From fostering meaningful debate to student activism to making sure future teachers have cultural sensitivity, immigration issues often come to the surface in college courses.
Immigration debates over the long-stalled DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) or the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) fill the news. As more and more Hispanic students — U.S. citizens as well as legal and undocumented immigrants — pursue higher education, current events have found a presence in college and university classrooms.
Academics who have long explored immigration issues in their research are seeing a new sense of urgency among students — to learn more about the issues, to more freely express themselves and to become informed so as to be effective leaders in their communities.
University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) professor Emma Sepúlveda, founder and director of UNR’s Latino Research Center, has long advocated for courses targeted at the school’s growing Hispanic population. In 2003, she helped create the course The Culture of Latinos in the United States, in which all of the students are Hispanic. The class now has more than one section and a long waiting list.
The students have questions about language, culture and how to fit into their new surroundings. She selects readings that both provoke and inspire them.
“I have work and projects that I think have great impact in their lives,” she says. “Last year, we learned about writing memoirs.”
Each week, in addition to readings and grammar assignments to improve their linguistic skills, her students wrote a few pages of their own life stories. These writings were done in Spanish because Sepúlveda wanted them to be able to write Spanish creatively. e writings were then discussed in class.
