Creating Responsive Classroom Communities

Reviews / Votes

This extended qualitative study by Auslander, an education researcher at CUNY, documents a project to improve academic success for immigrant and refugee high school students in New York. These newcomer English language learners are known as "students with interrupted/inconsistent formal education," or SIFE. Thoroughly developed, using grounded theory methodology, the book's central research question focuses on how responsive the project curriculum is for SIFE, who can be years behind in their education, academically as well as socially and emotionally. Auslander provides perspectives on the research question from teachers, counselors, and the students themselves, with frequent vignettes to let people speak in their own voices. She discovers well-meaning school professionals struggling with overwhelming student needs and limited budgets, similar to other research findings on public education. Despite this stark reality, the project curriculum is successful for SIFE who manage to stay in high school. Auslander buttresses her findings with a thorough bibliography and detailed research notes for readers who want to go more in depth. This book will be of significant value to undergraduate students pursuing teaching or school counseling or graduate students entering school administration.



Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * Choice Reviews * Every day immigrant adolescents with developing literacy in their home languages sit silently and passively in high school classrooms. In this book, Auslander brings them into full view, as she shares their lives and traumas, as well as the ways in which educators in four schools implemented a curriculum and developed strategies to fully engage them as active learners. -- Ofelia Garcia, The Graduate Center, City University of New York At a time when much of the national discourse criminalizes immigrants and when policies ban them from entering the US, Lisa Auslander's book humanizes the migration experiences of youth who have risked so much just to survive. She shows how schools can take a collaborative approach with administrators, teachers, counselors and community organizations to support the socio-emotional well-being and academic growth of newcomer students, and help them thrive in their new nation. Holistically educating immigrant secondary students who are also new to English and to school-based literacy practices is not easy, but it is an imperative for US schools and Lisa Auslander shows us ways to do just that! -- Tatyana Kleyn, The City College of New York, CUNY, USA