Educating Across Borders: The Case of a Dual Language Program on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Educating Across Borders is an ethnography of the learning experience of transfronterizxs, border-crossing students living on the U.S.-Mexico border whose lives span two countries and two languages. Authors Maria Teresa de la Piedra, Blanca Araujo, and Alberto Esquinca examine language practices and funds of knowledge these students use as learning resources to navigate through their binational, dual language school experience.

The authors, who themselves live and work on the border, question artificially created cultural and linguistic borders. To explore this issue, they employed participant-observation, focus groups, and individual interviews with teachers, administrators, and staff members to construct rich understandings of the experiences of transfronterizx students. These ethnographic accounts of their daily lives counter entrenched deficit perspectives about transnational learners.

Drawing on border theory, immigration and border studies, funds of knowledge, and multimodal literacies, Educating Across Borders is a critical contribution toward the formation of a theory of physical and metaphorical border crossings that ethnic minoritized students in U.S. schools must make as they traverse the educational system.