Enacting a Student Identity Across Multiple Learning Spaces

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

Abstract

Purpose: Each year, thousands of young people resettle in the United States as refugees. Resettlement offers relative safety and increased stability, while schools often serve as key institutions where refugee students adjust to a new home (Adams & Shambleu, 2006). Unfortunately, schooling is often accompanied by negative experiences, such as racism and discrimination, and deficit-based representations of students’ needs (e.g. “SLIFE”) (Adams & Kirova, 2006; Li, 2008; Roxas, 2011). To make learning experiences more meaningful, it is necessary to create more inclusive learning spaces by engaging with the broad range of learning resources from students’ everyday lives. Thus it is important to consider what being a student means to young people with refugee backgrounds, and how they use resources from communities, homes, playgrounds, and digital spaces in this role (Gee, 2003; Ito et al., 2009; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). This paper illustrates how nine teenage girls who were resettled as refugees from Thailand enacted student identities across learning spaces.
Theoretical perspectives: A sociocultural perspective on identities is a useful frame for understanding student experiences and identity enactments. Identity in this paper is considered as a dynamic authoring process, or as self in practice, negotiated within multiple contexts (Bakhtin, 1981; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998).

Methods: This eight-month qualitative study was based in an afterschool program for refugee youth the Intermountain West. Participants included nine 13-17 year old Karen, Burmese Muslim, and Po Karen girls.

Data sources: Data was collected through participant observation, more than 30 hours of semi-structured in-depth interviews, and screen shots and screen recordings. Data sources include field notes, interview transcripts, and documents, which were analyzed through theme analysis (Saldaña, 2009) and dialogic narrative analysis (Wortham, 2001).

Findings: By enacting their student identities, the girls articulated what they considered to be important elements of learning that supported their student identities in and out of school. The findings illustrate heterogeneity of self-authoring processes by highlighting how multiple identities intersected to influence what being a student meant for each of the girls. These dynamic identity enactments included authoring as multilingual, showing the richness of their linguistic resources; translocal, reflecting multiple global histories in their social practices; digital experts, illustrating the skills they used to navigate digital spaces and tools; and as girls, showing the complexity of their translocal gendered experiences. The ways in which these complex identities intersected in the girls’ individual self-authoring as students depended on the particular contexts of their everyday lives. These various contexts reflected the practices, knowledges, and histories the girls found meaningful and important for self-authoring. Thus, it is necessary to recognize heterogeneity within identity enactments, as well as how these heterogeneous enactments are reflected in the understandings and enactments of what it means to be a student.

Significance: Engaging with youth’s identity authoring processes has the potential to allow educators working with students with refugee backgrounds to create meaningful learning experiences that affirm diverse knowledges and disrupt homogenizing deficit discourses surrounding refugee youth.

Author

• Delila Omerbasic, Tulane University