Minority Rights and the Politics of Community Engagement: A Study of Ethnic-Based Community Organizing With and for Refugees and Immigrants From Burma

• In Event: 60.072 - Toward Ethnoracial, Linguistic, and Geopolitical Justice: Heritage Communities, Cultural Politics, and Community-Engaged Research

Abstract

Beginning in 2010, qualitative methods of participant observation, field notes, document review and interviews were used to study an ethnic community-based organization established to “strengthen and empower the newly resettled refugee-immigrant communities from Burma…through formal and informal educational programs leading toward their self-realization, confidence and sufficiency” (organization website). Drawing on ethnographic methods, this ongoing extended case study (Burawoy, 1998) examines school-community interactions over time to illuminate how the educational rights of students whose national origin and status as English language learners are mediated by political tactics enacted by school personnel and Burmese community organizers. This paper reports on critical incidents with key school and district personnel over the last several years focused on equitable access, participation, and outcomes for linguistic minority students from Burma.

The study responds to calls for rethinking community engagement with schools. In addition, the study contributes to a few noted absences in education research: (a) a need for contextualized understanding of a specific Asian community in U.S. schools (Author, 2013); (b) attention to refugees as a distinct group rather than clustering these within the broad category of immigrant studies; (c) greater links between sending and receiving countries including “families’ prior sociocultural realities;” and (d) a focus on longitudinal studies of immigrants (Arzubiaga, Nogueron, & Sullivan, 2009; Black, 2001).

We highlight the ways in which school and district personnel appear ill equipped to understand and address the needs of students who are learning English and arrive from their homelands and refugee camps with severely interrupted formal education. In particular, we focus on school-level decisions to initiate assessments for special education placement for increasing numbers of Burmese students, the way in which the community organizers intervened, and the administrative tactics engaged to displace the politics of demanding educational rights for the Burmese community. Our findings echo Arzubiaga et al. (2009) regarding the exclusionary nature of U.S. policies aimed at “enforcing protracted vulnerability” of immigrants. In particular, they note the way in which families and communities become “a backdrop or afterthought to the politics of inclusion or exclusion” (p. 248). The distinctive ways in which Burmese community difference and self-determination are understood and framed within the school-community relationship are revealed as parents, families, and community organizers continue to engage schools – claiming a place in the foreground in their efforts to advance educational equity for their children.

Authors

• Thu Suong Thi Nguyen, Indiana University - IUPUI

• Brendan D. Maxcy, Indiana University - IUPUI

• May Oo Mutraw, Burmese Community Center for Education

• Neineh Plo, Burmese Community Center for Education

• Jerry Htoo, Burmese Community Center for Education