Schooling experience of Latino immigrant adolescents in North Carolina: an examination of relationships between peers, teachers, parents and school

This study uses the LAMHA project qualitative interview data as a secondary data set to examine twenty adolescent Latino youth's school experiences in North Carolina. The study examines how Latino immigrant youth (a) construct their understanding of self and peer identities and the factors contributing to this construction, (b) describe teacher-student relationships together with the factors that mediate whether students have positive or negative teacher-student relationships, and (c) how immigrant youths' parents experience the relationship and involvement with their child's school, parental beliefs about education and factors that enable or inhibit engagement with their child's education. Findings indicate that race, ethnicity and cultural distinctions are leading factors in construction of self and peer identification. Relations between students and teachers are heavily mediated by teacher adaptation to students' differences. Parental engagement is largely a product of financial and language resources made available to them for enabling their involvement