Building Bridges and Borders with Deficit Thinking

In this paper, we look at a high school to college transition program intended to prepare Latinx youth living in Arizona, a southwestern US border state, to negotiate, if not cross, borders, including those associated with accessing college. Purposefully, we problematize the at-risk discourses that...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jill Koyama (Author), Suzanne Desjardin (Author)
Format: Book
Published: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 2019-07-01T00:00:00Z.
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Summary:In this paper, we look at a high school to college transition program intended to prepare Latinx youth living in Arizona, a southwestern US border state, to negotiate, if not cross, borders, including those associated with accessing college. Purposefully, we problematize the at-risk discourses that reify the nature of these border landscapes within neoliberal framings aimed at explaining educational patterns of Latinxs and that infuse the college bridge program we examine. We demonstrate that while the program provides social and cultural capital, as well as additional temporary academic supports that high school students need to navigate college-going processes, it is also embedded with deficit perspectives that frame Latinxs as at-risk because of their culture, ethnicity, and language, or conversely, disregard their heritage entirely. Finally, we offer recommendations for future research of bridge and transition programs. We argue for turning examinations upside down to resituate and reconsider, and potentially dismantle, the enactments of at-risk deficit thinking, which still undergird many programs aimed at mediating borders experienced by Latinxs in the US.
Item Description:0100-3143
2175-6236