Futuring Teacher Education: Community Partnerships with Refugee Families for Critical, Caring, and Joyful Learning

• In Event: Unforgetting Newcomer Experiences, Knowledges, and Identities: Humanizing and Future-making Pedagogies across Canada and the U.S

Abstract

This three-year ethnographic study explores partnerships between a private university in the Southeastern United States and local organizations supporting resettled refugee families. Drawing on Freire’s (2000) understanding of education as a practice of freedom, the project places teacher candidates in homes and community spaces with multilingual refugee-background children, youth, and families. Together, they read, play, hike, and engage critically with their surroundings – serving as pursuits that foster what Sealey-Ruiz (2020) terms critical love, which foregrounds deeply caring for the people and communities that educators learn with and from, and reimagine teacher education by centering care, dignity, and the everyday experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Central to this work is an ethic of care (Noddings, 2012), emphasizing relational, responsive, and reciprocal engagement between educators and learners. By foregrounding care, teacher candidates learn to honor students’ lived realities, histories, and aspirations (Muhammad, 2020; Paris & Alim, 2017). The study also draws on the concept of freedom dreaming (Love, 2019; hooks, 1994; Kelley, 2002), which envisions education as a space for imagining and building more just, equitable worlds unconstrained by the present. Freedom dreaming, as articulated by Love (2019), hooks (1994), and Kelley (2002), not only invites us to envision futures where all can thrive, but also to actively disrupt injustices and dominant narratives in the process. The research question guiding this work is: In what ways do intergenerational, multilingual exchanges in community settings surface histories and possibilities absent or erased in formal schooling, and how does enacting care and freedom dreaming outside of school disrupt dominant narratives about teaching and learning?

Shaping education’s future depends on our willingness to remember and honor the past. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2013) asserts that it is our ability to imagine alternative futures that fuels our struggle for change, making homes and communities, alongside classrooms, essential sites for recovering memory and generating new possibilities. Through dialogic reading, translanguaging, and collaborative play, teacher candidates and families co-constructed narratives of belonging, joy, and criticality (Muhammad, 2020). Estes (2019) reminds us that the future is always tethered to our understanding of the past, and that meaningful change requires engaging with histories often overlooked or erased.

Data sources included ethnographic observations, impromptu interviews, audio recordings of shared reading sessions, and artifacts such as children’s and caregivers’ drawings created in response to the readalouds. Data analysis involved First and Second Cycle coding, which entailed initially identifying descriptive and process codes within the data, followed by pattern coding to discern broader themes and relationships across participants’ experiences (Miles et al., 2019). Findings reveal that community-based collaborations enabled teacher candidates to co-construct knowledge with refugee-background children and families, surfacing lived realities often not seen in formal schooling. Through critical and humanizing methodologies, participants enacted solidarity, dignity, and ethical responsiveness, preparing future educators for justice-centered, liberatory praxis rooted in critical humility. This work ultimately offers a model for imagining education’s future as a collective endeavor grounded in remembrance, sustained by community partnerships, and guided by the agency and wisdom of marginalized communities.

Author

• Nermin Vehabovic, Elon University