Uncovering Refugee Families' Educational Efforts Through Multilingual Family Math Workshops

• In Event: 34.075 - Engagement With Immigrant, ELL, and Refugee Families

Abstract

Creating inclusive school engagement practices for culturally and linguistically diverse families continues as a challenge of our time, yet it is now critical to distinguish the needs and nuanced challenges refugee families face in supporting their children’s education. In our 2-year exploratory project MATH (blinded), focused on developing a support mechanism for refugee children, their families and teachers in Turkey, one of the implementation components is multilingual family math workshops. Drawing on the ecologies of parental engagement framework, the analysis of our conversations with refugee families in the workshops reveals how they navigate through uncertainties in a new country for their children’s education and highlights the possibilities and potentials schools can capitalize on to strengthen home-school-community relationships with refugee families.

Authors

• Elif Karsli Calamak, University of South Carolina

• Mana Ece Tuna, TED University

• Max Vazquez Dominguez, University of North Georgia

• Martha A. Allexsaht-Snider, University of Georgia