"I Feel Safer Here Than at Home or School": Community-Based Educational Spaces as a Site of Healing

• In Event: Institutional Leaders, Staff, and Contexts Shaping Southeast Asian American Student Success Along the Education Pathway

Abstract

Much of the educational literature on Southeast Asian students in public schools paints a bleak picture of this population's schooling experiences, of which racialized educational inequity is endemic (Ngo & Lee, 2007). The few existing excellent educational literature on this population has been school-centered, resulting in findings that bound the educational experiences of Southeast Asian youth to formal schooling spaces (Lee, 2005; Ngo, 2010). This study, shifts the site of study to a social justice Southeast Asian community-based summer program to highlight the educational promise of community-based educational spaces for shedding light on the lived experiences of Southeast Asian youth. Thus, this paper asks the following research questions: What motivates Southeast Asian high school youth to join Refugee Youth Organizing Training (RYOT), a co-ethnic community-based summer social justice program? And, (2) what do these motivations reveal about Southeast Asian youths’ experiences related to schooling, family, and the city they live in?
Utilizing data collected for a larger two-year ethnographic project that took place between 2017 and 2019, the study uses the following data sources: initial applicant interviews, semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and site documents. The conceptual framework draws from a Critical Refugee Studies (Espiritu, 2014; Um, 2015) orientation to center Southeast Asian youth of refugee background as an analytic lens, mapping how youths’ diverse intersectional identities inform and are shaped by educational institutions, policies and practices operating for racial capitalism interests. Taken altogether, by locating Southeast Asian refugee youth and education within a community-based educational space, the study sheds light on what Southeast young people believe are missing from their education, families, and city and how that has shaped their lives and relationships as students and second generation refugees in an urban city.
All youth in the study are of Khmer and Vietnamese descent, come from low-income families, and reside in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The seventy-two young people interviewed for the study attend 13 different schools, including neighborhood, charter, and public magnet schools across the city. Four major motivation categories emerged. Expressed as youth “types”, the four motivation categories are: (1) Nourishing Safe Space Youth, (2) Homeward Bound Youth, (3) College Bound Youth, and (4) Emerging Activist Youth. Two commonalities ran across all four groups: (1) invisibility and isolation due to ethnic misrecognition or racial stereotyping in schools and (2) feeling a lack of belonging and safety in schools and neighborhoods due to no Southeast Asian youth-centered spaces. For RYOT youth, the program served as a healing and nourishing space where youth were encouraged to explore their multiple, marginalized identities among same-age and co-ethnic peers. The findings of this study not only speak to the effects of intergenerational refugee trauma, urban poverty, and marginalization in school spaces but also call for additional critical research on Southeast Asian refugee communities.

Author

• Linda M. Pheng, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author