The World Between Us: Teachers' Beliefs About Boundaries While Working With Adult Refugees

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

Abstract

Objectives

In an era of unprecedented human migration, recent refugees and immigrants to the United States—roughly 13% of the U.S. population (Migration Policy Institute, 2017)—must adapt against a backdrop of increasing anti-immigrant hostility (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015). For educators working in increasingly diverse learning spaces, the work of building inclusive communities, communicating in multilingual environments, and developing relationships across difference may be complicated by the sociopolitical realities of our current U.S. climate of fear and uncertainty.

Perspectives

Despite increasing attention to refugee children’s needs in the educational context (McBrien, 2005), less attention has been paid to the experiences and educational needs of adult refugees (Mathews-Aydinli, 2008). Many adult refugees are also engaged in learning work as students as they develop English proficiency and attempt to rebuild their lives in a new country (Finn, 2010), and more work is needed to understand how they navigate education in their new home, as well as how educators perceive and work with these newcomers’ unique needs (Bigelow & Schwarz, 2010; Perry & Hart, 2012).

Data Sources and Methods

To better understand how teachers navigate the current social and political climate, as well as their own beliefs and perceptions of immigrants and refugees, this pilot study draws from interview data to explore the experiences and meaning-making of three participants, all of whom were volunteering with adult refugees and immigrants in a weekly one-on-one tutoring relationship through a local non-profit organization.

All participants identified as teachers, at various stages in their careers, from pre-service teaching to retirement. Reflective of the broader teaching profession (Ladson-Billings, 2005), all were white women and U.S. citizens, and were working with multilingual adult refugees learning English. Diversity and identity, power and vulnerability, and relationship-building across difference are centralized in this study. Each participant was involved in a tutoring relationship where they were working across racial and ethnic, linguistic, national/citizenship, gender, and social class differences.

Results

Similar to work which has explored whiteness-at-work in educational contexts (Picower, 2009; Yoon, 2012), identified themes suggest that volunteers spent significant time and energy enacting, crossing, avoiding, and negotiating perceived boundaries in their relationships with students, despite demonstrated conscious knowledge of privilege, oppression, and difference, and very present concerns about the political and social climate for diversity in the U.S. Using Critical Discourse Analysis tools and methods to explore participants’ language construction of boundaries (Fairclough, 2015; Gee, 2014) a pattern emerges of strategic “border-maintenance,” used by participants to understand self in relation to others, to avoid confusion or uncertainty, and at times, to exert control over the learning space. Volunteers were at times conscious of and intentional with these boundaries, and occasionally frustrated by boundaries which felt imposed, but often employed them unconsciously.

Scholarly Significance

These boundaries may be signals for future work on the ways subtle cues reinforce power and vulnerability in relationships—even within a context of good intentions—and perhaps provide an avenue for strategy-building toward more equitable relationships across difference.

Author

• Lindsay Jarratt, The University of Iowa