For teachers to effectively teach students who enter the U.S. educational system from other countries, they must first learn about the complexity of the immigrant experience, taking into account themes such as race, generational immigration, class, formal education, and language. When these themes are taught through the immigrant narrative, they…

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the nation's children population. According to the U.S. Census (2007), approximately 16.4 million children, more than 1 in 5, are children of immigrants, most of whom are school-age population (aged 3-17 years). This large demographic shift is fundamentally changing the nation's schools and…

In this conceptual article, I use five questions that were posed in 1936 about immigration and the education of immigrant children as a lens to examine contemporary perspectives on immigration and the education of immigrant children. Dispelling myths about immigrant students and English learners has been a consistent concern in our country. These…

This article draws into specific relief current perspectives of teacher education and the ongoing debates over how best to prepare teachers for the integration of immigrant children into society--in particular, into schools and classrooms. Equally important is preparing teachers for working with undocumented populations that enter society and are…

At the author's institution, the majority of preservice teachers pursuing a master's degree in education curriculum and instruction are White middle-class students, so preparing them to be reflective practitioners with adequate knowledge, skills, and dispositions to teach English learners, whose cultural perspectives often differ significantly…

The author often teaches a course titled "Teaching ELLs in the Content Areas," including this past summer (2012). Acknowledging that education of English-language learners (ELLs) and immigrant education are overlapping rather than fully synonymous, students in a recent rendering of this class raised a number of interesting issues that connect to…

Immigrants are a fast-growing segment of the United States population. Presently, some 39.9 million immigrants call America home (Passel & Cohn, 2012; U.S. Census Bureau, 2011b). Today, immigrants come from all over the world, but most new Americans originate in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. It is because of the mass migration of the…

According to recent U.S. Census Bureau (2009) data, more than 20% of residents speak a language other than English. Today, 22.3% of U.S. children in Grades K-12 are Latino, and 21% speak a language other than English at home (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010). In California, nearly half (44.8%) of all children in the K-12 system…

Immigration is often framed as a problem, yet it is also a time of remarkable opportunity. While immigrants come to the United States from all over the world, the author focuses on the unique and urgent issues related to Latino immigration. Immigrant Latinos have changed the face of America and U.S. schools. Approximately one in five K-12 students…

The 1965 Immigration Act and its 1976 amendments paved the way for the fourth wave of immigration, the largest ever in U.S. history. From 1970 to 2010, about 35 million immigrants entered a postindustrial and service-oriented U.S. society. However, a new and striking trend of the fourth wave of immigration has swept rapidly beyond the coastal,…

The metaphor of the popular television shows "CSI: New York," "CSI: Miami," and "CSI: Las Vegas" (CSI stands for "crime scene investigation") is applicable to investigating issues of immigrant children in teacher preparation programs (TPP). One of the fundamental principles of CSI is to solve the crime by…

Central to schools of education are the professional preparation and development of future educators, who will be responsible for preparing citizens to function and live in a global community. Globalization and schooling have the potential to successfully or unsuccessfully affect the skills that students need to succeed in an increasingly global…

To address the theme of this special issue--namely, the major challenges faced by teacher education in an increasing global society--the author finds herself returning to her earlier work. This return-intellectual-migration gives depth and meaning to the experience of immigration and speaks to the sensibilities (or lack thereof) that many teachers…