Honoring Their Experiences: Exploring Refugee Stories

• In Event: 51.035 - Sympathetic and/or Agentic? Constructions of Youth in Educational Scholarship

Abstract

We are amid a refugee crisis that affects the education of thousands of children. Yet, as educators we do not have the adequate tools, nor training, to help these children or their families. One tool early childhood educators have is the home visit. Using a Funds of Knowledge, Dialogical and Cultural Capital framework, a series of home visits to a refugee family yielded extraordinary data. The interviews focused on the difficult journey from a civil war riddled town, through perils and nightmarish scenarios to a destination were life would be better. We discovered resources and assets the family had acquired that could help them navigate the difficult maze of an educational system that at times seemed impossible to penetrate.

Author

• Ana Aracelly Olguin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign