Riding la Bestia: Preservice Teachers' Responses to Documentary Counter-Stories of US Immigration

In this mixed methods study, we examined the responses of 82 preservice teachers to the acclaimed documentary Which Way Home, a film that profiles unaccompanied adolescents who hitchhiked the train system of Central America and Mexico en route to the United States. Using pre- and post-surveys (n = 82) and focus group interviews (n = 13), we found that preservice teachers intellectually grappled with immigration counter-stories and demonstrated two shifts in their thinking about immigration and their future teaching. Nested in the frameworks of critical race methodology and Freire's critical consciousness model, this study illustrates one approach to exploring immigration.