Breaking Down Barriers and Building Bridges Between Teachers and Immigrant Students: A Review of Literature

• In Event: Educating the World in Our Classrooms: Preparing Teachers for Immigrant Students

Abstract

Objectives
Over 5.6 million people have fled Syria since 2011, escaping civil unrest and conflict (UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR], 2018). Turkey has facilitated an open-door policy for refugees and asylum seekers (İçduygu, 2015), granting them legal “temporary protection” status (Kirişci, 2014). It currently hosts the largest number of refugees worldwide, close to 4.1 million, which includes Syrians as well as asylum-seekers and refugees of other nationalities (UNHCR, 2019). Consequently, the Turkish education system has confronted massive flows of immigrants, which has surfaced important demands for their education (Arar, Örücü, & Ak-Küçükçayır, 2019) considering that over 1 million children are school-aged (Directorate General of Migration Management [DGMM], 2019). Besides, while 684,919 Syrian children are enrolled in formal education as of March 2020 (UNHCR, 2020a), 96.3% of all Syrian children enrolled in formal education (estimated as 633,271) attend public schools (UNHCR, 2020b). This implies an ever-growing critical educational issue for teaching immigrant students that requires closer examination.

Theoretical framework
Drawing on Cochran-Smith’s (2010) theory of teacher education for social justice, this study gains insight into how teacher education conceptualizes immigrant education in Turkey to offer a window into the knowledge and skills teachers need to possess, and suggest possibilities for professional development of teachers, to address the needs of immigrant students.

Methods
Considering the critical insights that the Turkish context can offer into teacher education for teaching immigrant students, this study is designed as a case study (Yin, 2014) and draws on a review of selected literature.

Data Sources
The study included 40 journal articles selected through criterion sampling (Patton, 1990) from 2015 through 2019 as it was both a period of unprecedented global mobility and immigration (UNHCR, 2018), and also encompassed the height of the refugee crisis in Syria. A comprehensive search both in Turkish and English was done using relevant keywords.

Results
Teachers saw immigrant students as problems and advocated for assimilation through a top-down approach from education policies to “fix” the issue. Common challenges for teachers in working with refugee students and their families included the inability to communicate due to language barriers and insufficient relevant instructional materials (Aydin & Kaya, 2017; Biçer & Kılıç, 2017), lack of competence in culturally relevant pedagogy that embraced immigrant students’ transnational identities and culture as strengths (Er & Bayındır, 2015; Solak & Celik, 2018), and lack of autonomy to implement alternative assessment techniques in a pervasive testing culture with a mandated curriculum (Taskin & Erdemli, 2018).

Significance
The study offers paramount implications for preservice and inservice teacher education for providing teachers with professional development opportunities to support them to develop skills and adopt culturally congruent mindsets to meet refugee students’ needs. The Syrian refugee crisis presents an opportunity for the international community to show solidarity with Turkey and other primary host countries as lessons suggest that the issue should be governed at the global level with international organizations and NGOs to share the experiences of integrating a mass flux of refugees (İçduygu, 2015), which could also offer new possibilities for teacher education.

Author

• Sibel Akin-Sabuncu, TED University