Children of Immigration connection to School Observation

I did my school observation with a sharp focus on the METCO program that the Bedford High School works with. This program brings students from the Boston area into the suburbs in order to give them greater educational opportunities. After writing my paper about METCO, and realizing that I had not written a blog about the Children of Immigration text we read in class, I decided to look back over my notes and found a great deal of connections. Now, not all of these METCO students are immigrants - and to be truthful, I do not have any information about how many of them are or are not - but a lot of what an immigrant child or children of immigration experiences coincides with the experiences of METCO students at the Bedford High School.
A connection I drew between this text and my research on METCO was the idea of "social mirroring" and how students struggle with the forming of their own identities due to their experiences. Adolescence is a time of great uncertainty and development for teenagers no matter where they come from. Some children of immigration may have their image of themselves skewed by the way their peers view them, as well as how the American society views immigrations as a whole (Suarez & Suarez 2001). This can have an extremely adverse affect on the child if they are overwhelmed with society's negative feelings about immigration. These children also have to reform their own view of themselves based on their association with their native culture and the sometimes stark contrast to the culture their attempting to assimilate with. Comparatively, METCO students have to attempt to form a sense of self that ties both their lives in Boston and their role as a student in a suburb school. If the METCO student is facing adverse treatment from their peers or teachers in Bedford then they may develop the belief of themselves as an outsider. For both children of immigration and METCO students there is a risk of feeling as though they belong to neither world. This sense of belonging and purpose is critical for adolescents to form a confident opinion of themselves and a strong sense of identity. The reality is that all of these children have the possibility of growing into more capable and diverse individuals if this self-identification process is nurture appropriately. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and they may feel this sense of alienation due to social-mirroring well into adulthood.
Along these lines, both groups of children are faced with the balance of their native culture and that of their new home or school. In the text, Suarez and Suarez (2001) assert that immigrants may feel pressure to leave their cultural and linguistic origins behind in order to completely assimilate with American society. This is a struggle that METCO students face as well. It would be a difficult balancing act to achieve for an established, self-assured adult, let alone an adolescent or child.