Teaching Students From Refugee Backgrounds in Arizona: The Appropriation of Structured English Immersion

• In Event: 45.068 - Supporting Refugee Students in the "Post-Truth" Era: The Role of Teachers in Resettlement Contexts

Abstract

Objectives

This ethnographic case study examines teachers’ implementation of Structured English Immersion (SEI), the authorized language policy in Arizona, in classes with high percentages of students from refugee backgrounds (SRBs). While there is a scarcity of research on SRBs’ academic experiences in the United States (Koyama & Bakuza, 2017), even less has been written about teachers working with this student population (Author, 2011). A deeper look into English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ sensemaking and enactment of SEI, specifically in relation to their SRBs, may shed light on how micro-level interactions with SRBs are related to macro-level ideologies about refugees (Johnson, 2009).

Perspectives

Three concepts are central to the framework I use to examine how teachers interpret and implement SEI to support SRBs: (a) appropriation (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2009), which represents teachers’ enactment of policy to fit their sociocultural contexts; (b) discourse, which describes the instantiation of teachers’ thoughts, actions, values, and ideologies as forms of texts or talk (Fairclough, 2009); and (c) cultural and figured worlds, which explains how teachers “figure” out how to act and position themselves in relation to others across multiple social contexts (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998).

Data Sources and Methods

The study takes place at Downtown High School, a diverse, urban high school in Arizona, which ranked sixth among all U.S. states in number of refugees resettled in 2016 (Radford & Connor, 2016). I use a single-case, embedded design to analyze the experiences of teachers and SRBs in three different classrooms, which serve as the units of analysis (Yin, 2014).

All three teachers in the study have extensive teaching experience, degrees in education, and ESL teaching endorsements. In addition, more than 75% of the students in their ESL classes were SRBs. All student-participants were in grades 9-12 at Downtown High, came from refugee backgrounds, and were enrolled in one of the selected ESL classes. Classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with teachers (n = 3) and students (n = 5 per class) were the primary data collection methods.

Data analysis included three rounds of open, inductive coding to (a) examine each participant’s unique experiences and (b) cut across all participants’ observed practices and interview responses in comparative and contrastive ways (Saldaña, 2015).

Results

Results indicate that teachers generally felt restricted by authorized SEI mandates and appropriated the policy to support their students in ways that might be described as subversive. The analysis highlights teachers’ construction of agent-of-change figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998), in which they balanced between macro-level policy design and micro-level interactions to advocate for and support their SRBs.

Scholarly Significance

Given I document teachers’ appropriation of authorized policy to promote social justice for refugee student populations, this paper aligns strongly with the 2019 AERA conference theme. Implications speak to today’s challenges of supporting marginalized students in U.S. public schools, with particular attention to language policies. Findings also point to a growing need for research that examines the implementation of language policies in relation to refugee students.

Author

• Eric Ambroso, Arizona State University