ABSTRACT
Students in migrant settings, particularly in large urban centers, confront multiple sociocultural worlds and traditions. These include both mainstream cultural practices and the migrant cultures that students encounter in the neighborhoods in which they have settled. As a result, an important part of their socialization is to learn to navigate between these multiple worlds and negotiate their diverse semiotic and normative frames. Besides, the trusted paths, networks, traditions, and knowledge present in the families of these students are contested and have to be reinvented. Immigrant parents and children alike are pushed into pioneering work to help the family survive or move up the social ladder. Learning becomes focused on fulfilling immediate knowledge needs rather than on trusting and teaching already-established paths. Who counts as the expert in this case is based on who brings in valuable experience and knowledge rather than on pre-established positions in which older generations pass down knowledge to the younger generation. Such processes always have been true for immigrants, but newer developments now are significantly affecting immigrant learning and socialization. In particular, increasing travel possibilities and students’ use of new media mean that the spaces of socialization no longer are confined to the person’s location of residence. Immigrants still must navigate among diverse spaces on-location and deal with the particular majority–minority histories that characterize these locations. However, increasingly, their learning is defined by the multiple navigation possibilities in the virtual and material world. This can allow immigrant learners both to continue their affiliations with their networks back home and to build new networks at a variety of geographical scales involving multiple affiliations and sociocultural worlds.
