Engaging Research to Humanize Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth

• In Event: Advancing Peace and Justice Through Humanizing Processes in Education

Abstract

Immigrant and refugee students face significant challenges in the U.S. educational system, including potentially linguistic discrimination, social exclusion, cultural alienation, and (for some) economic and legal precarity. Efforts to dismantle educational injustice and construct educational possibilities must pay specific attention to the needs of immigrant and refugee students. This paper outlines the original empirical research completed over 10 years across various school sites in the U.S. to identify key strategies for better serving newcomer immigrant and refugee youth in U.S. schools, with a focus on grades 6–12. Drawing from interviews with students, educators, school leaders, as well as a survey carried out with more than 50 educators of newcomers, we share ways schools can support newcomer youth and build towards cultures of peace, human rights and social justice within the school and beyond. We draw from scholarly literature on community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005 & Jimenez, 2019) as well as literatures on translanguaging to center the needs and realities of immigrant and refugee newcomer youth in “additive” rather than “subtractive” ways.

The strategies outlined in the paper are grouped under three categories: (1) classroom and instructional design, (2) school design, and (3) extracurricular, community, and alumni partnerships. This paper presents the 20 strategies and then goes into depth regarding three, offering vignettes from school portraits or interviews with educators to illustrate them. Humanization is at the core of efforts for peace, human rights, and social justice within education and this paper centers the experiences of newcomer immigrant and refugee youth in U.S. schools–a population that is often dehumanized in broader media and policy discourses.

Authors

• Monisha Bajaj, University of San Francisco

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin - Madison