Left Out of the Culturally Responsive Conversation? Reimagining a More Inclusive Vision of Working With Immigrant and Refugee Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Supporting Immigrant Learners Through Practice and Advocacy

Abstract

Drawing on work with secondary-level, European-origin voluntary immigrants and Somali Bantu refugees, this paper highlights how conceptualizations of immigrant and refugee experience could be positively expanded in multicultural education and culturally-relevant practices. Nuancing this theorizing as well as school practice, would revitalize the field for those who remain marginalized and thus offer them a much-needed, alternative context of reception in the midst of wider anti-immigrant sentiment. We thus focus on multicultural education as context of reception, drawing attention to its discourses and practices as curricular contexts with possibilities and limitations that have long-lasting implications for the lives of newcomer youth.

Authors

• Ramona M. Fruja, Bucknell University

• Kevin C. Roxas, Western Washington University