Exploring Interculturality: Dialectical Tensions with Identity and Schooling Systems with First Generation Immigrant Students

First generation immigrant students' experiences, perspectives and histories deeply affect their socio-cultural understanding and connection to their surrounding environments, and can serve as a valuable point of entry into problematizing the concept of static integration. Working from a dialectical perspective, I utilize thirteen first generation immigrant students' accounts to explore their socio-cultural struggles, the two school systems into which they were imbedded and the ways in which these facilitated or impeded immigrant student intercultural experience(s). Results showed that students experienced internal struggles with sociocultural scripts, language and cultural loyalty in confluence with school systems that were in themselves expressing stress vis-Ă -vis socio-cultural facilitation and support.M.Ed