Examining Teachers' Awareness of Immigration Policy and Its Impact on Attitudes toward Undocumented Students in a Southern State

Feature Examining Teachers’ Awareness of Immigration Policy and Its Impact on Attitudes toward Undocumented Students in a Southern State Sophia Rodriguez, with William McCorkle1 Abstract This study investigates teachers’ awareness of federal and state immigration policy and how it impacts their attitudes toward undocumented students using an explanatory mixed-methods design in a focal state in the New Latino South, i.e., South Carolina. Data were collected in 2016–2018 during the height of post-Trump anti-immigrant rhetoric and a flurry of xenophobic initiatives. The article shares descriptive survey data results (n = 101) that reveal an insignificant correlation between teachers’ awareness and attitudes but illustrate an alarming lack of awareness of policies related to immigration and a range of attitudes regarding these policies. Qualitative interviews showcase more deeply teachers’ attitudes about immigrants/immigration policy. The paper argues for increasing teacher awareness in the form of sociopolitical knowledge of policy contexts and a nuanced conceptualization of teacher empathy. The significance of this study is that to date there has not been a large-scale study that examines teachers’ awareness of federal and state immigration policy and how that awareness shapes attitudes toward undocumented students specifically, yielding practical knowledge for teacher preparation programs and professional development. Implications Volume 31 | 2019 suggest that teachers who lack sociopolitical awareness are more likely to believe in false or inaccurate narratives about immigrants, which negatively impacts undocumented students. Introduction This timely study acknowledges that undocumented immigrant students face significant challenges in schools and US society. This study speaks directly to such challenges as it examines the anti-immigrant policy climate in the focal state of South Carolina. This antiimmigrant policy climate that recently arrived undocumented youth navigate positions them as “criminals,” “risks,” and “threats” to society2,3 (Rodriguez, 2017). As undocumented immigrants are negatively positioned in public and political discourse, it is imperative to investigate how this social and political context shapes their school experiences. To this end, this study contributes to the growing body of literature about K–12 teachers’ experiences working with undocumented immigrant youth.4,5,6 The study creates new knowledge about high school teachers’ awareness about the federal and state immigration policies and their attitudes toward undocumented students in a constrained and hostile policy context in the New Latino South, specifically South Carolina. 21 This study investigates teachers’ awareness this specific population,15,16,17 which indicates of federal and state immigration policy7 the largest percentage growth in the United and how it impacts their attitudes toward States over that time period. Relatedly, the undocumented students using an explanatory teachers in this study work with recently armixed-methods design8 in a focal state in rived undocumented high school youth from the New Latino South,9 specifically South Central America within the last two years.18 Carolina. Data were collected in 2016– These newly arrived undocumented students 2018 during the height of post-Trump anti- face limited access to resources, and their immigrant rhetoric and the flurry of racist and rights and access vary depending on when they xenophobic initiatives from arrived and how they are arbithe Trump administration. trarily labeled by government Approximately 5.1 million This political context shaped agencies. 19 Even though children 18 years or younger undocumented immigrants’ South Carolina restricts acare either undocumented or cess to public and social lives around the country. In states with restrictive, anti- have undocumented parents resources and educational immigrant policies, such opportunity, undocumented as South Carolina, fears for undocumented students all have a right to K–12 education.20 students were magnified. This in turn increased Yet, that right is comprised the lack of instituteachers’ encounters with new challenges to tional supports in public schools that are low understanding their undocumented immigrant resourced and whose teachers are ill informed students’ lives.10 The hypothesis for the larger about the political and social context shaping mixed-methods study suggests that teachers’ undocumented students’ experience.21 While individual levels of awareness correspond previous scholarship addresses immigrant with their personal attitudes toward such youth experiences in schools broadly, includstudents. Given the gap in the literature ing ability to achieve academically and the on teachers’ awareness of federal and state role of teachers in supporting such achievepolicy relating to undocumented students, ment, it primarily focuses on teachers’ beliefs the project reveals a need for increasing toward English-language learners (ELLs) and teacher awareness in the form of sociopolitical their efficacy for teaching ELLs rather than knowledge and teacher empathy—a concept teachers’ knowledge of immigration policy drawing on Zembylas’s work on sociopolitical and how it impacts the educational trajectories empathy.11,12 The findings reveal teachers’ lack and social mobility of immigrant youth, which of awareness about immigration policies that is the focus of the current study. impact undocumented students. The significance of this study addresses two specific gaps in previous research: (1) Significance There exists limited research that examines In the last decade, the Latinx immigrant pop- teachers’ awareness of federal and state immiulation has rapidly increased and, thus, so has gration policy and how that shapes teachers’ their public-school attendance. Southeastern attitudes toward undocumented youth. (2) To states like South Carolina, the focal state here, date there has not been a large-scale, statehave witnessed more recent increases in their wide study that examines teachers’ awareness Latinx population13 as approximately 5.1 mil- of federal and state immigration policy and lion children 18 years or younger are either how that awareness shapes attitudes toward unundocumented or have undocumented par- documented students specifically. This study ents.14 For instance, from 2000 to 2010, South informs scholarship on teachers’ awareness Carolina witnessed a 148 percent increase in of federal and state immigration policy and 22 Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy how that awareness shapes their attitudes to- the qualitative interview data revealed teachward undocumented youth, yielding practical ers’ perspectives in the state, shedding light knowledge for teacher-preparation programs on teachers’ attitudes about immigrants and professional development. and immigration policy in South Carolina. The map for the rest of the article includes Integrating the quantitative and qualitative a discussion of three interrelated bodies of data allowed for the opportunity to expand scholarship: (1) teachers’ attitudes toward upon the statistically insignificant but perimmigrant students, how dehumanizing plexing quantitative results related to attitudes learning environments for language learners of teachers and their sociopolitical awareness impacts their educational trajectories, and in both data sets.24 Implications of the data teachers’ attitudes toward immigration and suggest that teachers who lack sociopolitical immigrants’ rights; (2) budding research on awareness are more likely to believe in false how teachers and schools are responding to or inaccurate narratives about immigrants, and the policy shifts and contexts related to undoc- this is negatively impactful for undocumented umented students—this literature focuses on students. teachers’ efficacy toward teaching language learners and how language learner becomes Review of Literature a proxy for undocumented status—and (3) This article’s research is at the intersection of how contexts of reception, including anti- dialogues about teachers’ attitudes toward imimmigrant states like South Carolina, limit migration, immigrant students, and encounters educational opportunity and social mobility. with newly arrived undocumented immigrants After the review of literature, I discuss how and how policy contexts in which teachers are the conceptual framework on teacher empathy key agents shape their lives and belonging. guided this mixed-methods study. Returning This research specifically connects to previous to the importance of state context, the New literature about teacher attitudes and how atLatino South and South Carolina are de- titudes impact expectations25 of cultural and scribed since this state policy context is highly linguistic minorities, research about contexts restrictive toward undocumented students and reception of immigrants, and the more and immigrants broadly.22,23 recent conversations about Then, the explanatory mixedteachers managing relations Findings illustrate the methods design that employed with undocumented stualarming lack of awareness dents in schools. Combining quantitative and qualitative data sources, a description of educational policies interrelated discussions of of the sample, and analysis related to immigration immigrants’ experiences in procedures is described. schools, policy contexts, and Findings from the descriptive survey data (n = teachers’ awareness and attitudes is a neces101) reveal no significant correlation between sary next step for understanding how teachers’ teachers’ awareness and attitudes but illustrate awareness of policy impacts their attitudes the alarming lack of awareness of educational toward newer populations of undocumented policies related to immigration and a range of students. attitudes regarding these policies with more Teachers’ Attitudes toward Immigrant restrictive views on in-state tuition and finanStudents cial aid and yet inclusive views toward access Patel argues that there remains a systemic to resources. Given the high percentage of need for teachers to understand how policies teachers who had wrong answers related to govern the everyday experiences of newcomer policies affecting undocumented students, immigrant youth, specifically undocumented Volume 31 | 2019 23 youth.26 The challenge is that schools, curricular projects, and programs often employ assimilationist approaches to immigrant mobility and make generalizations about immigrant groups that do not speak to the variation in Latinx immigrant experiences. Similarly, Amthor and Roxas and Rodriguez have argued that a decontextualized desire to help or a compassionate need to pathologize, label, and over-test language-learning immigrants for special education is dehumanizing and does not reflect the brand of critical empathy with a sociopolitical awareness of immigration policy context.27,28 Such unreflective help and uncritical compassion reinscribes racial hierarchies and, in the case of undocumented youth, neglects the realities of differing immigration status and how anti-immigrant policy contexts shape their everyday lives and sense of belonging. This is significant because teachers’ beliefs and attitudes inform their pedagogical approaches and actions in the classroom along with their perceptions of students’ ability to achieve in school.29 And previous research tells us that immigrant students feel discriminated against by their teachers, especially in relation to educational achievement.30 To this point, Mellom et al. argue, “Monolingual biases, exacerbated by misunderstandings about bilingualism, language learning and cognition, inform teachers’ attitudes about language learners in their classrooms and may blind these teachers to opportunities to cultivate and capitalize on their students’ strengths.”31 To this point, teachers in the present study encounter undocumented youth who not only need to acquire English-language proficiency in many cases, but they arrive undocumented into policy contexts that specifically seek to limit their access to resources, hindering their ability to participate in many daily activities such as driving a car or acquiring a living-wage job. Teacher Attitudes toward Immigration and Immigrants’ Rights The beliefs that teachers have regarding the 24 larger issues of immigration and immigrant rights can have an effect on their attitudes toward immigrant students.32 The scholarship on implicit bias33,34 reveals how teachers can inadvertently treat students differently based on subtle prejudices and preconceived notions. This implicit bias can have a detrimental effect on student success.35 There is also a significant correlation between teachers’ attitudes toward students and expectations of them.36 These attitudes and expectations affect overall academic achievement,37,38,39,40 retention rates,41,42 and self-esteem.43,44 While this literature at the very least addresses teachers’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, there is limited discussion of how teachers develop a sense of sociopolitical awareness and empathy that could positively impact immigrant and more recently undocumented immigrant student experiences. For instance, McAllister and Irvine found that teachers’ empathy was associated with positive interactions and a supportive classroom environment.45 This empathy was associated with a more student-centered environment that allowed teachers to “connect content to students’ interests, backgrounds, and developmental needs.”46 However, the authors argue that this empathy is not sufficient by itself as it can often be superficial. The goal is for empathy to lead to a critique of social injustice. Teachers’ Encounters with Undocumented Students With an estimated 5.5 million children in the United States living in families with undocumented immigrants,47 there has been a burgeoning body of qualitative research on how teachers and schools are responding to the influx of undocumented students and the policy shifts impacting their everyday lives. This literature is framed around teachers’ attitudes toward immigration policy, general knowledge of immigration status of students, and how teachers navigate the immigration status of children and/or children from mixedstatus families.48,49,50,51,52 For instance, Jefferies Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy and Dabach’s article was one of the first pieces of scholarship to raise questions about teacher knowledge of undocumented status.53 Similarly, Gallo and Link recently argued that understanding immigration status of students is important because the anti-immigrant policy context and increased deportations along with the threats of deportation force children to grapple with fear and anxiety for themselves and their family members.54 The more-recent research on teachers’ encounters with undocumented students points to the necessity of how policy context and immigration issues result in pedagogical challenges for teachers.55,56,57 Gallo and Link’s study traces the experiences of elementary school teachers working with undocumented elementary-age children to illustrate how these teachers create critical spaces for interrogating immigration issues in relation to teacher practice. And yet, teachers in their study still fall on a continuum of whether or not they chose to advocate for undocumented students, avoid the difficult conversations related to immigration and status, and move beyond their comfort zones,58 suggesting the need to more deeply understand what shapes teachers’ attitudes in relation to the policy contexts they work within. Moreover, a series of recent articles explore how social studies teachers are politically aware of citizenship in civics classes with undocumented students or students from mixedstatus families.59 Dabach points to the variation of teachers’ perspectives toward undocumented students and builds knowledge about how social studies teachers develop civic knowledge in mixed-status classrooms. Dabach highlights the way that social studies educators can break the silence around sensitive issues such as deportations with students.60 In this study, a teacher moves beyond just teaching to serve in an alternative advocacy role, which is informal and ad hoc.61 Furthermore, scholars examine how social studies educators can effectively teach civics classes with students who are undocumented Volume 31 | 2019 by focusing on giving these students a sense of political legitimacy and letting the students know they are safe to share their stories and struggles with their teachers. The authors point out the difficult balance between having undocumented students openly share their stories and the need for safety and anonymity that students may feel, especially in the increasingly xenophobic environment particularly due to the changes under Trump. However, they also point out the need to allow undocumented students’ voices to be heard in the classroom and not just in extracurricular activism. In this way, the undocumented population go from merely being objects discussed in civics to individuals with agency for making changes in the society despite the limitations of their civic rights. While each of these studies is critical to building a body of knowledge around teachers’ encounters with undocumented students, the current study contributes in two critical ways. First, while these previous studies62,63 only have sample sizes of between one and seven teachers, the survey data here are from a statewide sample of 101 teachers and speak to this survey data with anecdotal evidence of two rich case studies of teachers from one school district in a focal state. Second, these previous studies have not occurred in antiimmigrant states such as those in the New Latino South. While the broad hostile, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric cuts across state borders, the focal state of South Carolina offers a unique perspective on how teachers’ attitudes and awareness are shaped by the state context. The focal teachers in the qualitative data illustrate that even the teachers more likely to support immigrants’ rights and undocumented students still express troubling perspectives toward immigrants in South Carolina. This ultimately speaks to the need to integrate policy knowledge as context for teacher practice. Teachers and Contexts of Reception Teachers’ attitudes are shaped by the policy context. Previous literature addresses the 25 importance of contexts of reception, generally referring to the larger structurally stratified aspects of society64 and how contexts of reception shape political activism for college-aged undocumented students.65 This study suggests here that teachers are powerfully shaped by societal and more local, state contexts of reception. Thus, scholarship needs to address the intersection of teachers’ awareness of policy and attitudes toward undocumented students in state contexts.66 This is significant because teachers act as key institutional agents and resource brokers in schools, particularly for immigrant students broadly.67 To build knowledge about the importance of context and policy knowledge within particular contexts, Crawford highlights how one local schools’ personnel, not just teachers, reacted to immigration enforcement officers’ increased surveillance based on their limited knowledge of undocumented immigrants’ rights. Crawford illustrates how depending on school personnel’s role, limits exist related to how they advocate for undocumented students, highlighting the dire need for policy knowledge as part of educator roles. Crawford suggests that previous research points to the lack of belonging and safety that undocumented students experience in K–12 schools.68 Drawing on Jefferies, who argues that school personnel learn about immigration status of students, there were limited interventions or plans for ensuring that schools remain safe spaces despite Plyler, even when “school administrators were sympathetic toward the rights of undocumented youth.”69 Crawford’s study further demonstrates the piecemeal planning and limited policy knowledge of school personnel and educators in protecting and advocating for undocumented students in increasingly hostile contexts of reception.70 In sum, this literature provides a significant move toward breaking the silence on teachers’ experiences working with undocumented students. And yet, a limitation of this important 26 previous work is that in each of these studies, the authors have small sample sizes that range from one teacher participant,71 seven teacher participants,72 and four teachers of 14 participants.73 The mixed-methods approach utilizes a survey of 101 teachers in an anti-immigrant southern focal state, South Carolina, and provides anecdotal qualitative data to deepen our analysis of the survey data and to make sense of two rich cases of teachers’ experiences. Conceptual Orientation Previous scholarship that focuses on teacher beliefs and attitudes notes that teacher empathy is a desirable disposition to have when working in diverse settings,74 specifically that empathetic teachers embody the perspective of those from a different cultural background and “feeling with” an individual rather than a judgmental way.75 And while some of the aforementioned literature note the importance of trust in teacher-student relations,76 there is an insufficient conceptualization of teachers’ attitudes and empathy. As such, teacher empathy as previously argued in the literature manifests in caring relationships. Rodriguez has argued that these caring relationships can be dangerous because they often focus too much on how much or how persistently a teacher “cares” for his/her students and “knows” them.77 The “danger of compassion” often shadows other systemic or institutional discrimination against culturally, linguistically, or racially diverse students such as unequal school resources, lack of language support services in schools, or in-school mechanisms that reproduce inequality in schools, disproportionately impacting students of color and immigrants.78,79,80 Even when empathy emerges in the previous literature, it is not directly interrogated in the way that speaks explicitly to teacher attitudes about policies that impact undocumented immigrants. This is an important step: to reorganize and foreground a brand of teacher empathy that encompasses sociopolitical awareness and names directly Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy the types undocumented students rather than the colorblind or safer terms such as “diverse learners” or “language learners” that we so often see in the previous scholarship. The present study uses the framework of teacher empathy and awareness of sociopolitical contexts.81,82 Empathy is used to interrogate teacher awareness of policies that impact undocumented immigrants and how that shapes their attitudes. This conceptual framework foregrounds a brand of teacher empathy that encompasses sociopolitical awareness. Zembylas argues that empathy “occurs in social contexts governed by social interactions and linked to matters of policy issues.”83 This study employs two dimensions of teacher empathy: moral and political. The study emphasizes that empathy is “linked to matters of interests” (political dimension) and “values” (moral dimension).”84 This study seeks to understand the extent to which teachers’ awareness of immigration policy (political dimension of empathy) impacts teachers’ attitudes (moral dimension of empathy) toward immigrant students. This conceptual orientation guided the survey development, interview protocol development, and data analysis to draw out these themes of teacher empathy and sociopolitical awareness. Context of New Latino South and South Carolina This study examines teachers in the unique context of the New Latino South, which bears mentioning because it provides nuanced circumstances to examine teachers’ attitudes toward undocumented youth and their knowledge of immigration policy in a state context.85,86 The South saw an increase in Latino immigrants following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).87 Mellom et al. explain that unlike other states that have had historically sizeable Latino populations, like California88 and Texas,89 only post-NAFTA did an aggressive privatesector recruitment campaign bring Latino Volume 31 | 2019 This is an important step: to reorganize and foreground a brand of teacher empathy that encompasses sociopolitical awareness and names directly the types undocumented students agricultural laborers to the South in significant numbers.90 The South grappled with how to accept Latino communities into the fold of a racially segregated social structure.91 Given the racialized labor and social structure in the New Latino South, the context of support is limited at best and hostile in many cases, posing significant barriers to educational achievement and social mobility.92 This study was conducted in one of these New Latino states, South Carolina, which is arguably the most restrictive state in the nation in regard to access to educational opportunity. South Carolina is also one of two states that completely bans undocumented students from studying in state colleges and universities and led the nation in this policy.93,94,95 Roth notes96 how South Carolina prohibits these students from receiving in-state tuition at public colleges and universities and bans access so that even when some state universities find ways to subvert undocumented students’ admission, the financial burden is too great.97 South Carolina maintains restrictive education and social policies toward undocumented students that comprise having the right (and, to some extent, a safe space of K–12 viz-a-viz Plyler) to a position of illegality and minimal opportunities for educational and social mobility beyond K–12. Research Methods Based on the gaps in the literature, this study sought to understand teachers’ awareness of policy and attitudes toward undocumented students using an explanatory mixed-methods design98,99 in a focal state with anti-immigrant policies: South Carolina. Three research 27 questions guided the study: 1. What overall awareness and attitudes do teachers have regarding federal and state immigration policy and the educational rights of undocumented students? (quantitative, descriptive) 2. To what extent does teachers’ awareness of federal and state immigration policy correlate with teachers’ attitudes toward undocumented immigrant youth? (quantitative) 3. How do focal teachers in South Carolina talk about their encounters with undocumented students in their high schools and the policies impacting them? (qualitative) Study Design This mixed-methods study aimed to investigate teachers’ awareness of immigration policies and how their awareness impacts attitudes toward undocumented youth in South Carolina. The explanatory mixedmethods design occurred in two phases. The rationale for this design was to be able to “expand upon an aspect that was identified by the quantitative data, specifically the perplexing results.”100,101 In this study design, quantitative data are collected and analyzed first, and then qualitative data are collected to explain or elaborate on the quantitative results.102 In the first phase, survey data were collected and analyzed. The results revealed an insignificant correlation between teachers’ awareness of policy and attitudes toward undocumented students. However, the survey data showed an alarming amount of misinformation that teachers held about policies and undocumented students’ access to resources and an overall lack of policy awareness. In phase two, semi-structured interviews with teachers were conducted. Sample The participants (n = 101) for the quantitative portion of the study were high school teachers at ten randomly selected South Carolina Title I public schools. Given the study is the 28 first to include a statewide survey of teachers’ awareness of policy and attitudes toward undocumented students, teachers in all subject areas, including special education and English as a second language (ESL), were selected to participate. To recruit participants, an email was sent to publicly available emails from the webpages of South Carolina public high schools. A list of all the South Carolina public schools was gathered and then put into a randomizer application in order to ensure a randomized sample. The first ten high schools with publicly available teacher emails were chosen to be part of the sample. These were traditional public high schools, not charter schools, with all students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Emails from all teachers within these schools were gathered. In total, there were 778 teacher emails gathered and included in this random sample. The survey was sent to these teachers in the fall of 2016. There was an additional reminder email sent out to all of the teachers. There were 101 teachers who took the survey. There were no incentives for participants to take the survey. Demographically, 60 percent of the survey respondents were female and 40 percent were male. The overwhelming majority of the respondents were White (87 percent). Only 2 percent were from Hispanic/Latino background, and 7 percent were African American. The immigration background of the respondents revealed that the majority of the individuals said both of their parents were born in the United States, with only 3 percent of the respondents having one or more parent born outside the United States. Only 4 percent stated that they themselves were born outside of the United States. 29 percent stated that they spoke a second language, with 71 percent stating that they were monolingual. The teacher participants for the qualitative, semi-structured interview portion were recruited from two of the Title I public schools in South Carolina as part of the author’s larger longitudinal study.103 These teachers Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy overall reflected the characteristics of the survey sample in that they were White, monolingual females. I selected educators with some Spanish-language background, which ranged from conversational to fluent. The qualitative interview participants were purposively sampled (n = 10), and then three focal teachers for this article were chosen to flesh out the survey data results for two reasons. First, the author spent two years observing the three focal teachers and engaged in five semi-structured interviews with them and co-planned lessons in their ESL classes. Their insights to teachers’ encounters with undocumented students provided a strong foundation for building knowledge about the concept of teacher empathy despite their propensity to believe in false narratives about immigrants. Second, the explanatory sequential design allows researchers to explore an aspect of the quantitative data. The survey data analysis below reveals that teachers largely held inaccurate views about undocumented immigrants. The teachers were either unaware of policies impacting undocumented students or held inaccurate views of these students and their ability to acquire citizenship status or access to public and social resources. I was interested in teachers I thought would have more inclusive and accurate views, so focal teachers were selected because they taught ESL, had Spanish-language speaking abilities, and worked with undocumented populations at their high schools. Yet as the data show, these focal teachers still had complicated views of immigrants and at times inaccurate views, which were ultimately shaped by the antiimmigrant ideologies and policies in South Carolina. Data Collection Procedures, Instrumentation, and Analysis Survey Instrument The survey was developed by the author and graduate student based on the extant literature. The survey was piloted with two Volume 31 | 2019 different groups of undergraduate preservice teachers in 2016 and was distributed September 2016. The purpose of this survey was to understand the larger correlation between teachers’ awareness of policy and how that shaped their attitudes toward immigrant students and rights. The first section measures teachers’ awareness of policies impacting undocumented immigrant students, specifically policies related to education and in-state tuition, rights to college enrollment, and access to resources and educational opportunity based on parental immigration status. The construct of awareness is based on concept of sociopolitical empathy.104 In order for teachers to possess the moral dimension (measured in the survey) of empathy,105 they must first be aware of the actual sociopolitical situation and potential struggles of the students.106,107 In the first section, participants were given three response options: “true,” “false,” and “I have no idea.” This distinction was meant to show the variance between teachers who were unaware of the subject and those who believed that the state was more inclusive than it truly is. The items in the first section included: • Any student who graduates from a South Carolina high school, regardless of immigration status (legal or illegal), and has lived in the state for at least two years is eligible for in-state tuition. • Any South Carolina high school graduate, regardless of immigration status, is permitted to enroll in public state colleges and universities. • All immigrants who have legal status or visa, graduated from a South Carolina high school, and have lived here for at least two years qualify for in-state tuition. • For US citizens, a student’s parent’s immigration status has no legal impact on one receiving in-state tuition. The second section of the survey measured teachers’ attitudes toward these policies that 29 impact immigrant students in the state. These items relate to the moral dimension of teacher empathy because items were trying to assess teachers’ values and beliefs about the educational rights of immigrants.108 The items were as follows: • Students who graduated from a South Carolina high school and are illegal/ undocumented immigrants should be able study at state colleges and universities. • Students who graduated from a South Carolina high school and are illegal/ undocumented immigrants should be allowed to receive in-state tuition. • Students who graduate from a South Carolina high school and are illegal/ undocumented immigrants should be able to receive in-state scholarships and grants (Life scholarship, Hope Scholarship). • US-born children of undocumented/ illegal immigrants who graduated from a state high school should be allowed to receive in-state tuition at colleges and universities. • Students who graduated from a South Carolina high school and are DACA students (undocumented students that under the 2012 Deferred Action Plan are granted a temporary work visa) should be able to receive in-state tuition. This section had a five-point Likert scale of strongly disagreeing to strongly agreeing with the statements. These items measure teachers’ overall empathy, specifically the moral dimension, toward undocumented immigrant students and the immigrant families they come from by understanding their views on policy issues that relate to the issues of justice within the educational system. The reason for using these items about policy instead of asking directly about teachers’ views of immigrant students is because it could reveal more substantial implicit attitudes109,110 toward immigrant students. This form of indirect questioning illuminates some trends that may be more obscured with more 30 explicit items, which respondents may be less likely to answer honestly.111 Semi-structured Interview Procedures The qualitative data derive from a longitudinal study at two Title I high schools in South Carolina.112 As mentioned in the sample description above, three rich cases were selected to delve deeper into some of the results from the survey. The semi-structured interview protocol for educators was designed to understand how teachers talked about and came to understand immigration policy in the state. The ten participants were all interviewed one time in person between 2016 and 2018, and then three in this article were interviewed multiple times with additional questions related to their knowledge of the immigrant student background, border stories, and trauma; their perceptions of their ability to advocate for undocumented students; and their knowledge of immigration policies at the federal and state levels. Data Analysis and Integration Analysis occurred in four phases. First, survey data were transferred from Qualtrics to SPSS to conduct descriptive statistical analysis on all constructs: teachers’ awareness and attitudes toward immigrant students. Second, a Pearson’s r correlation test was conducted to determine the strength of the correlation between awareness and attitudes. Third, qualitative interview data were coded in two phases. The first phase included open coding, with emergent codes such as teachers’ awareness of policies, conceptualization of immigration (assimilationist perspectives), and linked oppressions between race and immigration. The second phase was analytic coding in conjunction with the conceptual framework of teacher empathy, which Zembylas defines as awareness of sociopolitical contexts in order to advocate.113 From the analytic coding in relation to the framework of teacher empathy, three themes emerged. First, teacher empathy meant “hearing their [student’s] stories” Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy to understand the experiences of undocumented students such as their border stories, family separation, and desire for better lives in the United States. Second, teacher empathy meant “knowing their rights,” which directly connected to teachers’ understanding (or not) of the sociopolitical context, including the policies impacting undocumented students. Third, the three focal teachers had budding moral and political empathy but still at times articulated false narratives about immigrant students and their families. This code was “believing in false narratives” to show that part of empathy development also meant exposing these teachers’ false narratives. From the qualitative data analysis, I generated a typology of teacher empathy that builds upon Zembylas’s previous conceptualization that foregrounds sociopolitical awareness and moral dimensions as part of teacher empathy.114 Figure 1 demonstrates how the themes in the qualitative data analysis contribute to a typology of teacher empathy, which is significant for teachers to understand in order to advocate for undocumented students. Data Integration The final phase of analysis in this mixedmethods approach was to integrate the data and compare and contrast them to deepen the understanding of the survey data with three focal teachers. While the survey data yielded an insignificant correlation between awareness and attitudes, the descriptive survey results reveal an alarming lack of awareness of policies impacting undocumented students and the tendency for teachers—even those with more positive and inclusive views toward undocumented students—held false narratives about immigrants. Three case studies of teachers Ava, Amelia, and Sam115 helped flesh out the descriptive results to deepen our understanding of teachers’ perceptions of undocumented students in relation to their policy awareness in South Carolina. Quantitative Results The results of the survey regarding teachers’ awareness showed a significant lack of policy knowledge among public school teachers in the sample. This unawareness was apparent in all of this first section’s items, with an overall mean score of 16.85 out of 100 across the four questions. This means that teachers selected the wrong answer most of the time. Table 1 shows that the majority of respondents selected wrong answers on items related to specific policies that impact college access and eligibility for in-state tuition for undocumented students. There were also two questions about the restrictions for in-state tuition for US citizens with undocumented parents and students on certain legal visas (such as the U visa for victims of domestic violence or other nonimmigrant visas). Both of these groups Figure 1. Typology of teacher empathy “Hearing their stories” Moral Political Conception of Teacher Empathy “Needed to know their rights” Counter-example Believing in false narratives Volume 31 | 2019 31 Question False (Correct Answer) True (Incorrect Answer) I have no idea In-state tuition regardless of immigration status 25.7% (26) 25/7% (26) 48.5% (49) Allowed to enroll in state colleges and universites regardless of immigration status 22.8% (23) 47.5% (48) 29.7% (30) All students with legal visas ability to receive in-state tuition 9% (9) 64.4% (65) 26.7% (27) The impact of immigration status of one’s parents on in-state tuition 9.9% (10) 61.4% (62) 26.7% (28) Table 1. Awareness of Immigration Restrictions of students have also been denied in-state tuition in the State of South Carolina. Overall, none of the items in section one showed an awareness level above 26 percent. Moreover, the lowest levels of awareness were on the items regarding the eligibility of US citizens with undocumented parents and students with certain legal visas to obtain in-state tuition. Aside from the question on in-state tuition for undocumented students, the teachers most frequently selected the wrong choice (as compared to the correct response or the “I have no idea” option). The majority of respondents believed that the policies of South Carolina are more inclusive toward immigrant students than they actually are. This lack of awareness is a barrier to teacher-empathy development because if teachers hold inaccurate beliefs about the policies impacting undocumented students, then their advocacy efforts will be distorted or nonexistent. It can also prevent teachers from gaining a sociopolitical consciousness if they already believe they are aware, which is indicated by the fact that they chose the wrong answer more frequently than selecting “I have no idea.” The second section of the survey— measuring teachers’ attitudes toward policies regarding immigrant students—revealed a 32 more complex and nuanced picture of teachers’ attitudes (see Table 2). For these items, 1 was the most exclusive position and 5 was the most inclusive. For two of the items about in-state tuition and state scholarships and grants for undocumented students, teacher respondents had a more exclusive position overall (with means of 2.93 and 2.64 out of 5, respectively). The questions about students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status receiving in-state tuition and the right of undocumented students to study at state colleges and universities had more inclusive responses (with means of 3.51 and 3.47 out of 5, respectively). Finally, the question regarding how parental immigration status of US-citizen children affects their ability to receive in-state tuition had the most inclusive response, with a mean of 3.87 out of 5. There was a Cronbach’s alpha of .848, which indicates a strong similarity in levels of inclusivity/ exclusivity among the different items. These results show that there are differing levels of support regarding these issues. The first finding was that even though most teachers had a more inclusive position when it came to issues like children of undocumented parents (i.e., that immigrant youth ought to have access to rights and financial aid even Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy with undocumented parents), this positive/ inclusive attitude did not transfer to undocumented students having access to in-state tuition or state financial aid or access to grants. The level of negative teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive rights for undocumented immigrant students in these results are somewhat surprising as many of these teachers have undocumented students in their K–12 classrooms and seem to be aware of the barriers these students face to access to higher education.116 These scores of teachers’ attitudes reveal a lack of empathy among many teachers toward the situations that their undocumented students face. While the Pearson’s r correlation test was conducted to investigate the relationship between awareness and attitudes, there was no significant correlation found. One of the limitations of this portion of the study was the relatively small sample and the more categorical nature of the awareness questions (which were recoded into a 1–3 scale for the correlational analysis). Despite this limitation of the sample, these results still show a troubling lack of teacher awareness of policies and the range of attitudes toward immigrants in the state.117 Qualitative Results As noted earlier, survey data revealed an alarming number of false answers from teachers, which is concerning because it showed that teachers thought they knew policies and did not as indicated by the fact that they opted out of choosing “I have no idea.” This led to exploring teachers’ attitudes toward immigrant student in semi-structured interviews to develop a deeper understanding of the false narratives and lack of awareness they held. The three focal teachers, Ava, Amelia, and Samantha, worked in the district for between five and nine years and had strong relationships with the undocumented community. Additional criteria included years teaching/ involved in education (5+), having English as a second language (ESL)/Spanish-language background with the assumption they would have more inclusive views toward immigrants, and work with undocumented populations in their high schools. The dimensions of empathy that emerged in the qualitative data analysis include “hearing their stories,” “I needed to know their rights,” and “believing in false narratives.” These themes provide additional Table 2. Attitudes toward Immigration Restrictions Item Mean 1 (Most Exlusive)5 (Most Inclusive) Stndard Deviation Undocumented students’ right to study at state colleges and universities 3.47 1.4 Undocumented students receiving in-state tuition 2.93 1.53 Undocumented students receiving state scholarships and grants 2.64 1.43 DACA students receiving in-state tuition 3.51 1.23 Parents’ immigration status affecting in-state tuition 3.87 1.2 Volume 31 | 2019 33 insight for understanding the complexity of survey results, including more information about teachers’ perspectives about undocumented immigrants in the state. Moral Dimensions of Teacher Empathy Many conversations with Ava involved her briefing me on events that youth were encountering related to their immigration status. All of the students in her ESL classes were undocumented newcomers with significant challenges integrating into the community and feeling safe.118 Ava talked about how other teachers expect that they “speak English on their first day here” without considering “all they’ve been through.” Additionally, Sam noted, “There’s a lot of forced immersion here—a sink-or-swim mentality toward the newcomer Latino immigrants without much thought.” Due to this budding awareness from teachers, the importance of “hearing their stories” emerges in order to build rapport and empathy. Related to developing teacher empathy for undocumented newcomer youth, Ava said, Hearing the stories, teachers here, people in the community have negative comments about immigration and how we need to stop letting immigrants in. Some of the teachers here feel that way, too, or they just don’t know. I don’t know what can be done to remove blinders from teachers. Teachers refuse to acknowledge the trauma that some of our recently arrived students have faced.119 Similarly, Amelia shared how teachers and district employees often do not understand the plight of undocumented immigrant children. Amelia said, I think there is often this deficit mentality on the part of some teachers and leaders. Latino students are not necessarily looked at as bilingual or almost bilingual—their less-than-perfect 34 English is seen as an impediment to good test scores. There’s an overall lack of understanding. Both of these teachers point to how undocumented students are often misunderstood and their experiences and potential needs are ignored. Amelia explained, There is very much an emphasis on assimilation here rather than embracing different cultures, exploring or learning about other cultures. In the South, the dominant culture/community in power does not make a big effort to reach out to the Latino community (except for money-making purposes) or even really acknowledge it as part of the city’s identity. Latinos.120 This understanding of systemic isolation that undocumented immigrants face in this southern community is not something that all educators are aware of or acknowledge to be a significant barrier and challenge to their everyday experience. This emotional and moral understanding connects to the next emergent theme of sociopolitical awareness as part of empathy. Political Dimensions of Teacher Empathy The interviews point to understanding the larger sociopolitical context. For instance, Ava commented on how the narrative about immigrants is that they “come here for a better life. These kids hear that school will help them. They are told to get an education,” but then the “schools don’t help them.” Ava explained that she did not know the political immigration policy context when she first started working with students. However, “all of the new students come to my room, and I needed to know their rights so that I could help them know their rights, especially after the election.” Ava’s responses speak to her belief that teachers need to learn about the legal aspects of immigration beyond just the personal experiences and emotional labor embedded in hearing their stories and understanding that these undocumented immigrant youth are Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy socially isolated. Similarly, Sam explained the aspects of her job that do not involve teaching but rather push her to understand the rights and services that undocumented immigrants need. Amelia acts as an “institutional agent,” helping students to access social capital and resources. She explained, Helping students with questions about the community (i.e., researched pro bono legal agencies for a student whose mom wants to divorce her husband), organizing some social events for students, but things like that always vary according to need. I feel like my colleagues and I are often the students’ connection (at least initially) to local services, culture, and resources, and we need to help them get their bearings as best as possible.121 In both Ava and Sam’s work, they embodied the emotional, moral, and political dimensions of empathy by understanding the oft-held deficit mentality among other teachers, the discrimination toward Latinos in the communities, and the need to engage in advocacy work beyond the traditional role of being an educator, i.e., delivering curriculum and supporting academic achievement. To this end, they expressed the ad hoc ways that they came to understand and learn about the rights of undocumented students in order to advocate for them, which was common among teachers across this district and others in South Carolina.122 Believing False Narratives While on the one hand educators like those in this study exhibited awareness of the lives of undocumented immigrants in the district, at times their views and perceptions of undocumented immigrants’ experiences of discrimination were skewed in that they reflected the larger racialized social structure of the South.123,124 I share this because it relates to the critical role that teachers’ attitudes Volume 31 | 2019 play in the academic achievement of undocumented immigrants when their awareness is skewed or inaccurate; even the most progressive or morally and politically empathetic educators like Ava, Amelia, and Sam maintain the propensity to believe in false narratives about immigrants. Below, Amelia and Sam articulate a problematic perception of the relationship between African Americans and Latinos in the southern community, and a false narrative about the experiences of both groups.125 Amelia said, I think there is some tension between African Americans and Latinos here because you have a community that has endured systemic disenfranchisement (both in term of participation in the labor market and in education) for generations and generations, and to this day have a very hard time making it to the middle class. There are flaws in the system, gatekeeping mechanisms built to keep African Americans separate and out. Hispanic immigrants—and the majority here are undocumented— moved in within the past 10–15 years, and again, because of flaws in the system, they have very quickly attained many of the things that are out of reach (or may seem) out of reach to the African American community—jobs, housing, cars, accumulation of wealth. This is because there is an industry and employers in the industry who benefit greatly from the underground (undocumented) labor market. These employers have a compliant labor force who will work for a set wage many hours above a standard business day. Employers don’t have to comply with a minimum or even labormarket-determined wage, they don’t have to pay overtime, they don’t have to pay taxes, they don’t have to pay sick leave/benefits, and they have a labor force that is not going to fight for their 35 rights because they are undocumented. So this benefits employers, it benefits the undocumented labor force because it’s better than no job at all back home, but it hurts the African American community. I think there is resentment because it is not fair. Again, these are flaws in the system that create these conditions, but it plays out among the people who are fighting to make a living wage. Sam contributed to this discussion regarding racial tensions and the perceived labor opportunities in the community: One thing the Latinos have going for them is their language. We need to be honing that. I had this idea to start a service learning program where the Latino kids could read or tutor the younger grades at the middle school, creating a bridge. We need to create workers for the district. They can use their Spanish for good use. On the surface, Sam’s idea was to promote access and equity for the Latinx students, but her comments were laden with an ideology that the “immigrant kids” needed to be “workers” in order to be useful. In these excerpts, Amelia’s perspectives of Latinx undocumented immigrants is that they compete for jobs and acquire more opportunities than African Americans in this southern community. Despite the fact that previous research shows this to be inaccurate,126,127 it is a troubling insight into the ways in which the context of the New Latino South shapes awareness (or lack of) about immigrants’ lives and how policies, including governmental recruitment efforts to secure the undocumented Latinx workers in the South, configured the labor structure. Additionally, Sam’s argument that the newcomers’ language ability ought to be seen as an asset was still misguided in that they should provide a service to the district rather than advocating that the district provide ESL or other services for the students, which it currently fails to do.128 36 Data Integration and Discussion Part of the endeavor in this mixed-methods study has been to consider the emergent narrative from interrelated data sets. Fetters, Curry, and Creswell argue, “With embedding, data collection and analysis link at multiple points. Integration at the interpretation and reporting level occurs through narrative, data transformation, and joint display. The fit of integration describes the extent the qualitative and quantitative findings cohere.”129 This section shares the insights gleaned from integrated data analysis through a “narrative approach” that allows for a thematic discussion of teacher empathy and specifically how awareness shapes attitudes toward immigrant students.130 The results of the survey data analysis indicate that teachers in South Carolina were highly unaware of educational restrictions toward immigrants. The results of the qualitative data analysis suggest emergent themes related to a new conceptualization of teacher empathy. This integration is important because it shows why both types of data were used to explore the problem. While the quantitative data revealed both the strong lack of awareness among educators regarding educational policies for undocumented immigrant students and more nuanced results in regard to their attitudes toward these policies, the qualitative data suggested that the lack of awareness about immigrant students sustains damaging attitudes in classrooms even for educators who I thought would hold more inclusive views and have an increased sociopolitical awareness of policies and conditions impacting undocumented students. Upon the integrated data analysis, key insights about teacher empathy and specifically the sociopolitical awareness of teachers in the unique context of the New Latino South emerge. Qualitative data showed that there exist layers of awareness to be acquired and maintained. In other words, data demonstrated the dimensions of awareness related to K–12 policies (i.e., how the schools do/do Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy not serve the undocumented students, lack ESL and other services, take English-only/ assimilationist perspectives), higher education, and general policy knowledge for immigrants (i.e., legal services/rights). And yet, despite a baseline level of awareness for teachers in the qualitative dataset, none of the teachers could name a single policy that impacted undocumented immigrants (i.e., Plyler v. Doe or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). While teachers in this study may appear to have baseline knowledge or awareness that their students receive paperwork from immigration and fear deportation, they still lacked the ability to name policies and pointed to how their colleagues lacked basic understanding of accommodations for language learners. All this is to say that even in this sample, teachers with likely more knowledge of immigration issues maintained a frightening lack of policy knowledge and the impact of educational policies on the undocumented immigrant community. They pursued knowledge in some cases and engaged in ad hoc advocacy as needed.131 Teachers like Amelia, despite her inclusive views and sociopolitical awareness of the community and district issues, still offered false and inaccurate narratives of labor relations and employment opportunities for the undocumented community. This was evidenced with the theme of believing in false narratives. In this theme, I detailed the example of Amelia believing that undocumented immigrants are taking away jobs from African Americans in the community, a group that is/has been marginalized in the South, and at times have more benefits than African Americans because they are illegally employed. This is not to criticize teachers’ lack of awareness given how much work they do in the community and district, but to point to the power of false narratives and their impact on attitudes toward this population even when the most “caring” and compassionate educators are involved. The implications of this speak to the need for strategic empathy that includes moral and Volume 31 | 2019 Teachers with likely more knowledge of immigration issues maintained a frightening lack of policy knowledge and the impact of educational policies on the undocumented immigrant community. political dimensions rooted in accurate policy knowledge. Exposing these false narratives as part of the conceptualization of teacher empathy is critical to unpack teachers’ views and build a type of teacher empathy that supports undocumented students. Furthermore, the data here expand our understanding of teacher empathy and often how a lack of awareness enables teachers to buy in to false narratives saturating the current political and public discourse. The teachers express generally positive attitudes toward immigrant students and recognize the plight that accompanies their immigration status. However, they also elucidate that sociopolitical awareness (i.e., awareness of immigrants’ rights afforded through policies and other resources available in the community) enables them to become advocates for their students even though their advocacy was ad hoc or on a case-by-case basis. While the moral and political dimensions of empathy reflected here in the themes of “hearing their stories” and “I needed to know their rights” are significant, there is still work to be done to dispel false narratives about (un)documented immigrants and the perceptions of immigrants’ access to resources and opportunities in and beyond school. Moreover, even though the teachers held inclusive views on immigration generally and in attitudes toward immigrant students in their schools, some of the data revealed the complexity of immigrant relationships with other racial minorities in the district and community. The data showed that these educators’ perspectives on issues like 37 multicultural education and the economic effects of immigration-enforcement regimes and anti-immigrant policies were shaped by the context and fraught history of the South. They are products of the South and teachereducation programs in the focal state that maintain both anti-immigrant sentiments and a racialized history, which inform the programs, policies, and practices. Connecting back to Zembylas,132,133 empathy in teacher practice needs to include moral and political dimensions. He argues that teachers must use this brand of empathy in strategic ways that embrace the discomfort that ensues from expanding empathetic orientations to include awareness of power dynamics that intersect with race, class, immigration status, and policy. Likewise, I found that these teachers acknowledged their need to better understand their students by recognizing the intersections of power, including the process of racializing newcomers in the New Latino South, and the oppression that mediated the experiences of the newcomers they taught. This acknowledgement reflects the strategic empathy involving power dynamics in social practices and interactions.134 However, the teachers in this study were still operating in ad hoc rather than strategic ways in their advocacy efforts. The narrative from data analysis and integration is complicated and troubling at best. For instance, even the more enlightened and inclusive educators in this study still hold inaccurate or false views about the undocumented experience and yet are able to point out, as Amelia did, that “teachers don’t notice or chose not to notice the discrimination in the schools toward undocumented students.” This reality could be even more problematic for undocumented students as discrimination and antagonism toward them is entangled with the language of legality. Thus, it is imperative that educators become more aware and expose the false narratives and discrimination, and this is off to a slow start in South Carolina. 38 The data showed that these educators’ perspectives on issues like multicultural education and the economic effects of immigration-enforcement regimes and anti-immigrant policies were shaped by the context and fraught history of the South. Implications, Limitations, and Future Research This study reveals the need for teachers to be aware of the policies impacting undocumented students and the social and economic situations they confront. There needs to be greater exploration for why this lack of awareness exists among educators and practical steps for helping teachers gain sociopolitical awareness and empathy. Perhaps if schools of education, school districts, and individual schools would stress the importance of this awareness and empathy with the same vigor as an awareness of proper pedagogy for achievement on standardized tests, important change could result. As Ladson-Billings stresses, sometimes being a good teacher is less about doing and more about “an ethical position they need to take,”135 and teaching must go beyond the role of being a tutor during class to one that looks at the social situations and futures of the students. Related to undocumented students, to be effective, teachers must not only know about the pedagogy of teaching language-learning students or those from multicultural backgrounds but also be willing to enter the more tedious political and policy arena, become aware of what their students face, and ideally become advocates. Though there was not a correlation between awareness and attitudes in this statewide study in South Carolina, it remains the first of its kind at the state level. Future research should address state-level attitudes and awareness of teachers. Additionally, Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy investigating teachers’ perspectives of borders and nationalism could prove an effective way to uncover and mitigate bias and expand strategic empathy. In southern states such as South Carolina where assimilationist ideologies and racism are deeply rooted, uncovering teachers’ biases might help transform teachers’ attitudes toward immigrant students as they start to understand and critique migration in general. Though it may be possible to be compassionate toward an immigrant child who you feel has no right to be in the country, it may be hard to actually advocate for them and understand their rights. The limitations in the study relate to the relatively small sample in the survey and the weak correlation. I argue, though, that a sample size of 101 in a statewide survey is still important and telling of broader sentiments in the state. And despite the insignificant correlation, the descriptive statistics revealed that teachers were highly unaware of policies impacting undocumented students and in many cases selected wrong answers on the survey rather than just selecting “I have no idea,” which is extremely troubling in that it reveals teachers think they know policy. Another limitation relates to the fact that I collected qualitative data at two high schools in a larger district because that is where my research and faculty position was located. The school district is allegedly more progressive than the more rural districts, so future research ought to address a broader qualitative sample to understand sentiments in more rural parts of the South. Conclusion This article was concerned with teachers’ awareness of policies that impact undocumented immigrant students. I argue that awareness can influence these attitudes, especially in the way that the teachers there have a baseline awareness and still hold false narratives about immigrant populations’ access to resources and employment in the state. The findings demonstrate teachers’ lack of awareness about Volume 31 | 2019 I hope that this data will provide the wakeup call necessary for educators and school-based leaders in particular to support teachers so that they can better advocate and provide the rightfully safe space for undocumented students. immigration policies, especially those that create educational restrictions for undocumented youth. The findings illustrate the various levels of awareness that teachers hold. I argue here that it is critically important to support educators in developing this policy knowledge— what I called sociopolitical knowledge as part of strategic teacher empathy—given that the one place that undocumented students are supposed to be safe is school. I situated this argument within the context of the teacherstudent relationship and the specific focus on teacher empathy. Although empathy has emerged in previous scholarship, this article expands an understanding of the concept by considering its moral and political dimensions as part of teacher attitudes and awareness in this project. The article also presented the counter-examples of believing in false narratives to show how critical it is for teachers to unpack their views about immigrants as a step toward developing accurate understandings of policies and conditions that impact immigrant students. To date, there has not been a study on this particular aspect of teacher attitudes and awareness toward the educational rights of undocumented students. Given the timeliness of undocumented youth experiences of racism and nativism, it is imperative to continue to interrogate how educators are falling into traps of larger anti-immigrant sentiments at state and national levels. Within the larger political climate, the changing and often contradictory positions held by the Trump administration, it is even more critical that educators in particular are attuned to the effects of policies on 39 undocumented students’ lives. I hope that this data will provide the wakeup call necessary for educators and school-based leaders in particular to support teachers through professional development on the topic so that they can better advocate and provide the rightfully safe space for undocumented students. Author Bio Sophia Rodriguez is an assistant professor of educational foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As a sociologist of education, she examines the social and cultural contexts of education policy and practice and teaches graduate courses related to immigrant youth and education, critical and social theory, and research methodology. Her two current longitudinal projects, funded by the Spencer Foundation (2018–20) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (2016–19), utilize mixed-methods and ethnographic designs to investigate how community– school partnerships, teachers, and schoolbased mental health professionals promote equity and advocate for migrant youth. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Educational Policy, Education Policy Analysis Archives, Educational Studies, The Urban Review, and The Journal of Latinos and Education. Rodriguez received her PhD in cultural and educational policy studies from Loyola University Chicago. 40 Endnotes 1 The author acknowledges the contribution of graduate student William McCorkle, specifically related to survey data collection and analysis. 2 Sophia Rodriguez, “‘Risky’ Subject: Theorizing Migration as Risk and Implications for Newcomers in Schools and Societies,” European Education 50, no. 1 (2018): 6–26. 3 Sophia Rodriguez and Timothy Monreal, “‘This State Is Racist . . ’: Policy Problematization and Undocumented Youth Experiences in the New Latino South,” Educational Policy 31, no. 6 (2017): 764–800. 4 Sarah Gallo and Holly Link, “Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices in a New Latino Diaspora Community,” Journal of Latinos and Education 15, no. 3 (2016): 180–96. 5 Dafney Blanca Dabach et al., “Future Perfect?: Teachers’ Expectations and Explanations of their Latino Immigrant Students’ Postsecondary Futures,” Journal of Latinos and Education 17, no. 1 (2017): 38–52. 6 Sophia Rodriguez, Timothy Monreal, and Joy Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories’: Teacher empathy and socio-political awareness toward newcomer undocumented students in the New Latino South,” Journal of Latinos and Education (2018), DOI: 10.1080/15348431.2018.1489812. 7 Hereafter, when the word “policy” is used, it refers to both federal and state policies in South Carolina. Teachers in this study were asked about federal policies such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). They were also asked about policies related to South Carolina through the survey items that asked them to comment on whether certain restrictions existed for undocumented students such as not being able to access or attend higher education. 8 Jessica DeCuir-Gunby and Paul A. Schutz, Developing a Mixed Methods Proposal: A Practical Guide for Beginning Researchers (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2017). 9 The New Latino South refers to a set of states, i.e., Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, that are considered nontraditional receiving contexts for immigrants; see Perla M. Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place (Austin, TX: Unversity of Texas Press, 2017); Jamie Winders and Barbara Ellen Smith, “Excepting/accepting the South: New geographics of Latino migration, new directions in Latino studies,” Latino Studies 10, no. 1–2 (2012): 220–45. 10 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 11 Michalinos Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion: A Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy Postmodern Enactment (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2006). 12 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 13 Diana Villiers Negroponte, “The Surge in Un accompanied Children from Central America: A Humanitarian Crisis at Our Border,” Brookings Institituion blog, 2 July 2014, accessed 2 January 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/07/02/thesurge-in-unaccompanied-children-from-central-americaa-humanitarian-crisis-at-our-border/. 14 Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Jie Zong, “A Profile of U.S. Children with Unauthorized Immigrant Parents,” Migration Policy Institute, January 2016, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/ profile-us-children-unauthorized-immigrant-parents. 15 Stephanie Kripa Cooper-Lewter, Latino Immigrant Families in South Carolina (Columbia: Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina, 2013) [PDF file]. 16 Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert, “The Hispanic Population: 2010,” report number C2010BR-04, United States Census Bureau, May 2011, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2011/dec/ c2010br-04.html. 17 Mark Hugo Lopez, “Chronicling Latinos’ diverse experience in a changing America,” PowerPoint presentation, Pew Hispanic Center, Reaching Latinos Online meetup, 27 April 2011. 18 It is of note that many of the more recently arrived undocumented young people in this larger study were also unaccompanied, meaning they arrived alone to the United States. As a result, their living conditions and overall life is highly constrained as they navigate their everyday positioning of illegality and live in fear of deportation. 19 Lauren Heidbrink, Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State Care and Contested Interests (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 20 Plyler v. 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Allard, “Undocumented Status and Schooling for Newer Teens,” Harvard Educational Review 85, no. 3 (2015): 478–501. 49 Dafney Blanca Dabach, “‘I Am Not a Shelter!’: Stigma and Social Boundaries in Teachers’ Accounts of Students’ Experience in Separate ‘Sheltered’ English Learner Classrooms,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 19, no. 2 (2014): 98–124. 50 Dafney Blanca Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration’: A Civic Teacher’s Breach of Silence in a Mixed-Citizenship Classroom,” Harvard Educational Review 85, no. 3 (2015): 383–413. 51 Julián Jefferies and Dafney Blanca Dabach, “Breaking the Silence: Facing Undocumented Issues in Teacher Practice,” Association of American Educators Journal 8, no. 1 (2014): 83–93. 52 Ariana Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence: Undocumented Students’ Decisions to Disclose or Disguise Their Citizenship Status in School,” American Educational Research Journal 54, no. 3 (2017): 485–523. 53 Jefferies and Dabach, “Breaking the Silence.” 54 Gallo and Link, “Exploring the Borderlands.” 55 Allard, “Undocumented Status and Schooling for Newer Teens.” 56 Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration.’” 57 Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence.” 58 Gallo and Link, “Exploring the Borderlands.” 42 59 Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration.’” 60 Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration.’” 61 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 62 Gallo and Link, “Exploring the Borderlands.” 63 Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration.’” 64 Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, Third Edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 65 Kara Cebulko and Alexis Silver, “Navigating DACA in Hospitable and Hostile States: State Responses and Access to Membership in the Wake of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” American Behavioral Scientist 60, no. 13 (2016): 1553–74. 66 Alexandra Filindra, David Blanding, and Cynthia Garcia Coll, “The Power of Context: State-Level Policies and Politics and the Educational Performance of the Children of Immigrants in the United States,” Harvard Educational Review 81, no. 3 (2011): 407–38. 67 Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar, “A Social Capital Framework for the Study of Institutional Agents and Their Role in the Empowerment of Low-Status Students and Youth,” Youth & Society 43, no. 3 (2011): 1066–109. 68 Emily R. Crawford, “When Boundaries Around the ‘Secret’ are Tested: A School Community Response to the Policing of Undocumented Immigrants,” Education and Urban Society 50, no. 2 (2018): 155–82. 69 Julián Jefferies, “Fear of Deportation in High School: Implications for Breaking the Circle of Silence Surrounding Migration Status,” Journal of Latinos and Education 13, no. 4 (2014): 278–95. 70 Crawford, “When Boudaries Around the ‘Secret’ are Tested.” 71 Dabach, “‘My Student Was Apprehended by Immigration.’” 72 Gallo and Link, “Exploring the Borderlands.” 73 Crawford, “When Boudaries Around the ‘Secret’ are Tested.” 74 Linda Darling-Hammond, “How Teacher Education Matters,” Journal of Teacher Education 51, no. 3 (2000): 166–73. 75 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 76 Crawford, “When Boudaries Around the ‘Secret’ are Tested.” 77 Rodriguez, “The Dangers of Compassion.” 78 Scott A.L. Beck and Martha Allexsaht-Snider, “Recent Language Minority Education Policy in Georgia: Appropriation, Assimilation, and Americanization,” in Education in the New Latino Diaspora: Policy and the Politics of Identity, eds. Stanton Emerson Fisher Wortham, Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy Enrique G. Murillo, and Edmund T. Hamann (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2002), 37–66. 79 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 80 To support this point, McAllister and Jordan-Irvan report, “White preservice teachers’ empathy provided a false sense of involvement that could be dangerous if they assume they know and understand their students although they may actually have a superficial understanding.” (“The Role of Empathy in Teaching Culturally Diverse Students,” 434). 81 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 82 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion. 83 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion, 10. 84 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion, 11. 85 Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (Athens, GA: University of Georgie Press, 2009). 86 Spencer Salas and Pedro R. Portes, eds., Us Latinization: Education and the New Latino South (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017). 87 Beck and Allexsaht-Snider, “Recent Language Minority Education Policy in Georgia.” 88 Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela Páez, Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). 89 Rolf Straubhaar, “Student Use of Aspirational and Linguistic Social Capital in an Urban ImmigrantCentered English Immersion High School,” The High School Journal 97, no. 2 (2013): 92–106. 90 Mellom et al., “‘They come with nothing.’” 91 Guerrero, Nuevo South. 92 Sophia Rodriguez, “‘Good, deserving immigrants’ join the Tea Party: How South Carolina policy excludes Latinx and undocumented immigrants from educational opportunity and social mobility,” Educational Policy Analysis Archives 26, no. 103 (2018), DOI: 10.14507/ epaa.26.3636. 93 Michael A. Olivas, “Undocumented College Students, Taxation, and Financial Aid: A Technical Note,” The Review of Higher Education 32, no. 3 (2009): 407–16. 94 Rodriguez, “‘Good, deserving immigrants’ join the Tea Party.” 95 Roth, “When College is Illegal.” 96 Roth, ““When College is Illegal.” 97 “Higher Education Issues for Immigrant Youth and US Citizen Youth of Immigrant Parents Living in SC,” South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, last updated March 2015, http://www.scjustice.org/brochure/highereducation-issues-for-immigrant-youth-and-us-citizenyouth-of-immigrant-parents-living-in-sc-2/. 98 John W. Creswell et al., “Advanced Mixed methods Research Designs,” in Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social & Behavioral Research, eds. Abbas Tashakkori Volume 31 | 2019 and Charles Teddlie, (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2003), 209–40. 99 DeCuir-Gunby and Schutz, Developing a Mixed Methods Proposal. 100 Jennifer C. Greene, Valerie J. Caracelli, and Wendy F. Graham, “Toward a Conceptual Framework for MixedMethod Evaluation Designs,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 11, no. 3 (1989): 255–74. 101 DeCuir-Gunby and Schutz, Developing a Mixed Methods Proposal, 87. 102 Creswell et al., “Advanced Mixed methods Research Designs.” 103 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 104 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion. 105 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion. 106 Norma Deitch Feshbach and Seymour Feshbach, “Empathy and Education,” in The Neuroscience of Empathy, eds. Jean Decety and William Ickes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 85–98. 107 Bridget Cooper, Paul Brna, and Alex Martins, “Effective Affective in Intelligent Systems – Building on Evidence of Empathy in Teaching and Learning,” in Affective Interactions: Towards a New Generation of Computer Interfaces (Berlin: Springer, 1999), 21–34. 108 Zembylas, Teaching with Emotion. 109 Greenwald and Krieger, “Implicity Bias.” 110 Riegle-Crumb and Humphries, “Exploring Bias in Math Teachers’ Perceptions.” 111 Robert J. Fisher, “Social Desirability Bias and the Validity of Indirect Questioning,” Journal of Consumer Research 20, no. 2 (1993): 303–315. 112 Though beyond the scope of this paper, the researcher engaged in this longitudinal multi-site mixed-methods study that included additional data collection procedures such as conducting semi-structured interviews with recently arrived undocumented youth (n = 20), social workers (n = 5), and district employees connected with English-language instruction in a southern city (n = 3) in addition to the teachers. Each of the district employees were White bilingual females that served in roles such as bilingual advocate and adult education coordinator along with a White male who served as the director of ESL for the district. Other district employees were recruited based on their involvement working with ESL populations. The nature of these interviews related to knowledge of policy and school-based personnel experience with undocumented students. 113 Johnny Saldana, Fundamentals of Qualitatitve Research (Understanding Qualitative Research), ed. Patricia Leavy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 114 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 115 All names in this article are pseudonyms. 116 A second curious point to make related to these 43 results is that the respondents overall tended to be more politically liberal, with under 30 percent identifying as Republican. Given these two factors, it is likely that the attitudes toward these items could be even lower among the general teacher population and the state residents as a whole. 117 Despite the insignificant correlation between attitudes and awareness, I examined the relationship to the demographic information of teachers in the sample. On all five items related to teacher attitudes, there was a significant difference (p < .05) between male and female respondents, with female respondents having more inclusive responses. There was no significant difference based on gender for the questions regarding awareness of state policies. Given the size of the study and the relatively small number of teachers from racial or ethnic minorities, no meaningful analysis could be conducted based on race or ethnicity. Not surprisingly, political party, political ideology, and choice of presidential candidate in 2016 were all significant factors with regard to teachers’ attitudes. 118 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 119 Interview with Ava, Sophia Rodriguez, in person, 26 January 2017. 120 Interview with Amelia, Sophia Rodriguez, in person, 19 December 2017. 121 Interview with Amelia 122 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 123 Guerrero, Nuevo South. 124 Helen B. Marrow, New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 125 While it is beyond the scope of the paper to delve into the race relations in the southern state, previous policy analysis shows that African American and Latinx groups are significantly marginalized in this southern state due to the racialized social structure, legacy of Jim Crow segregation, and the criminalization of immigrants in the South. See Rodriguez, “‘Good, deserving immgrants’ join the Tea Party.” 126 Marrow, New Destination Dreaming. 127 Vanessa Ribas, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016). 128 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 129 Michael D. Fetters, Leslie A. Curry, and John W. Creswell, “Achieving integration in mixed methods designs - Principles and practices,” Health Services Research 48 no. 6 part 2 (2013): 2134–56. 130 Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby and Paul A. Schutz, Developing a Mixed Methods Proposal: A Practical Guide 44 for Beginning Researchers (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2016), 119. 131 Rodriguez, Monreal, and Howard, “‘It’s about hearing and understanding their stories.’” 132 Michalinos Zembylas, “Pedagogies of strategic empathy: navigating through the emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education,” Teaching in Higher Education 17, no. 2 (2012): 113–25. 133 Michalinos Zembylas, “The Emotional Complexities of ‘Our’ and ‘Their’ Loss: The Vicissitudes of Teaching about/for Empathy in a Conflicting Society,” Anthropology & Education Quaterly 22, no. 1 (2013): 19–37. 134 Zembylas, “Pedagogies of strategic empathy.” 135 Gloria Ladson-Billings, “‘Yes, But How Do We Do It?’: Practicing Cultural Relevant Pedagogy,” in City Kids, Ciy Schools: More Reports from the Front Row, eds. William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Michie, and Pedro A. Noguera (New York: The New Press, 2008), 145–61. Harvard Kennedy School Journal of Hispanic Policy