Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655

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Teaching and Teacher Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Research paper

Humanizing power of counter-stories: Teachers’ understandings of

emergent bilinguals in rural settings*
Paula Golombek a, *, Aleksandra Ita Olszewska b, Maria Coady a
a
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
b
Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

h i g h l i g h t s

Reading counter-narratives of undocumented persons develops teacher understandings of immigrant emergent bilingual students.

Counter-narratives facilitate teacher empathy with and restorying of students and local places.

Transformed understandings of undocumented students can expand instructional practices including use of home language.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This article explores how counter-narratives of undocumented students' journeys to and life in the
Received 24 February 2021 United States can disrupt White, monolingual teachers' understandings of emergent bilinguals (EBs) in
Received in revised form their rural classrooms. Online postings and plans of action of two teachers were analyzed through
27 November 2021
Vygotsky's theorizing on imagination, emotion, and catharsis, and Nussbaum's narrative imagination.
Accepted 26 January 2022
Available online 23 February 2022
Reading the counter-narratives triggered an emotional response, enabling teachers to develop an
informed empathy and to re-story interactions with previous EBs and understandings of familiar rural
spaces. With expanded understandings of undocumented students' lived experiences, teachers could
Keywords:
Professional development
more responsively address the needs of EBs and their families.
Transformative learning © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Counter-narratives
Rural schools
Emergent bilinguals
Undocumented students

1. Introduction minors arrived in six European countries between January and

Dehumanizing images and stories of immigrants permeate the
American consciousness (Beckwith, 2018; Davis, 2018; MacGuill,
2018) at a time when immigrants, including unaccompanied mi-
nors, continue to cross the southern border of the United States in
record numbers (Sullivan, 2021). This situation is not unique to the
United States: more than 11,000 unaccompanied and separated
* Antagonistic perspectives toward immigrant populations of
This submission has not been published elsewhere, is not presently under
review elsewhere, and will not be submitted elsewhere while under review for
TATE. The Institutional Review Board at the University Florida approved this
research as part of a federally funded National Professional Development grant
through the US Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). We have no conflict
of interest to disclose.
* Corresponding author. PO Box 115454, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL,
32611-5454, USA.
E-mail address: pgolombek@ufl.edu (P. Golombek).
March of 2021 (United Nations Children's Fund, 2021, p. 2). For
example, humanitarian crises are currently evolving at the Polish-
Belarussian and Croatian-Bosnian borders, demonstrating how
persistent migration issues have not been adequately addressed.
Since almost half of the forcibly displaced population include
children (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2021),
how educators address and meet the needs of these students
amidst an often-hostile discourse around human mobility is a
critical issue globally.
color abound worldwide, and misconceptions can shape in-
dividuals' attitudes toward immigrants (Bauman, 2016). The Polish
government, for example, has portrayed the refugees currently
entering through Belarus “as potentially dangerous radicals and
criminals” (Henley, 2021). In the U.S. context, majoritarian narra-
tives often brand Latinx immigrants as ‘illegal aliens’ who exploit
the generous welfare state of the United States, take jobs away from

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103655
0742-051X/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
American citizens, threaten security, and participate in illegal ac-
tivities (Chaco
n & Davis, 2018). The depiction of immigrants as
criminals, what has been called the criminal narrative, has been
found to shape an individual's cognitive representations of immi-
grants, which then shapes preferences for restrictive public policy
on immigration (Martinez et al., 2021).
These pejorative narratives about Latinx immigrants similarly
shape teachers’ attitudes in U.S. public schools working with
emergent bilinguals (EBs)1 with varied immigration statuses.
Scholars estimate that about 600,000 students attend rural schools
and are identified as English learners (here, EBs) (Hussar et al.,
2020). Spanish-speaking EBs, who comprise the majority of the
students identified for English language learning services in
schools, come from distinct cultures and have varied historical,
social, political, and economic reasons for immigrating to the
United States (Fuller & Leeman, 2020).
Though the percentage of EBs is lowest in rural settings (about
14%) compared to cities, suburbs, and towns in the United States,
rural educators are the least prepared to address cultural and lin-
guistic diversity in their schools and classrooms (Cicchinelli &
Beesley, 2017; O'Neal et al., 2008). K-12 educators remain largely
White, monolingual, female, and middle class (National Center for
Education Statistics, 2016; Taie & Goldring, 2018), especially in
the U.S. South (Guarino et al., 2006), the context for this article.
Teachers' early experiences with diversity shape their evaluations
concerning immigration and undocumented student status, with
little experience with diversity being associated with negative at-
titudes towards these students (Connery & Weiner, 2021). Some
teachers in the South describe their communities as conservative,
having little to no experience with diversity, and suspicious of
minoritized populations in their communities (Li, 2020; Marichal,
2020). White monolingual teachers working with EBs in their
classrooms often develop deficit-based and xenophobic beliefs of
EBs' language abilities and may hold incorrect assumptions about
the use of the home language in school (Garmon, 2005; Pettit, 2011;
Walker et al., 2004). Some teachers in the South have expressed the
attitude that EBs “come with nothing” (Mellom et al., 2018, p. 98), a
deficit perspective concerning EBs that then may shape their
instructional expectations of and interactions with EBs.
Connery and Weiner (2021) highlight the exigency for formal
professional development (PD) opportunities to inform teachers
about immigration and the lives of undocumented students. They
argue for the need to develop teachers' sociopolitical awareness
“beyond a well-intentioned approach to working with students
from multicultural backgrounds” (p. 11), so teachers can engage
these students in meaningful ways. Their call for formal PD op-
portunities resonates with the context and goal of the research we
present in this article. We describe two classroom teachers'
participation in a book group project in a graduate-level course on
teaching EBs in high poverty rural settings to answer our research
question: How do counter-stories of immigration transform
mainstream teachers' understandings of EBs and their families in
their rural educational context? Using Vygotsky's (1971; 2004)
theorizing on imagination, emotion, and catharsis in relation to
art, complemented by Nussbaum's (2017) work on the narrative
imagination, we detail how counter-stories of immigration can
extend White monolingual teachers' understandings of EBs and
their families by both engaging them with the book characters and
contextualizing their EBs' realities in a specific spatial and socio-
political context.
1
English Learners (ELs) is commonly used in the U.S. literature. Herein we use
the term emergent bilinguals (EBs) to highlight linguistic resources of these stu-
dents in U.S. schools rather than immigration status.
2
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
2. Review of literature and theoretical framework
2.1. Young adult literature
Researchers have proposed that reading children's multicultural
and young adult literature (YAL) in schools can shape cognitive and
emotional development (Sims Bishop, 1990). Teacher educators and
researchers have similarly used this idea by integrating YAL con-
cerning Latinx adolescents to develop teachers' understandings of
immigration and EBs' lived experience. The findings show that
teachers emotionally connected with the fictional characters and
their experiences, though some expressed misunderstandings and
discomfort about cultural issues (Escamilla & Nathenson-Mejía,
2003) and often had difficulty analyzing immigration issues criti-
cally (Graff, 2010). Martínez-Rolda
n and Heineke (2011) noted how
teachers' personal experiences as immigrants and educators of
color born in the United States mediated their negotiation of the
fiction they read and provided the one White female teacher with a
different perspective of the discrimination and racism described in
the book. This early work integrating YAL in teacher education
suggests that the emotional connection that teachers experience
when reading fiction about students' lives that differ from their
own is a valuable way to build teacher empathy for these students.
Furthermore, Rodriguez et al. (2018) argue that teachers must
develop knowledge of the sociopolitical conditions surrounding
immigration for undocumented newcomers to cultivate empathy
and to avoid placing these students in detrimental, even dangerous,
situations.
2.2. LatCrit theory
More recent scholarship grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT)
and Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit) has examined how children's
literature can humanize and restory the immigrant journey across
the southern border of the United States (Sciurba et al., 2020); and
how Latinx students' stories help them make sense of their own
and their families' experiences crossing the border, as well as
inform other students and educators (Osorio, 2018; Ríos Vega,
2020) by pushing back against narratives demonizing Mexican
immigrants. Gonzalez (2018) juxtaposed his educational story in a
college-preparation program for under-represented, first-genera-
tion college students with that of one of his older brothers who “fell
through the cracks” (p. 252). He highlighted how teachers
perceived his hairstyle, manner of dress, and behaviors as prob-
lematic and punished him. These studies suggest the power of
counter-narratives to not only facilitate the sense-making pro-
cesses of Latinx students concerning immigration and schooling,
but to inform other students, educators, and administrators about
other cultures and the conditions that immigrants face to challenge
misperceptions. As Delgado (1989) concisely expressed, “The sto-
ryteller gains psychically, the listener morally and epistemologi-
cally” (p. 437).
2.3. Counter-stories
We conceptualize counter-stories and their role according to

rzano and Yosso's (2002) definition:
Solo
both a method of telling the story of those experiences that are
not often told (i.e., those on the margins of the society) and a
tool for analyzing and challenging … the majoritarian story. (p.
26)
We largely draw upon Delgado's (1989) theorization of the value
of counter-stories, or counter-narratives, which aligns with Miller
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
et al.’s (2020) recent call for CRT as being a compelling framework
through which to address issues of educational equity. Counter-
stories, according to Delgado (1989), are crucial to the listener
who is uninformed or misinformed by the master narrative because
the “graphic quality” of counterstories “can stir imagination in ways
in which more conventional discourse cannot” (p. 2415). Counter-
stories “engage conscience” (p. 2415) and help us in “overcoming
otherness” (p. 2438). They inform us about the realities of
marginalized people and can transform educators' belief systems
(Buchanan & Hilburn, 2016; Cho, 2017; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001;
Fr

anquiz et al., 2011).
In this study we operationalize both fictional and non-fictional
stories about undocumented people's journey to and life in the
United States as counter-stories and as a means through which to
challenge the criminal narratives portrayed in the media. Because
both the EBs in the research setting and the protagonists in the
books were mainly of Latinx background, LatCrit Theory fit the
context and purpose of this study. LatCrit Theory, rooted in CRT
(Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Solo
rzano & Yosso, 2002), may situate
educational understandings of Latinx students, who are economi-
cally and legally affected by their status and seen as raced, stereo-
typed, and minoritized groups. Delgado's (1989) call to use counter-
stories to problematize, resist, and fight the labeling practices
reinforced by the media and political rhetoric is particularly
important in the broader sociopolitical context of the Latinx com-
munity immigrating to, residing in, and changing the composition
of U.S. rural areas (Gill, 2010; McHenry-Sorber & Provinzano, 2017).
This situation intensified beginning in 2016 with the enforcement
of immigration policies by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforce-
ment (ICE).
2.4. Vygotsky and Nussbaum and the power of imagination through
art
We theorize the value of counter-stories in transforming
teachers' understandings of EBs through Vygotsky's (1925/1971,
1978) theorizing on imagination, emotion, and catharsis as humans
engage with various types of art, especially in classrooms (Bundy
et al., 2015; Connery et al., 2010; Piazolli, 2018). We also use
Nussbaum's (2017) framework of narrative imagination. According
to Vygotsky (2004), “everything the imagination creates is always
based on elements taken from reality, from a person's previous
experience” (p. 13). Vygotsky's idea is significant because it sug-
gests that one goal of education is to broaden students' experiences
by engaging them with different kinds of people, events, and
knowledge. In the context of this study, White, monolingual
teachers as culturally and historically situated and mediated beings
working with immigrant EBs do not have the previous experiences
to imagine these students' lived experience nor to comprehend
their emotions, needs, motives, and behaviors. Educators' everyday
understandings of EBs are incomplete and possibly inaccurate,
especially when these understandings have been normalized by
majoritarian stories portraying immigrants as freeloaders, gang
members, and so on. Vygotsky (1986) called these unexamined
notions as everyday concepts–imperfect empirical observations
people make through the concrete experiences of daily life. It is
imagination that provides the means through which one
can conceptualize something from another person's narration
and description of what he himself [sic] has never directly
experienced. He [sic] is not limited to the narrow circle and
narrow boundaries of his own experience but can venture far
beyond these boundaries, assimilating, with the help of his [sic]
imagination someone else's historical or social experience.
(Vygotsky, 2004, p. 17, p. 17)
3
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
Broadening experience to enrich human beings' potential to use
their imagination is not easy or even possible at times to do. Yet, as
Nussbaum (2017) highlights, humans can cross boundaries and
engage with peoples whose identities they do not share through
literature. Readers can imagine another's psychology and lived re-
ality. Broadening one's experience can be accomplished through
engagement with literature because it evokes emotion. When one
reads a tragedy, the pain of the protagonist as portrayed through
the written word is felt, so the emotions of a character can be
experienced “truly, seriously, and deeply” (Vygotsky, 1971, p. 20).
One must reflect on the written word as well “to consider more
profoundly the depths of human experience” (Smagorinsky, 2013,
p. 196). When reading about the ordeals and intimate feelings of
characters as the drama unfolds, “empathy as an emotional and
cognitive response” may emerge (Bundy, 2014, p. 118). Empathy
with characters, thus, enables us to connect personal feelings to the
human condition, stimulating a deeper understanding and
sensitivity.
Identifying with others, while necessary to realize social justice,
however, is problematic by itself. Nussbaum (2017) cautions that
we can “too easily deteriorate into a self-congratulatory wallowing
in our compassionate tendencies” (p. 391). She explains how
narrative enables us to understand the circumstances that shaped,
continue to shape, and limit a person's desires, motivations, and
ability to act. She details what readers must also experience by
referencing Marcus Aurelius' argument that narrative imagination
contributes to undoing retributive anger. He [Aurelius] means
that when we are able to imagine why someone has come to act
in a way that might generally provoke an angry response, we
will be less inclined to demonize the person, to think of him or
her as purely evil and alien. (p. 390)
As readers, according to Nussbaum (2017), we must be
disturbed by what we read to spark our conscience and try to un-
derstand the social, economic, and historical conditions behind a
character's motivations and actions, as well as to imagine their
psychological state. Following this line of argument, teachers who
use their narrative imagination to try to tell the story of a student
who has annoyed or angered them from the student's psychological
state, even though not fully understanding the student's psychol-
ogy, would be less likely to misconstrue or punish that student's
behavior.
Literature can thus provoke a dual affect, an affective reaction to
the aesthetic and actual worlds (Bundy et al., 2015; Vygotsky, 1976).
Dual affect may provoke conflicting feelings of beauty and pain and
may result in what Vygotsky (1971) formulated as catharsis, “the
creative act of overcoming feeling, resolving it, conquering it” (p.
248). Humans engaging with art are moved through their con-
flicting emotions, resulting in the “short-circuiting and destruction
of these emotions” (p. 213). The developmental potential of this
psychic release can be realized if emotions are reflected upon after
being experienced (Bolton, 1979). Still, development of a person
involves not only changes in cognition (thinking) but changes in
activity (doing). Vygotsky's theory as a theory of mind conceives of
development as a dialogic process of transformation of self and
activity (Galperin, 1992; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000).
3. Methods
3.1. Research setting
The rural north Florida school district in which this study took
place is predominantly agricultural with an industry base of peanut
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
and watermelon farming, pine needle baling, and horse farming.
Immigrant families predominate as day workers in these industries
and provide low-cost labor for the local community's economy. Of
the 40,000 people who reside in the rural community, about 9%
self-identify as Hispanic or Latino (U.S. Census, 2019). Though
approximately 6% were found to speak a language other than En-
glish in the home, and approximately 3.2% were foreign-born, these
data do not capture undocumented members of the community.
There is evidence that those numbers are twice those reported in
the U.S. Census (Coady, Harper, & De Jong, 2016). The large school
district had 198 EBs who were receiving ESOL (English to Speakers
of Other Languages) services during the 2017e2018 school year,
among a total of 5204 students. Data from the district indicate
further that of the district's elementary teachers, 133 were White
females, six were White males, four were African American fe-
males, and one was a Hispanic female (Florida Department of
Education, 2013, p. 5).
3.2. The professional development program
This study was conducted during an academic course that was
part of an ongoing job-embedded, federally-funded rural PD pro-
gram consisting of two phases. Phase I included six online graduate
level courses with on-site coaching for classroom teachers. The
coursework was adapted from an existing online graduate certifi-
cate program by using a critical place-based lens (Gruenewald,
2003) to ensure that the PD responded to the place-based needs
of our participating rural educators and the EB students and fam-
ilies with whom they worked. The course featured in this article,
Meeting the Educational Needs of Children Living in Poverty, was
delivered in hybrid format and explored the socioeconomic and
political context surrounding EBs living in high-poverty rural set-
tings. The first author was the instructor of this course, and the
other authors were participant observers (second author took field
notes during the face-to-face sessions).
We played an active role in the completion of the four-year rural
PD project. As two White American professors and a White Polish
graduate student associated with a southeastern research-
intensive university in the United States, we recognize our role in
perpetuating Whiteness and dominant culture ideologies in the PD,
in the coursework, and in this study. At the same time, being White
gave us a kind of insider status despite not being from that county.
We had worked with educators in the community for more than a
decade, placed undergraduate students there in field experiences,
and built relationships with district leaders, principals, and teach-
ers. Our cultural backgrounds, personal family migratory stories,
experiences being raised by single mothers in challenging socio-
economic conditions, multilingual backgrounds, as well as our cu-
mulative 60þ years working with English learners and teachers in
various contexts shaped the findings of this study (Creswell & Poth,
2018). Throughout our data analysis, we engaged in self-reflexivity
by discussing each other's interpretations in relation to our
identities.
3.3. Book/reading group assignment
The 21 participating rural educators were asked to prioritize
three books from a reading list created by the instructor including
non-fiction (some disliked fiction) and YAL of the journey to and
living in the southern United States as undocumented persons from
Mexico or Central America (one of the student populations in this
district). The instructor formed groups of three or four participants
based on their book preferences (Appendix). Each book group
wrote three on-line postings at identified points over the semester,
with each group member acting in one of the three following
4
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
assigned roles common to book groups: Discussion Leader, Quote
Finder, and Connector. The educators were encouraged to respond
to each other's online postings, and the instructor wrote responses,
posing questions and providing information to each individual
post.
At the end of the semester, educators completed a plan of action,
based on their emerging understandings from the project: 1)
beginning-of-schoolyear goal (August) and specific action(s); and
2) beginning-calendar-year goal (after January 1) and specific ac-
tion(s). This served as an orientation (Galperin, 1989), an exter-
nalized, intentional conception of actions to enact based on new
understandings of a phenomena, in this case the students' journeys
to and life in the United States. Several activities were intended to
support the book reading throughout the semester, including: an
awareness-raising activity by our partner, the Rural Women's
Health Program (RWHP), to expose the educators to the different
Latinx groups in the county and the socioeconomic and political
conditions in Latin America shaping their motives for immigrating
to the United States; a visit to a local nursery owned by a Mexican
immigrant who employed other Latinx immigrants, some of whom
were parents of students in the district; and a guest lecture by an
immigration attorney to inform educators about U.S.immigration
policies that affected their students and families.
3.4. Data analysis
Through the selection, analysis, and presentation of data, we
established trustworthiness in various ways (Elo et al., 2014). The
primary data sources consisted of the educators’ online postings for
the book group (labeled as OP1, OP2, OP3) and their plans of action.
The first two authors followed a collaborative inductive and
deductive analysis approach (Spradley, 1979) through five phases.
Field notes (FN) were used to triangulate our understandings of the
data by expanding content from the in-person classroom discus-
sions related to their book reading.
In the initial coding of phase one analysis, the primary data
source consisted of the 21 participants' three online postings for the
reading group assignment. We individually analyzed the postings
chronologically to generate a range of codes in terms of the content,
language used, and emotions expressed, placing data from each
participant under relevant codes. We then collaboratively dis-
cussed observations, hunches, and disagreements in response to
our guiding question during weekly meetings that occurred over a
month. In phase two, we selected five participants to examine in
depth, because they represented different roles in the schools
(three teachers, one reading coach, and one guidance counselor)
and a range of responses connecting the story to their personal and
professional lives. In phase three, we collaboratively compared our
domain analyses by detailing the characteristics of each domain
and subdomain, focusing on actions that the participants wanted to
take and their restorying. In phase four, we analyzed our domains
deductively through our theoretical framework and then theorized
how these counter-narratives of immigration worked to transform
the educators' understandings of EBs and their families. Finally, we
collaboratively engaged in a cross-participant analysis to detail the
similarities and differences in the educators’ transformations in
their thinking and instructional activities.
We selected the two focal teachers, Kayla and Kevin (pseudo-
nyms), as narrative exemplars (Lyons & Laboskey, 2002). We
enacted trustworthiness by exemplifying through the teachers’
own words how they individually moved through each of the roles
in the book group chronologically. We engaged in a process of
validation (Lyons & Laboskey, 2002) by presenting these narratives
for feedback, a sense of plausibility and verisimilitude (Bruner,
2010), and dialogue with different research- and teaching-based
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
audiences (English as a second language education, rural education,
and bilingual education) at several conferences.
4. Findings
To explain how counter-stories of immigration transform
mainstream teachers' understandings of EBs and their families in
their rural educational context, we detail Kayla and Kevin's
engagement in the book group activity. Below we detail their online
postings in the order in which their book group roles took place to
show their cognitive-emotional engagement with the characters
and stories over time. We end each section with the teachers' plans
of action to show how they re-conceptualized their work with EBs
and their families.
4.1. Kayla's story
Kayla grew up on a farm in this north central Florida town; in
fact, she attended the very elementary school in which she was
teaching. Kayla had a bachelor's degree and worked as a first-grade
teacher for 18 years. During that time, she consistently had small
numbers of EBs in her classroom. She lived in the town in which her
school was located at the time of the study with her two daughters,
one of whom taught in the district as well.
4.1.1. Kayla's reproachful questions and an inability to imagine
In her role as Discussion Leader, Kayla summarized the key
theme from the first three chapters of the book Enriques's Journey
(Nazario, 2006), as “the negative effect of Enrique growing up
without having his mother in his life.” Kayla linked this theme to a
series of questions concerning Enrique's mother's choice to leave
him in Honduras when she immigrated to the United States. She
wrote.

Did Lourdes [mother] really think about the effects of her
leaving Enrique behind in Honduras? Did she anticipate all of
the misfortunes her leaving would cause for her child?

Is money alone a good reason to leave your child behind in a
place where there is so much danger, and do many dangerous
things for them to become involved in?

How could have Lourdes made better decisions upon arriving in
America so that she could have saved the needed money to get
her children to American safely? (OP1)
Kayla's questions connote a majoritarian story about immigra-
tion through which she views Lourdes as making an informed,
rational, agentive, and personal, perhaps selfish, choice to move to
the United States. Though she does not express the kind of retrib-
utive anger that Nussbaum (2017) references, she does subtly
convey reproach at Lourdes as a mother for her decision to leave
Enrique in Honduras. She openly wonders whether Lourdes “really”
thought through the consequences of her actions, anticipated “all of
the misfortunes”, and could have made “better decisions”. The
questions neglect the socioeconomic and political conditions that
influenced Lourdes to leave Honduras. Furthermore, the content of
the questions naively implies that Lourdes was culturally and
emotionally savvy to navigate living in a new country despite not
speaking English fluently or understanding the daily cultural and
social processes of the community, something a monolingual per-
son would not know to even consider.
4.1.2. Kayla's quotes as sense-making about the reality of the
journey
As Kayla continued reading Enrique's Journey (Nazario, 2006),
her selection of quotes in the role of Quote Finder illustrates that
5
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
she was trying to make sense of what the journey to the United
States involved and what both Enrique and his mother
experienced:

“Ten times in ten months train riders have carried to her front
door men and boys without arms, legs or heads.” (p. 75)

“The house is notorious … Women are raped here, most recently
a 16-year-old was assaulted repeatedly over 3 days.” (p. 77)

“Drinking water can be impossible to come by. Migrants filter
ditch sewage through T-shirts. Finding food can be just as
difficult.” (p. 79) (OP2)
Kayla's selection of quotes suggests she had an emotional re-
action as she engaged with the book as they embody the “graphic
quality” (p. 2415) that Delgado (1989) highlighteddthe dangers of
navigating the terrain of the journey; losing body parts or being
killed on what immigrants call “El Tren de la Muerte” (Train of
Death); encountering people who may violate another person; and
finding food and water. Kayla's quotes suggest that she was gaining
some understanding of the psychological terror of what the
immigrant journey involved.
Some of Kayla's selected quotes reveal her emerging under-
standing of Enrique's mother's expectations about immigrating to
the United States and the painful consequences of that decision:

“Though many mothers expect the separations to be short,
typically they last 6e8 years.” (p. 156)

“Enrique says, “Who are you to me? I don't even know you!” (p.
195)
Though Kayla was never forced to decide to leave her daughters
to work abroad, she could draw on her lived experience as a mother
to imagine what it might be like to be separated from her daughters
for such a long period time and how they might reject her because
of that separation. This shift from expressing reproach to identi-
fying different psychologies of fear (safety, starvation, loss of child)
represents a recognition of the realities of the immigrant journey
that contradicted her everyday concepts, shaped by growing up in a
relatively crimefree and homogenous town where everyone knew
her, and the majoritarian stories about immigrants coming through
the southern border.
4.1.3. Kayla's restorying as catharsis
As Connector, Kayla acknowledged her emotional reaction and
the limitations of her everyday concepts concerning immigrants’
overland journey to and their lives in the United States:
This book in its entirety (not just the last few chapters) has made
me more conscious to the struggle and the lifestyle of our [EB]
families. Enrique's Journey was heartbreaking and so real. This
book helped me realize that many of our students come from
families like Enrique's. I did not understand the magnitude of
what coming to this country really meant until reading this
book. (OP3)
Kayla began to imagine the lived experiences of her students
and their families resulting from the cognitive and emotional
dissonance she experienced concerning the characters: a dual
affect in response to the fictional and real-world events. That is,
Kayla was emotionally affected by our visit to a local nursery for
which several parents who had immigrated from Central America
and had children in the school district worked. When we returned
to our classroom for discussion, Kayla's sense of concern was
palpable in her words and body language as she expressed that she
could not help wondering about their histories in relation to what
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
she learned from the book though she would never ask them (FN, 3/
3/17). She later wrote,
As I sit and think about the [EBs] in my classroom it helps me
realize some of the struggles of my previous and past students.
Why things that I feel are so important aren't really important to
these families I have served. One case in particular comes to
mind. A few years ago I was asked to take a student into my class
from second grade. This little girl has just arrived in the states
and could not speak in any English at all. She was from
Guatemala. The answer for her to learn English was to push her
back a grade and into my room. Of course I accepted the child
into my room. She was so shy, but so sweet. She has the desire to
learn and we got to work. She would never do her homework
and returned nothing I ever sent home (even in Spanish). Her
second grade teacher would get very frustrated with her and say
“all she wants to do is play.” I later found out that her mom left
Guatemala when she was just an infant. She was raised by her
grandmother. She was brought here by her mom (I never asked
how). Her mother worked nights to this child would have to go
with mom to work, and often sleep on the floor at her mom's job
at night. There was no time to do homework, or read, or really
even rest. However, she was often punished at school for not
having what she needed each day. (OP3)
As a result of her cognitive (learning more about) and emotional
(feeling for) engagement with the book about Enrique and her
former student, Lourdes, Kayla experienced catharsis as she re-
storied her experience. Working through the dual affect, she used
her narrative imagination to re-tell this student's story with some
understanding of the psychological state and real-world conditions
this student and her mother faced. In her re-storying of this stu-
dent, Kayla interpreted the student's behaviors with understanding
rather than from the deficit perspective expressed by her colleague.
4.1.4. Kayla's plan of action
Kayla's plan of action oriented her future actions with a goal to
“really get to know our students.” Her new understanding of the
lived realities of some of her immigrant students, gleaned through
her reading of the counter-narrative, helped provide a new po-
tential for acting towards these students and their families. Kayla's
beginning-of-schoolyear goal was “to enhance communication
between immigrant children's families,” and this was to be ach-
ieved by translating the open house materials into Spanish and
inviting the bilingual representatives of the RWHP to share La Guía,
a bilingual guide for local medical and legal services, and charitable
agencies. Though monolingual, Kayla came to understand how
important the home language was when engaging with EBs and
their families. Because Kayla imagined her response through the
story she read, her plan anticipated the challenges of daily life that
immigrant families likely faced and provided resources, especially
linguistic ones, to meet those challenges, foregrounding herself and
the school as an ally. Kayla's beginning-calendar-year goal focused
on coaching parents to help their children with schoolwork at
home. This suggests she views immigrant parents as resources,
people who want to help their children but may be unsure how to
do so in another language and culture.
Kayla accomplished her beginning-of-schoolyear goal, a change
in her activity and thus development in a Vygotskian sense. With
the help of the other first grade teacher and the ESOL aides, all
bilingual, they created an informational presentation for parents in
Spanish. Kayla then met with the parents, communicating through
the assistance of a translator. She was not able to accomplish her
beginning-calendar-year goal due to time constraints that semes-
ter. Though not part of the data used in this study, Kayla's
6
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
development as a vocal advocate for EBs in the school and state
legislature is further detailed in Li (2020).
4.2. Kevin's story
Kevin also grew up monolingual in the north central Florida
rural context of this study. At the time of the study, he had a
master's degree and was a fourth-grade teacher at another
elementary school in the district. An early career teacher, Kevin had
taught for three years, and worked with a small number of EBs in
his classrooms during that time.
4.2.1. Kevin's questioning compels his group to imagine
Kevin, as Discussion Leader, posed a series of questions
compelling his group to both express their feelings and make
connections between events described in their novel, Dream Things
True (Marquardt, 2015) and their work as educators:

How did these chapters help you better understand the
thoughts and feelings of undocumented families in our schools
and communities?

What feelings did you have as Alma and her family pulled up to
the chicken plant and witnessed what was unfolding?

In these chapters, the book presents the viewpoints of Alma and
Evan, however, the book also indicates that no one in the United
States is on the side of (undocumented) immigrants. How can
we alter this perception in our schools? (OP1)
Kevin's questions seemingly exemplify Vygotsky's ideas about
imagination and emotion and Nussbaum's narrative imagination.
Kevin's questions varied from Kayla's in that they encouraged his
group to think about the psychological state of the fictional char-
acters and to express their emotions and empathy for them,
compelling them to connect this empathy by imagining the un-
documented students and families in their own school. He compels
the group to express how they feel about an incident from the book
in which Alma and her family witness agents from the U.S. Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounding up workers at the
chicken plant where they work. Kevin's questions triggered a dual
affect in that they solicited an emotional response to both the
dramatic world as readers invested in Alma and the actual world as
humans. Although the educators never had a relative picked up by
ICE, they experienced empathy for Alma and her family by
expressing their feelings in response to such a disturbing scene.
Kevin recognized the sociopolitical realities of being undocu-
mented, including marginalization and the lack of advocates, as a
lead-in to his final question asking his group to consider how they
could act to change, essentially, the majoritarian narrative of
immigrants.
4.2.2. Kevin's quotes as sense-making about the aesthetic and
actual worlds
In the role of Quote Finder, Kevin again responded differently
from Kayla. Kevin selected quotes as part of his response to the
questions put forth by Gina (a guidance counselor), who was the
Discussion Leader in that round. Gina's questions included the
following:

After listening to the immigration lawyer [real name was used]
talk about immigration in our country, did you change the way
you viewed Alma's families [sic] misfortune/targeted racial
profiling when they got stopped?

How did racial profiling take place in the book, and is there
anything we can/should be doing to prevent racial profiling in
our schools? (OP2)
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
This online posting discussion took place after a face-to-face
class session in which a local immigration lawyer informed the
educators about the status of different immigration programs and
the implications of the intensified enforcement of immigration
policies by ICE. Many of the educators were distraught by the
lawyer's message that they could unintentionally place undocu-
mented parents at risk by trying to help them. Furthermore, the
three bilingual educators, including two Puerto Rican teachers and
an African American teacher, shared their own stories of racial
profiling in the local community.
Kevin responded to Gina's first question by identifying quotes
from the book (in italics) and connecting them to both the lawyer's
and classmates' commentaries:

“Well, son, I can take you back there to see them, but don't waste
your time postin’ bail. We'll have to keep ‘em here till Immi-
gration comes.” (Marquardt, 2015, p. 172)

Our talk with the immigration lawyer changed this scene for me,
as it became more realistic for our community. It is not by
happenstance that undocumented people are being deported, it
is an intentional and targeted action taking place right now. I
especially connected to Ariana's [teacher born in Puerto Rico]
story about being targeted for stops by the police. (OP2)
Kevin developed a different understanding of this scene in
which a police officer informs Alma's White boyfriend, Evan, about
how ICE would now be controlling the fate of his girlfriend's
imprisoned father and brother. As a result of the immigration
lawyer's presentation and his classmates' own experiences, Kevin
understood that ICE racially profiled the characters, stopped them
for a burned-out light on their truck, and arrested them. During the
class discussion with the lawyer (FN, 5/15/18), Ariana, one of the
Puerto Rican teachers, told several stories about her and her chil-
dren being stopped by the police and racially profiled, under
dubious pretenses. That several of their colleagues were racially
profiled by the local police was shocking for some of the White
teachers. Though Kevin does not explicitly use the words racial
profiling in his response, he is referencing it when he comments
how he “connected” with Ariana's story. That is, although Kevin
was emotionally disturbed by what transpired in the book as he
engaged with the book, he did not understand the racial un-
dercurrents or the real-world consequences until real people in his
community could explain and authenticate.
Kevin identifies a second scene from the book and describes his
understandings, which were reshaped by the lawyer's description
and Ariana's account of racial profiling:
“Yeah. You know those little lights next to the license plate?
There's one on each side?”
“One was burned out, and they stopped him because of that …”
(Marquardt, 2015, p. 176)
Racial profiling took place in this book by the collusion of
Georgia counties with the Federal government to stop and check
for undocumented people in the area. The above lines from the
book show how police use little things as probable cause to stop
the vehicle. I also know from our conversation in class that
people are stopped because their vehicle supposedly matches
the description of a vehicle reported in some type of crime or
situation. (OP2)
Though Kevin would not experience racial profiling, he could
now with narrative imagination, as Nussbaum (2017) suggests,
imagine the perils that the daily life of a person of color or an
7
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
undocumented person, living in his town might experience.
Although as a local White male Kevin could drive without fear, he
imagined that police might be told “[F]or example, we should pull
over any Hispanics we see driving within the city limits of [our
town] to check for a driver's license.” Kevin experienced a dual
affect in response to the events of the fictional or aesthetic world
and real-world stories shared by the lawyer and colleagues; that is,
his empathy for Alma and her family was reinforced by and
extended to Ariana. Kevin developed an expanded understanding
of the lived realities of undocumented persons, as well as how the
majoritarian narrative about immigrants often presents them as
criminals.
4.2.3. Kevin's connections as catharsis
Kevin expressed his personal engagement with Alma and her
storyline in his role as Connector.
I feel like there is a great pride associated with revealing our true
self, our struggles and removing that mask that we sometimes
put on to fit in. While I'll likely never face the same challenges as
Alma, I did feel proud of her willingness to stand up and share
her heart. (OP3)
The pride Kevin felt at Alma's action was an intimate response to
a fictional character's actions, as well as a recognition of something
generalizable in Alma's actions. He recognized the distinctiveness
of her experience as a female immigrant, obstacles that he would
never face, something Nussbaum (2017) attributes to narrative
imagination. Connecting to Alma's specific plight and the chal-
lenges of the human condition sparked empathy in Kevin.
A specific scene from the book provoked a deeply personal
connection to Kevin's childhood memories and the creative act of
catharsis:
I connected very strongly with the visit Alma and Evan made to
the detention center in Stewart County. I've been visiting
Stewart County since I was 5 years old. We have a hunting camp
there. It's a very desolate place. The detention center is in the
town of Lumpkin, a very dead place with no grocery stores or
red lights. It's even smaller than Bell, Florida which is the closest
place I could equate it to. Hotels are far away and it is isolated. I
can remember seeing the signs for ICE once and driving down
the road just being curious. I've pulled in the parking lot but I
didn't know much about what ICE was doing nor did I have any
connections to immigration. Now I imagine what it is like to live
in a community and have loved ones taken to a detention center
hours away. I can't imagine looking this place up, seeing where
it is and trying to find a way to get to your relatives and visit
them. I will never again visit Lumpkin without thinking of the
people who are detained there and the families split apart. (OP3)
Kevin reflected on a place so familiar and filled with memories
from his early childhood, Stewart County, and interrogated it from
the perspective of detained undocumented persons and visiting
families. He remembered seeing ICE signs and being “curious,” but
his lived experience as a White male from the community meant
that he, previously, had not questioned this. As a result of his
cognitive (learning more about) and emotional (feeling for)
engagement with the characters in this book, he identified the
difficulties people would encounter visiting their detained loved
ones due to the seclusion and lack of services in that area. Kevin
experienced catharsis as his understandings of a place he took for
granted were disrupted: he restoried the familiar through the
expanded experience that the novel provided and a different
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
understanding of the psychological state of the characters.
Kevin wanted “a happy ending” to the book, but he stated, “[I]t
just doesn't end that way for undocumented people. It doesn't end
that way for anyone when injustice is involved.” (OP3)
Kevin's reading and engagement of the book led him to share
personal information in class. One day he explained that he had
previously called undocumented people ‘illegal aliens’ but now
called them undocumented (FN, 3/3/18). He noted that he had
worked to transform his family's use of the term, an example of
how he was actively working to challenge “those thoughts and
ideals in the people we interact” with. Kevin's feelingsdof pride in
Alma, distress at racial profiling happening in the book and in his
community, and disbelief at what immigrant families experience
when family members are detained by ICE in conjunctiondare
externalized and made sense of through his writings of the online
posts.
4.2.4. Kevin's plan of action
Kevin's plan of action oriented him to new classroom activities
and strategies that reflected his that recognition stories can expand
our knowledge of each other. His beginning-of-schoolyear goal was
to “connect with student and create an open/inclusive classroom”,
which he hoped to achieve by creating student portraits to learn
more about their “backgrounds, families, and interests. His
beginning-calendar-year goal was “to incorporate differentiated
resources for all [emphasis original] students”. This included books
that reflected students' backgrounds, supplemental resources on
various cultures, and the use of languages other than English. The
second goal involved actions that in some sense mirror what Kevin
experienced by reading the novel. Students would be able to read
books that reflected their own lived experience, even in their home
language, and would share that experience with classmates who
likely do not have that lived, cultural experience. By doing this,
Kevin expressed a newfound commitment to incorporating stu-
dents' home languages into his classroom.
The next school year, when Kevin could have implemented his
plan, he moved into an administrative position in another rural
district, so he did not enact his plan. He remained part of the second
phase of the PD program, and he worked as a mentor with edu-
cators in his new district to create specific actions for the admin-
istration to promote inclusiveness and communication at the
school and for teachers to develop instructional strategies to work
with EBs, a change in his activity.
5. Discussion
Vygotsky's ideas on imagination, art, and catharsis, united with
Nussbaum's narrative imagination, can help explain how counter-
narratives of immigration and life of undocumented persons from
Mexico and Central America disrupted and expanded these White
monolingual teachers' understandings of the families and students
who might be in their classes in their rural schools in similar and
distinct ways. What reading the counter-narratives, in conjunction
with engaging with peers and people in the community, did in
transforming the teachers' understandings can be expressed by the
teachers shifting from feeling emotions for the characters to
beginning to feel emotions as the characters. The educators tried to
make sense of new information, historical and fictional events, and
the feelings and interactions of specific characters in response to
their everyday understandings of EBs living in their community.
The reading and discussion of the counter-narratives enabled the
educators to experience a dual affect (Vygotsky, 1976) as they
experienced an emotional reaction as human beings to the
8
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
aesthetic world of the characters' plight, and as teachers reflecting
on the possible real-world lived experiences of their students.
Reading about the characters' experiences informed and engaged
the educators' “conscience” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2415) regarding the
trauma of the journey to the United States, as well as how EBs/
immigrants may be perceived as outsiders in rural communities
and as having limited social, financial, legal, and linguistic support.
Empathizing with others and generalizing their experiences as
part of the human condition is valuable, but readers must, as
Nussbaum (2017) argues, gain understanding of another's psycho-
logical state. In Kayla's case, she initially could feel empathy for
Enrique, but as a mother of two daughters living in a relatively safe
rural town, she expressed disapproval of Enrique's mother and
misconceptions about her motivations to leave him behind. As
Kayla learned more about what Enrique and Lourdes experienced
and reflected on it through the online posts, she came to under-
stand Lourdes' psychological perspective, her motives. Kayla con-
nected her sensemaking to Latinx parents that she met in the
community. Kayla could then re-story her experiences with a
former student from the student's perspective rather than as
‘other’, which Delgado (1989) suggests as one impact of counter-
stories.
Kevin expressed empathy towards the main character and stu-
dents in his school in his first reflections. Later, he connected the
psychological terror the characters in the book experienced to the
immigration attorney's details of how ICE was implementing ar-
rests of Latinx persons locally and his Latinx colleague's sharing of
her and her children's stories of being racially profiled in their local
community. As Vygotsky (2004) and Nussbaum (2017) argue, nar-
ratives can inform about people's differences in experience and
identity. Kevin, having qualitatively different experiences and
identities from the book characters, realized how people in his local
community might experience what the characters had. He was then
able to perceive something previously invisible in the place where
he vacationed: an ICE detention center. He re-storied the place with
newly developed insights into the hardships and psychological
state of persons who were trying to connect with undocumented
friends and relatives at the center.
Teachers’ feeling for the characters in the book, the EBs in their
schools, and the undocumented people in their community is
especially critical in rural schools, where educators are less likely to
be knowledgeable about culturally, linguistically, and racially
diverse students. This study thus contributes to research demon-
strating how reading of counter-narratives of Latinx adolescents
and immigration enables teachers to learn about and connect with
the lived experiences of some Latinx students through the char-
acters in literature (Escamilla & Nathenson-Mejía, 2003; Martínez-
Rolda
n & Heineke, 2011), essential to imagination, and to question
the dominant discourses concerning undocumented immigrants
and immigration (Graff, 2010; Rodriguez et al., 2018).
Becoming change agents also requires participating in the
difficult discussions surrounding linguistic and racial privilege and
inequity. Dialogues with their classmates and the immigration at-
torney localized the realities of racial profiling, as well as the in-
tricacies of and brutality of enacting immigration policies. Much
like the teachers of color and multilingual immigrants in Martínez-
Rolda
n and Heineke (2011), it was the teachers who were Latinx
and/or African American, and bilingual that initiated conversations
about normalized racial oppression in their rural community.
However, the educators did not, nor did the teacher of the course,
sufficiently engage online in more difficult self-reflection con-
cerning how they personally benefit from the maintenance of the
social inequities that EBs and their families face. The findings
P. Golombek, A.I. Olszewska and M. Coady
caution against a superficial, self-serving empathy through which a
person identifies with another by othering that person and not
working to change the social and material conditions that create
inequities (Boler, 1997). Teachers need to develop more than “a
common-sense understanding of multiculturalism too common in
teacher training and practice” (Rodriguez et al., 2018, p. 14).
Empathy must be developed along with awareness of the socio-
political context and the disparate power relations that students in
a new culture face (Connery & Weiner, 2021; Palmer & Menard-
Warwick, 2012), or a “critical empathy” (DeStigter, 1999, p. 24, as
cited in; Palmer & Menard-Warwick, 2012, p. 19).
The plan of action, nonetheless, provided an orientation for how
the teachers could concretize their new understandings in actions
to support EBs in their classes and their families. The creative
process of catharsis requires teachers to not only work through
their emotions and empathize, to use their narrative imagination,
but to take actions to address inequity. Both teachers changed their
activity through their actions to include the students' home lan-
guages in their classrooms and in communication with parents.
This is especially poignant for rural communities, given that rural
schools have less access to specialized teachers for EBs (Provasnik
et al., 2007), and monolingual teachers often view EBs’ home lan-
guages as problematic in their learning (Mellom et al., 2018). In
sum, this change in activity, along with the cognitive/emotional
changes, represents development in a Vygotskian sense.
6. Limitations
We focus here on only two educators to show the variability of
participants’ initial understandings and transformed un-
derstandings and activities, in this case of/with EBs and their
families in their rural educational context, as a kind of reality of PD
programs from which other researchers and teacher educators
might gain insights rather than generalizability. Though there were
teachers who did not change their activity, we do not share those
stories here. They remain an important part of the PD experience to
share in another venue.
7. Conclusion
Integrating YAL in teacher PD programs represents the kind of
opportunities that Connery and Weiner (2021) call for to inform
teachers about immigration and the lives of undocumented stu-
dents. Yet, our experience revising this research during the COVID-
19 pandemic, which exposed the brutality of systemic racial and
economic inequity globally, has heightened our awareness of the
shortcomings of this research (Giroux, 2020), as well as our
implementation of the book groups. We now understand this study
as an example of how researchers can examine research and
pedagogy using counter-narratives to promote transformative ac-
tions (Miller et al., 2020) for various minoritized students, and we
conclude with some implications for others doing similar work
across the globe.
We recognize that having these difficult discussions on race,
systemic inequities, and educators’ own White and linguistic
privilege required us to take a more systematic and reflexive
approach. Teachers would have benefitted from perspective-taking
activities, such as from Gere and others (2009), to lay the ground-
work for these difficult discussions. Including YAL reflecting other
immigration motives relevant to this rural place would have
amplified the diversity of the Latinx population. Unpacking
monolingual privilege more explicitly would have been simulta-
neously threatening and constructive, as would including other
9
Teaching and Teacher Education 113 (2022) 103655
issues such as sexism and ableism. The instructor of this course, by
adopting an anti-racist pedagogy and explicit self-reflexivity, would
have opened a space for these difficult discussions (see for example,
Lac et al., 2020). Acknowledging the shortcomings in this course
while simultaneously imagining possibilities to address them
reaffirms our commitment to having educators read diverse
counter-narratives while building culturally and linguistically sus-
taining pedagogies. Reading YAL counter-narratives of immigration
and life in the United States, as well as other immigration stories
from and to other places, as is being done in Norway, Poland, and
Turkey (Karsli-Calamak, 2018; Olszewska, 2020; Svendsen et al.,
2021), can be part of a systematic and intentional process of
addressing the cultural, racial, and linguistic gap between EBs and
their mainstream teachers in various settings.
Appendix. Books Read by Book Groups
Alvarez, J. (2009). Return to sender. Random House.
Davis, J. (2014). Spare parts: Four undocumented teenagers, one
ugly robot, and a fight for the American dream. Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux.
Jime
nez, F. (1997). The circuit: Stories from the life of a migrant
child. Houghton Mifflin.
Marquardt, M. (2015). Dream things true. St. Martin’s.
Nazario, S. (2006). Enrique’s journey. Random House
Pellegrino, M. (2009). Journey of dreams. Frances Lincoln.
Restrepo, B. (2011.) Illegal. Harper Collins.
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