Living Within and Outside the Margins and Borders: The Impact of School Leadership on Successful Bridge Programs and Latino/a Transitions to Community College and Beyond

Abstract

"Living Within and Outside the Margins and Borders…" depicts the lived experiences of eight Latinx high school seniors transitioning from an urban high school categorized by the State as a high poverty, high achieving, Latino majority-minority school in a large, southern Arizona city on the cusp of the U.S. Mexico border. This qualitative study spans the course of an academic school year, and includes an examination of narratives from three educational leaders within the target school. As longtime educators contained and often constrained inside a sizable metropolitan district, educational leaders were challenged to serve these Latinx youth within the limits set by state and national policies related to immigration, achievement testing, and education of emergent bilinguals. A major goal of the study was to understand how educational leaders negotiate educational policy margins to resist deficit-framed approaches and to incorporate socially just action within their schools. As demonstrated by the participants in the present study, many Latinx youth are searching for ways to navigate linguistic, cultural, racial, and class-based borders. Furthermore, many seek to breakthrough prescribed margins characterized by educational policies and practices that seek to track, label, and often marginalize them. These margins can be "more than a site of deprivation…[but] also a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance" (hooks, 1990, p.149). Thus, these Latinx students' narratives, which include descriptions of the capital employed to overcome these barriers, were analyzed via a Community Cultural Wealth lens (Yosso, 2005).