Compared to research about public schooling or higher education, few studies of U.S. nonprofit adult education exist, and fewer still explore the experiences and contributions of adult immigrant students in this context. Often silenced, perceived as quiescent and passive, these students bring to education visions and voices that have long gone unheard. In a political moment of great insecurity, when fear and violence paralyze the imagination, my work represents an activist response to an unacceptable lacuna in educational research. This occupies a direct challenge to the assumed rightness of Western democratic principles and to dominant, top-down assumptions about adult immigrants who are discursively constructed and disempowered on ethnic/racial, linguistic, class-based, and educational terms, among others.

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2018

• Date of Conference: 25-28 June, 2018
• DOI: 10.2053/CICE.2018.0037
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-908320-90-2
• Conference Location: University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada