Learning to Form Integrated Identities: Teens' Identity Work in an After-School Refugee Services Program

• In Event: Engaging Refugee Children and Youth in Informal Learning Environments Toward Transformative Learning

Abstract

Objectives: Little is known about the nature of participation in after-school programs that benefit non-dominant youth (Eccles, 2005). One group about which minimal research has been conducted is the roughly million refugees who have resettled in the United States in the past decade (Bruno, 2014). Prior research on school-aged refugees focuses on their struggles (McBrien, 2005) rather than examining how these transnational youth agentively shape their experiences to achieve their goals.

This study’s purpose is to investigate how, when, and why resettled refugee teens learn to integrate identities and achieve goals during informal “homework help” time in an after-school, refugee youth services program. Research questions (RQs) guiding this inquiry are:
- How do transnational teens agentively learn during their program participation?
- Why do teens join the program and participate in these ways?

Perspective: Central to becoming a successful young adult is the ability to integrate, individuate, and imagine identities (Nagaoka et al., 2015) while building agency within situated contexts. Learners’ agency, identities, and imagined worlds influence learning among multilingual youth (Norton, 1995; Wortham, 2004). Using Nagaoka et al.’s (2015) framework, I investigate how this integration of identities is manifested and embodied among participants as they participate in seemingly unstructured homework help time.

Methods: Participants in this program are refugees who resettled in the southeastern US within the past five years. For this first stage of a design-based project (Cobb et al., 2003), I collected ethnographic data (Erickson, 1992) including videotapes, photographs, audiotapes, and field notes of teens’ participation in twenty sessions over five months. Data collection for RQ2 included audiotaped interviews with 14 teen participants. Focusing on 4 teens, I conducted discourse analysis to uncover “social functions…identities or positions that participants assign themselves and others” over time (Wortham & Reyes, 2015, p. 10).

Findings: Teens learned to integrate their identities, feel a sense of belonging, “do school” (Pope, 2001), and interact productively with peers, volunteers, and tools to make sense of disciplinary ideas. One Burmese teen, Tay Moo, said that attending this program was the best part about school. With aims to become a nurse, Tay Moo typically worked on health science homework. Video of Tay Moo recorded on March 17th reveals her agentive use of strategies to accomplish science homework, including: translanguaging between Karen and English, collaborating with peers, requesting volunteer help, rewriting essay drafts, and searching the internet. With less homework on May 22nd, Tay Moo practiced Burmese dance with her friends.

With these data, I argue that seemingly informal programming actually enabled teens to integrate their identities meaningfully to shape their own future. In this informal space, teens leveraged their resources to make sense of their new roles as American high school students and integrated their Burmese identities to shape and achieve personalized goals.

Significance: More research is needed on how programs without specific disciplinary foci can enable refugee youth to achieve goals. This research begins to fill this gap.

Author

• Shannon Mary Daniel, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College