Public debates on immigration often reduce undocumented youth to statistics or political symbols. However, their daily experiences in America’s schools reveal a deeper truth: educational environments are shaped by the narratives and assumptions educators hold. Sophia Rodriguez’s Undocumented in the U.S. South (2025), a Sociologist of Education at New York University, offers a powerful lens for understanding how these narratives operate. Through three years of ethnographic fieldwork in two South Carolina high schools, including participant observation, interviews with 63 Central American youth, and analysis of state policy language, Rodriguez documents how undocumented students navigate racialization, surveillance, and systemic misunderstanding across multiple levels of schooling.
At the policy level, Rodriguez identified hundreds of enacted or proposed bills in which immigrants are described as “terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “aliens,” revealing how public discourse constructs immigrant youth as fundamentally dangerous. At the school level, both urban and rural campuses reproduce deficit-oriented ideologies about English learners and provide limited institutional support. Students describe being pulled out of class to translate for administrators and encountering educators who misunderstand or dismiss immigrant experiences. At the interpersonal level, they endure discriminatory remarks, such as teachers questioning their legal status or implying they do not belong in the country. These experiences collectively shape what Rodriguez calls “policy thinking”: youth develop a nuanced understanding of how they contribute to society while simultaneously being constructed as threats. As one student explained in her study, “We are free and not free at the same time.”
What Rodriguez’s work makes undeniable is that schools are not neutral spaces. They are contexts where undocumented youth encounter the racialized consequences of educational practices, teacher beliefs, and administrative decisions. This reality demands a shift in how educators receive professional development: we must prioritize training rooted in culturally responsive teaching to cultivate asset-based perspectives of undocumented students.
Culturally responsive teaching centers on the idea that students learn best when their cultural backgrounds and lived experiences are treated as meaningful strengths (Gay, 2018). Rather than assuming one “normal” way of learning, this approach values the diverse languages, traditions, and perspectives students bring to school. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2014) explains that this work goes beyond adding cultural examples to lessons; it also requires holding high academic expectations and helping students understand and navigate real social issues. Relatedly, Paris and Alim (2017) argue that schools should not only respond to students’ cultures but actively sustain their linguistic and cultural practices, affirming these identities as vital resources for learning and community life.
These frameworks share a core belief: students’ cultural and linguistic identities are resources, not deficits. However, Rodriguez’s findings demonstrate how far many educators stray from this position. When teachers question a student’s legal status, ignore the emotional burden of immigration enforcement, or rely on students as ad hoc interpreters, they reproduce the very deficit ideologies culturally responsive teaching seeks to dismantle.
This is why professional development must shift away from narrow compliance-oriented models—such as training on enrollment procedures or crisis protocols—and focus instead on building educators’ capacity to understand and support undocumented students holistically. Professional developments below can help educators:
- Recognize the structural realities that undocumented students navigate. Rodriguez’s participants avoided grocery stores during certain hours due to ICE activity and experienced racial profiling when they encountered police. Understanding these lived conditions helps educators adjust expectations, attendance policies, and classroom practices to reflect better students’ experiences and the pressures they carry.
- Examine assumptions and build asset-based perspectives of undocumented students. Educators should recognize that deficit-based beliefs usually stem from institutionally embedded assumptions, thereby making it easier to see the strengths undocumented students bring to the classroom. Viewing these students as capable and resourceful shifts practice from remediation to empowerment, opening the door to more just and supportive learning environments.
- Strengthen collaborative structures within schools. Schools can work best when educators and administrators work together. The collaborative relationship between educators and administrators can create structures that support undocumented students not only in individual classrooms but also throughout the school. Culturally responsive change happens when the entire institution aligns around practices that affirm students’ cultural and linguistic strengths.
Importantly, professional development grounded in culturally responsive teaching is not merely pedagogical; it is also ethical and political. When educators adopt culturally responsive, asset-based approaches, they create policies to facilitate the conditions for belonging, safety, and academic success. Rodriguez’s ethnographic research makes clear that undocumented students already possess extraordinary insight, resilience, and navigational skills. Our responsibility is not to fix these students but to repair the institutional conditions that misrecognize them. Schools must become places where undocumented youth are affirmed as whole human beings with complex identities and rich cultural knowledge. Such transformation begins with professional development that equips educators to see, understand, and honor the strengths undocumented students bring to our classrooms.
References
Callahan, R. M., & Gándara, P. (2014). The bilingual advantage: Language, literacy, and the labor market. Multilingual Matters.
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
Rodriguez, S. (2025). Undocumented in the U.S. South: How youth navigate racialization in policy and school contexts. Rutgers University Press.