, and 31% of the Latino sample took the survey in Spanish. The two principal measures of help-seeking orientation came from a 20-item scale developed and tested by Vaux, Burda, and Stewart (1986); using principal component analysis, Stanton-Salazar and associates were able to identify two distinct and interpretable dimensions. The first factor or dimension was termed Confidence in the Support Process, and represents the belief that help-seeking is a viable coping strategy, as well as a belief in the ability of others to provide sound support. The second dimension was termed Interpersonal Openness, representing the respondents ability and willingness to share personal problems with others. The third measure of help-seeking orientation was termed Desire for Support, and originated from a seven-item scale adapted from Hymovich (1983) and used to gauge the areas in which the student would have liked pertinent information and guidance. StantonSalazar (2001a & b) used one of the seven items: Advice and guidance from teachers and
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counselors in making important educational and academic decisions. The response format consisted of three choices, would not, not sure, and would like. The forth measure was Perceived Support, and consisted of an 11-item scale that focused on support received from teachers and counselors. The third item in the scale reads, I rely on my teachers for advice and guidance in making important school related decisions. A four-point Likert scale was used to register students responses on the 11 items. The two measures of actual help seeking, comprising the first dimension of Embeddedness, are as follows: o Sought Assistance from a Teacher or Counselor Regarding Academic Issues (during the past school year; survey administered in the spring) o Sought Assistance from a Teacher or Counselor Regarding Post-High School Plans Confidence in the Support Process proved to be nonsignificant as a predictor of actual help seeking with regard to Academic Issues. On the other hand, students scoring high on Openness were more than twice as likely to seek support for academic issues as were students low on this measure. Interestingly, the findings are reversed using our second measure of actual help seeking; students registering high on Confidence were nearly twice as likely to seek support regarding post-high school plans compared to students who were low on Confidence. Help-seeking orientation appears to be a sound predictor of actual help seeking from teachers and other school personnel. Students registering a Desire for Support were nearly twice as likely to seek support for academic issues as students with low Desire, and again, twice as likely to seek support regarding post-high school plans as those students low on Desire. Perceived Support turned out to be a dynamic variable. Students registering high on Perceived Support were 10 times
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more likely to seek support for academic issues then were students who registered low on this measure, and 9 times more likely to seek support regarding post-high school plans than were students low on perceived support. This also means that students who scored low on perceived support, and who felt that teachers and counselors were not there for them, would likely never consider approaching a teacher for academic support. Analyses by Stanton-Salazar and associates also included Grades and Family Socioeconomic Status (SES) as predictor variables. As expected, students who reported high grades (i.e., As) were more likely to seek both forms of support than were students with low grades. Clearly, we see confirmatory evidence that students registering a positive helpseeking orientation indeed follow through and actually seek support from school personnel. It is important to keep in mind, however, that those students who are low on Confidence and Openness, who register a low Desire for Support and who score low on Perceived Support are often the most marginalized students in the school and most likely got this way due to lack of support over many years. In virtually all public urban high schools, structures and norms are not established to address the help-seeking orientation and network behavior of low achievers, of other marginals in the school, and of recent immigrants; we see no organized effort to develop these students positive help-seeking orientation and actual helpseeking behavior. Using the entire school sample, SES did not register any statistically independent significant effect on seeking academic support and on post-high school plans. Measures of socioeconomic status used in studies of some Latino populations are problematic, due in part, to the insufficient variation in SES in the sample, and because of the wide variation in
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cultural life and acculturation. Cultural variables are conventionally difficult to statistically control.
Social Embeddedness and English Proficiency As an independent predictor of actual help seeking, English proficiency produced mixed results. While English proficiency registered a significant positive influence on the likelihood of seeking help pertinent to post-high school plans, no independent effect surfaced with regard to seeking support for academic issues. However, comparing two students, one an English-proficient Latino and the second, a Spanish-dominant Latino, with all variables set to averages, an English-proficient Latino student was nearly twice as likely as the Spanish-dominant student to seek support for academic issues, even when both reported the same level of Perceived Support. This analysis suggests that the mobilizing force normally behind Perceived Support may not be as operative for Spanish-dominant immigrant students, relative to their English-proficient peers (Stanton-Salazar, 2001, pp. 240-241). Furthermore, immigrant students registering at the lowest levels of English proficiency were nearly three times less likely to seek support regarding post-high school plans than those students with the highest levels of proficiency (English-proficient Latinos and non-Latino native-English speakers). Clearly, Spanish-dominant immigrants may be found to be among the least to be socially embedded within the school; systematic efforts to integrate them would be a prominent goal in our restructuring initiative.
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Predictors of Help-Seeking Orientation (Stanton-Salazar, 2001) In this section we report on the results of analyses of background variables predictive of Confidence in the Support Process, Interpersonal Openness, and Desire for Support. Family SES registered a significant positive effect on Interpersonal Opennessbut only among non-Latinos at the school. Thus, for this sector of the student body, those from higher SES families reported greater willingness to share their problems with others--in accordance with published studies. Mirroring published studies, gender displayed its prominent role in the help-seeking orientations of the high school sample. Significant statistical effects for gender surfaced across all 3 models. The findings appear unequivocal, boys, relative to girls, consistently report lower confidence in the support process, less willingness to share their problems with others, and less desire for personalized academic support from teachers and counselors. In our school restructuring design, special attention would need to be given to the help-seeking orientation of boys. Measures of English proficiency routinely serves as a key variable differentiating Latino student samples. In the regression model including nearly all students at the school, English proficiency had no effect on Confidence; it did, however, show itself to be a strong predictor of Opennessrepresenting the respondents ability and willingness to share personal problems with others. The results for Desire for Support varied. English proficiency was operative only among Spanish-dominant immigrant Latinos. Immigrants reporting the lowest levels of English proficiency showed a low desire for academic assistance from school personnel. Seems that as Spanish-dominant students developed their English language skills, the greater
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the desire for academic assistance from school personnel. However, such a finding leaves immigrant students who report the lowest levels of English proficiency in a risky situation. Similar to the results for actual help seeking, grades showed positive effects across all three regression models. Students reporting good grades registered the most Confidence in the support process; the most Openness, and a greater Desire or interest in receiving advice and guidance on academic matters. Students with moderate to poor grades, the students who are most in need of academic support from teachers and counselors, exhibit a help-seeking orientation that dramatically lessens the likelihood of them receiving it. Most social structures that organize a school are invisible and outside of consciousness; without radical intervention, there is no impetus for teachers and counselors to come to know, and to think of, students help-seeking orientation. It comes as no surprise that academically-successful students, particularly high-achieving girls, are the most socially embedded in their school. The challenge for any community of progressive educators at a school site, specifically one with a high percentage of both minority students and immigrants, is how to socially embed low-achieving segments of the student body, particularly low-achieving boys who are not inclined to seek help from teachers and counselors; another vulnerable group are immigrants with low-proficiency in English.
Evaluating the Structure, Resourcefulness of an Agents Social Networks A network-analytic account of school restructuring sees teachers and counselors as embedded in their own social web of colleagues and friends (i.e., alters) as well as situated in social networks across institutional contexts (e.g. social networks in the school, the district,
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and in professional organizations). The capacity for teachers and other school personnel to empower students and other school staff is dependent on three primary factors: 1. On the resources teachers and other staff directly or personally possess and on the institutional support they are able to provide (i.e., personal resources). 2. On the resources attached to their position in the school and/or school district (i.e., positional resourcesi.e., the power and authority attached to a position within an organization; e.g., school principal). 3. On the resources and support possessed by actors (or alters) in the agents network, but whom a teacher (or a counselor) is able to mobilize on behalf of their students. Embedded in their own social web of colleagues and friends, as well as in social networks across institutional contexts, teachers and counselors readily access resources from alters situated in their networks. The capacity of teachers to tap the shoulders of different alters in their network is dependent upon both the structure, composition and quality of their own social networks, and on teachers proclivity and history of tapping alters in order to secure resources for someone they care for in their personal network. Reciprocity is key to sustaining such relationships. Teachers and other school staff, in the role of Institutional Agent, possess a critical awareness of the accessible alters and resources that are embedded in their social networks and in the networks of their alters. Effective teachers and other school personnel, as network-builders, learn to construct social networks that they perceive will become a reservoir of valuable resources needed to accomplish their goals, to meet the challenges posed by their career, and to help their students. Again, the first rule in constructing resourceful network with a diverse set of alters is a readiness to provide others
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resources and support when neededwithout calculated expectations of return (Baker, 2000).
The Structural Features of Educators Social Networks As effective institutional agents, teachers and other school personnel must learn the value of critically evaluating the structure and composition of their social network. The selfevaluation process allows for an appreciation of how teachers and other educators can become overburden and stressed when they attempt to meet the needs of their students alone. Teachers and other school personnel commit to investing the time and energy necessary to develop an ample social network of support. Evaluating the structure and resourcefulness of an agents own social network entails determining whether an agents network is diverse. Highly resourceful egocentric networks tend to be diverse and span organizational boundaries. Network diversity is defined in terms of the extent to which network members have dissimilar attributes (gender, race, age, occupation, etc.) (Stanton-Salazar, 2001). Hammer (1981, 1983) proposed a model that suggests that the optimal structure of educators social networks, is a two-dimensional one. On the one hand, educators construct a relatively small, high-density network of other educators; such an inner network becomes a source of advice and other key forms of social support (i.e., conferring on the progress of a commonly-shared student). Such a network also functions as a reliable source of emotional support. On the other hand, one develops a cosmopolitan network, characterized by weak ties that stretch into a constellation of different institutional settings, both within the district, and throughout society.
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Directions for Restructuring & the Development of Design In high schools across the country, high achievers and those involved in school organizations are the most socially integrated and the most socially embeddedas defined by our framework. These often overlapping groups exhibit a positive help-seeking orientation and are the most inclined to seek help from teachers, counselors, and other competent school personnel. In short, they enjoy relationships with teachers and possess the good deal of social capital. In response to students help-seeking behavior, teachers and counselors step into the role of institutional agent. The impetus behind any serious and major restructuring effort is to address the needs of the rest of the students in the school; and included in this impetus are arrangements that empower teachers to effectively address the needs of vulnerable students. Creating a school where social embeddedness speaks both to the organization of the school and to the characteristics and experiences of every student; it requires a restructuring design that is network-analytic, and a group of educators that exhibit what Paulo Freire terms, a critical consciousness (Freire, 1993). As we saw in the Stanton-Salazar study (2001), help-seeking orientation is consequential, in the sense that in the process of exercising a coping strategy oriented toward help seeking, trusting relationships with adults are solidified, and embeddedness in the resource-networks of the school is ensured. A school where all the students exhibit a positive help-seeking orientation is a dynamic, highly effective school. In the realm of instruction and subject matter courses, learning is accelerated when situated within close and trusting relationships with teachersrelationships oriented toward enabling the student to empower him or herself. Intimacy and trust are nonnegotiable features of the pedagogical relationship. In the words of Paulo Freire: ...our relationship with the learners demands that we respect them and demands
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equally that we be aware of the concrete conditions of their world, the conditions that shape them. To try to know the reality that our students live is a task that the educational practice imposes on us: Without this, we have no access' to the way they think, so only with great difficulty can we perceive what and how they know. ... there are no themes or values of which one cannot speak, no areas in which one must be silent. We can talk about everything, and we can give testimony about everything.2 Thus, for positive help-seeking orientations to be a characteristic of all students, the entire gamut of relationship-building, help seeking, networking, and Freires pedagogical intimacy, have to become explicit norms and practices of the school culture. By explicit, we mean a discourse emerges for talking about what, traditionally, has been tacit and invisible, yet standard among high achievers and their select group of teachers. We speak here of a discourse for talking about network-building, help seeking, institutional agents, and social capital, and their importance, not only in school, but also in the world outside of school, in the university, in the workplace, in politics, and in so many other places and arenas in society. Such a restructuring effort translates into transforming the culture of the school and the social structures that manifest as both explicit and latent rules for how people engage in the schooling process and for how teachers engage in their work as educators. The learning of a new culture will require new identities, the learning of a new discourse, and adaptation to new social structures that redefine how the students, teachers, and the school is reorganized. Nothing less than new curricula for students and for teachers, and the full commitment of all personnel at the school to radical restructuring, would be necessary.
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The Empowerment of Immigrant Students in School: Using Social Capital Research and Theory To Guide The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of A Comprehensive School Restructuring Initiative

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The Empowerment of Immigrant Students in School: Using Social Capital Research and Theory To Guide The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of A Comprehensive School Restructuring Initiative

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The Empowerment of Immigrant Students in School: Using Social Capital Research and Theory to Guide the Design, Implementation,

and Evaluation of a Comprehensive School Restructuring Initiative

By Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar & Imelda Quintanar

Draft: May 17, 2013

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

Stanton-Salazar & Quintanar

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