“It’s not just learning English, it’s learning other cultures”: belonging, power, and possibility in an immigrant contact zone

This ethnographic investigation of a multiethnic, multilingual classroom examines the ways in which immigrant students’ goals for community and belonging were mediated by their vibrant cultural and linguistic practices. Findings demonstrate how youth formed a community of practice through brokering acts, resource pooling, and linguistic play across national, cultural, and linguistic differences. As such, immigrant students were agentive transcultural navigators whose practices broach new understandings of social life and learning, and present a pedagogy of possibility. It is argued that immigrant classrooms in contact zones must be reenvisioned – from reductive spaces where educational goals are to acculturate the immigrant into a fading US homogeneous mainstream – to cutting edge spaces of twenty-first-century learning.