Burmese Refugee Youth's Identity Work in an After-School Learning Setting

• In Event: 16.028 - Examining Identity to Enhance Learning Opportunities Among Resettled Refugee Youth

Abstract

Objectives: This study presents findings from an afterschool STEM program that engaged resettled Burmese refugee youth in learning and talking about weather, climate, and climate change. The research questions are:
• How do the Burmese youth participate in learning practices of an afterschool STEM program?
• How do they negotiate their identities in the discursive participation in the program?
Theoretical perspectives: The afterschool program was designed drawing upon principles of responsive teaching (Hammer, Goldberg, & Fargason, 2012) and funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to enable learners to draw on their rich experiences and knowledge resources and to pursue questions and thread of ideas emerging in each moment of learning. In this paper, our interest as analysts is to examine how the youth participated in the learning environment from a perspective of identity. We define identity as a type of personhood, the ways in which an individual and surrounding people view the individual (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1988). Identity is performed in every moment of social discursive interactions and manifests as voice, speaking personality and consciousness that entails “a will or desire behind it” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 434). In micro-moments of discourses, analysts can identify stance(s), “a socially recognized point of view or attitude” (Ochs, 1993, p. 288) that constitute one’s voice. Thus, we identify and analyze discursive events in the afterschool program and interviews with the participants that represent the youth’s stance with respect to, for instance, their communities, science, and themselves, in order to draw an inference about how they negotiate their identities.
Methods: We implemented the afterschool program with Burmese high school youth in a Midwestern city in 2015-2016 (21 sessions total, one-and-half hours each). Average, 10-20 teens attended each session. Data include video and audio-recordings of sessions, interviews, screencast of participants’ computer use, and youth-generated artifacts. We draw on video analytic techniques suggested by Derry et al. (2012) and Knoblauch and Schnettler (2012) in analyzing classroom video recordings and phenomenological and ethnomethodological orientations (Baker, 2002; van Manen, 1990) in analyzing interviews.  
Findings: Our analysis suggests at least three different, but interrelated, ways of negotiating identities: (re)constructing identities with respect to science, learning communities, and ethnicity. Through their discursive participation, the youth positioned themselves who can play with science and decide what is and is not important to them (not to scientists) and who can talk and contribute to the learning communities. Furthermore, they positioned their ethnic experiences as legitimate sources for science discussions and thus themselves as a possessor of the important experiences and knowledge.
Significance: The findings will shed light on how the refugee youth agentively negotiate their identities and have their stance (about science, learning community, and ethnicity) in the context of an afterschool STEM program. We will discuss implications of this work in global contexts of wide-spread discourse that demoralize and marginalize refugees and what educators and researchers can learn from youth’s local practices of identity work to disrupt such discourses.

Authors

• Minjung Ryu, Purdue University

• Mavreen Rose Sta Ana Tuvilla, Purdue University

• Casey Wright, Purdue University