Enemies or Friends? Newcomer Immigrant Students’ Developing Conceptions of Diversity in High School

Abstract

Drawing insights from a qualitative study with 15 newcomer immigrant students, this article examines the students’ developing understandings of the meaning of diversity in school. Although contradictory, the students’ collective narratives reveal a keen analysis of a complex social setting, in which race, language, and nationality are seen simultaneously as sources of tension and as opportunities for growth. It is proposed that by identifying and linking similar discourses at multiple levels of schools, we could create webs of resistance to frameworks that tend to categorize and exclude.