As a part of the School of Public Affairs Leadership program, I spent the fall 2020 semester researching the inequities that immigrant students face in educational settings. Over the course of the spring semester, I am implementing a project to address the three main findings of my research: inadequate teacher preparation/cultural proficiency, networks for advocacy between students and their teachers, and resource distribution. This project will support immigrant and other marginalized students through fulfilling a resource-based needs assessment and by utilizing the journalism opportunities on American University’s campus to help elevate student voices. The first portion of this project is being achieved using money from the Eagle Endowment Office’s Martin Luther King Jr. grant allocated according to survey results from a local D.C. non-profit: the Latin American Youth Center. The second portion of this project is aiming to utilize opportunities with WAMU or other journalism opportunities to interview marginalized students. Through these interviews I hope to elevate the cultural proficiency of listeners, specifically teachers and peers, and help students practice their advocacy skills.

          Over the course of creating this project, I have come to realize how many people it takes to create An Idea (with an uppercase “I”) as opposed to ideas (with a lowercase “I”). When I chose my research topic, I started with an idea: as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and refugee to the United States, I wanted to research something pertaining to immigration. After pouring through surface level data about immigration research currently being conducted, a culmination of other people’s ideas, I decided that my interests, previous experience, and deficits in the research I was reading best directed me to researching education and immigration. As I continued to account for more researchers’ and scholars’, immigrants’ and professors’ ideas, my research question shifted from “how does a student’s immigration status affect their emotional, social, and academic development and success during their primary and secondary education?” to “given the inequities faced by students who are immigrants from countries where English is not the primary language, how can education systems and community partners ensure that teacher preparedness programs and relationships between schools and immigrant communities most benefit the emotional, social, and academic success of and resource distribution for students who are immigrants from countries where English is not the primary language?”

         After months of compiling research, I thought I had a good idea regarding the social action project I wanted to complete. Then, I met with Troy Boddy, the Director of the Montgomery County Public School’s Equity Initiatives Unit. I met with Monica Behn, the Coordinator of American University’s Eagle Endowment Council. I met with Marcy Campos, the Director of American University’s Center for Community Engagement and Service. I met with SPA Leadership second-year teaching assistant Olivia Phillips again and again and again. My final concretized, realistic, implementable, effective Idea (with an uppercase “I”) was a labor not only from my own head and of my own heart but from and by collaboration with the heads and hearts around me. From this project, I have come to realize that an idea turns into An Idea when it considers as many options and incorporates as many points of view as possible to achieve a collectively desired goal, together.