Recent reviews of research in immigrant education in Spain make clear that insufficient attention has been given to questions of knowing the schooling experiences of children of immigrants from a more holistic perspective (Garcia Castaño et. all, 2008).  Due to the magnitude and fast tendency of increasing of the immigrant population in Spain, in the last two decades, educational research focused on urgent or broad issues such as 1) statistical sources about students characteristics, students enrolment en school, course arrangements and so on 2) educational policies and measures intended for welcome and support immigrant students 3) teaching and learning Spanish as a second language, or promoting the mother tongue teaching and learning 4) immigrant family – school relationships 5) school success/dropout of immigrant students Few provided a close-up perspective on immigrant students as they interact in education systems, in order to get an insight into the educational experiences as understand and portrayed by the students themselves.

As Franzé (2002) pointed out the immigrant student´s personal background was left outside school and was taken into consideration when bad achievement results, behaviors and challenges blocked or jumped into the one-direction, linear teaching-learning processes. In particular, there has been a tendency to overlook aspects of the personal, subjective life of immigrant students and their families, so that there is a marked predominance of evidence on statistic outcomes and intervention measures, but very little about the processes,their lived experiences, their needs and expectations or their goals, and notion of success.

In the light of this situation, this paper reports findings from a study that focused specifically on the immigrant student perspective -accessing contextualized experiential accounts of one particular Chinese background student and the way in which she interpreted and experienced her trajectory in the Spanish educative system, underpinned by a view of students as active agents rather than passive recipients. The general aim was to explore knowledge, beliefs, significant moments, circumstances and reflections about the education of the protagonist from her own perspective. More specifically, the research investigated issues related to the main difficulties, tensions and problems she encountered during her school trajectory, as well as, possible solutions to these prevailing circumstances, based on her strategies of accommodation and agency. Special attention was played to the personal characteristics of the protagonist, her family environment and peers context, as well as the pedagogical and curricular responses of the school system to her specific needs.

Epistemological and methodological assumptions based on social constructivism, critical, multicultural, and antiracist pedagogies perspective informed the study. This work drew on international research that advocated and used students´ voice and experiences as a foundation to defy discrimination, stereotypes and myths in education (Griffiths & Troyna, 1995; Nieto, 2000; Phillion, 2008) to respect and legitimize students’ own lives (Freire, 1972; McLaren, 1989), to improve school practice by listening to what students have to say about their own education (Rudduck & Flutter, 2004).

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