Safety and Belonging in Immigrant-Serving Districts: Domains of Educator Practice in a Charged Political Landscape

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

Safety and belonging for immigrant-origin students are persistently shaped by shifting federal policies, enforcement practices, and a polarized immigration discourse that affects K–12 schooling. This article analyzes educators’ survey responses from six U.S. school districts, asking how educators describe safety and belonging and which practices they develop to support students. Four practice domains emerge—signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space for conversation—connecting educators’ perceptions to enacted strategies in charged contexts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Research questions and urgency

Methods

Study design and survey administration

Sample characteristics across districts

Findings

Educator perceptions and four practice domains

Discussion and implications

Safety as both theme and practice

AERA Open January-December 2021, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1–15 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584211040084 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2021. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Safety and Belonging in Immigrant-Serving Districts: Domains of Educator Practice in a Charged Political Landscape Rebecca Lowenhaupt Boston College Dafney Blanca Dabach University of Washington Ariana Mangual Figueroa City University of New York Drawing from a context of reception framework, this article asks the following questions: How do educators describe issues of safety and belonging in the context of a charged immigration policy climate? What practices have educators developed to support immigrant-origin youth? And, what are the relationships between educators’perceptions of safety and belonging and educator practices? We analyze educators’ survey responses administered across six school districts in different contexts across the United States, including the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. We synthesize four domains of educator practice: signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space for conversation. Through this work, we connect the domain of safety as a perennial theme to safety as a practice. We discuss the implications of this and the need for future work that critically analyzes educators’practice in relation to immigrant-origin youth for more generative contexts—contexts of development, not merely reception. Keywords: immigration, immigrants, district practice, teacher practice, school safety, school culture The political climate keeps me awake at night. We work so hard to keep our students safe and immigration looms with uncertainty. —Illinois Educator In recent years, immigrant-origin children and youth have faced an increasingly challenging set of circumstances: federal policies that narrowly circumscribe everyday worlds (Gonzales, 2016), enforcement practices that sow fear (Hipsman & Meissner, 2017), and a polarized political landscape that has negatively affected their schooling (Ee & Gándara, 2020; Rogers et al., 2017) .1 While the safety and belonging of these students are perennially at stake (Gonzales, 2016; Gonzales et al., 2013; Ríos-Rojas, 2011), the years from 2016 to 2020 were an especially difficult period (Callahan et al., 2020; Rogers et al., 2017) . The Trump administration’s expansion of immigration enforcement, child separation policies, and attempts to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—among other actions—have threatened the safety of immigrant communities across the country (García, 2019), with a direct impact on K–12 school districts (Costello, 2016; Ee & Gándara, 2020; Quinn et al., 2017) . This article builds on a small but growing body of research exploring educational stakeholders’ experiences of schooling during periods of intensified anti-immigrant discourse and policymaking, specifically examining how educators perceive of their role and responsibilities in relation to their immigrant-origin students (Callahan et al., 2020; Ee & Gándara, 2020) . We seek to understand how educators’understandings of safety and belonging shape the practices they enact in schools.2 Prior research has shown that educators’ interpretation of policies shapes their practices in ways that matter for immigrant-origin students’ sense of safety and belonging ina hostile anti-immigration climate (Hopkins et al., 2021; Jaffe-Walter & Lee, 2018; Quinn et al., 2017; S. Rodriguez et al., 2020) . This article addresses two research questions: How do educators describe safety and belonging against the backdrop of a charged immigration policy climate? What practices have educators developed to support immigrantorigin youth and how do they relate to those educators’perceptions of

FAQs

What core issue does the article examine for immigrant-origin students?

It examines how educators describe and enact safety and belonging for immigrant-origin youth within charged political and immigration-policy contexts.

How is the study conducted and what data are analyzed?

The study analyzes educators’ responses to an all-staff survey administered in spring 2018 across six U.S. school districts.

What four domains of educator practice are identified?

The article synthesizes four domains: signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space for conversation.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam