Growing immigrant populations in the United States and Europe have transformed communities in recent years. Immigration brings important changes to everyday life, especially for schools. The integration of immigrants in schools prompts debates about assimilation and multicultural education. It spurs policymakers to respond to language and cultural diversity. And it alters the work of teachers, who are often on the front lines of community responses to immigration. Spain is a newcomer to these issues. Formerly an immigrant-sending country, Spain now has comparable rates of immigration to more traditional immigration countries like the United States, Germany, France and England. Study of the social change these new immigrant populations set in motion is just beginning in Spain. To date, studies mainly focus on policy models or the experiences of immigrants in schools (Agrela et al. 2008; Carrasco, Pàmies, and Ponferrada 2011; Zapata-Barrero and de Witte 2007). Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have called for more studies of how the host society shapes immigrant integration (Alba 2005; Thomson and Crul 2007). This dissertation study therefore takes up the question of schools as a context shaping immigrant incorporation in Barcelona, Spain. Specifically, I focus on the role of schools in defining what it means for integrate into the cultural mainstream of society.
Three broad questions guide this study of the symbolic and social ways schools matter for immigrant integration. How do education policies define what it means to integrate immigrants in schools? What does it mean to integrate immigrants at the school level, and how do policies matter? What are teacher beliefs about the meaning of immigrant integration? I investigate these questions in depth in this dissertation study, looking into what it means to belong in schools, the role of language in marking belonging, and assumptions of immigrant change. I also look into why immigrant integration comes to mean what it does at each level of the education system.
I study these issues in Barcelona, Spain, where official bilingualism in Spanish and Catalan, and a large Spanish-speaking immigrant population, complicate questions of immigrant integration. The study employs in-depth case study research methods including open-ended interviews, ethnographic observations, and document analysis. At the policy level, I interviewed 37 policy officials and collected and analyzed policy formation and implementation documents. To understand implementation at the school level, I compared two high schools with similar immigrant populations. I interviewed school leaders, new immigrant classroom teachers, and district coaches. I also did over 160 hours of observations in the two schools, and collected numerous documents. Finally, I interviewed 24 regular subject teachers to understand their beliefs about immigrant integration, belonging, and the mainstream in Barcelona.
The study findings show how history - in this case earlier experiences with immigration, integration, and language issues - influences what integration comes to mean in schools. Specifically, I found that the meaning of integration in Barcelona schools depended on past experiences with diversity and difference. At the policy level, it depended on past versions of integration policies focused on integrating Spanish-speaking people from other parts of Spain. In schools it depended on school history and historical norms for how schools attended to differences in learning needs. And at the individual teacher level, beyond the reach of many policies, the meaning of immigrant integration depended on teachers' own family and professional backgrounds with being different or seeking a unified Catalan identity in Barcelona, Spain. I also found that district coaches played an important intermediary role in shaping policy implementation.
