Educating Refugee-background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts

Description

This collection of empirical work offers an in-depth exploration of key issues in the education of adolescents and adults with refugee backgrounds residing in North America, Australia and Europe. These studies foreground student goals, experiences and voices, and reflect a high degree of awareness of the assets that refugee-background students bring to schools and broader society. Chapters are clustered according to the two themes of Language and Literacy, and Access and Equity. Each chapter includes a discussion of context, researcher positionality and implications for educators, policy-makers and scholars. Reviews: In these pages, socially aware academics have integrated educational and social issues, attending consciously to refugees as whole people. The editors and authors understand how the educational concerns of refugees are inseparable from their political, geographic, cultural and psychological contexts, and are to be commended for producing this worthwhile volume. - James Simpson, University of Leeds, UK This volume offers a wealth of information about what crossing (language) borders means for students with a refugee background. It demonstrates the opportunities modern technology offers them to stay connected to their heritage culture and languages, to create new bonds with host community members, and to foreground their voices. In doing so, it invites educators to go beyond the classroom walls to meet students’ experiences and needs. - Jeanne Kurvers, Tilburg University, The Netherlands With deeply nuanced and textured accounts of the various factors that influence the language, literacy and learning experiences of refugee-background learners of all ages and in many contexts, this volume will be of great value to anyone interested in facilitating refugee-background learners’ access to educational, social and economic opportunity. - Doris Warriner, Arizona State University, USA Recently resettled refugee students learning English in US high schools : the impact of students' educational backgrounds / Christopher Browder -- "History should come first" : perspectives of Somali-born, refugee-background male youth on writing in and out of school / Bryan Ripley Crandall -- Translanguaging pedagogy to support the language learning of older Nepali-Bhutanese adults / Koeun Park and Verónica Valdez -- Students with refugee backgrounds creating digital landscapes of knowing / Delila Omerbasic -- Sociocultural literacy practices of a Sudanese mother and son in Canada / Katerina Nakutnyy and Andrea Sterzuk -- Supporting self-healing processes of adolescent refugee newcomers in a literacy program / M. Kristiina Montero -- The role of English as a foreign language in educating refugees in Norway / Anne Dahl, Anna Krulatz and Eivind Torgersen -- Bridges and barriers : Karen Refugee-background students' transition to high school in Australia / Amanda Hiorth and Paul Molyneux -- Educating refugees through "citizenship classes and tests" : integration by coercion or autonomous agency? / Amadu Khan -- Using Photovoice with Cambodian and Guatemalan youth to uncover community cultural wealth and influence policy change / Erin Papa -- Swedish teachers' understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder among adult refugee learners / Eva Holmkvist, Kirk Sullivan and Asbjorg Westum -- Educational participation of refugee youth in Germany : case studies in the multicultural urban centers of Hamburg and Munich / Annette Korntheuer, Maren Gag, Phillip Anderson and Joachim Schroeder -- Iraqi refugee-background adolescents' experiences in schools : using the ecological theory of development to understand discrimination / Amy Pucino -- Besides a degree, what do refugee-background students gain from college? / Eliana Hirano -- Conception versus reality : the impact of migration experiences on children's educational participation / Beatrix Bukus -- Afterword / Martha Bigelow.