Elevating Refugee-Background Communities’ Ways of Knowing, Doing, Being, and Becoming: Canadian and U.S. Perspectives

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

In this session, six presenters who identify as transnational and multilingual people from immigrant and refugee backgrounds, draw on six in-depth empirical qualitative studies involving refugee-background children, youth, families, as well as their language and literacy educators from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds across diverse Canadian and U.S. communities. Our studies advocate for including refugee-background communities’ diverse ways of knowing, being, doing, and becoming. We explore possibilities for repairing and remedying educational practices so that they build on the lived experiences and communicative repertoires of children, youth, families, and educators from refugee backgrounds and replace deficit-oriented discourses and practices. We employ conceptual lenses such as literacy as a social practice, place-based literacies, multimodal literacies, strength- and asset-based frameworks, transnationalism, and translingualism.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 3: Languages, Literacies, and Representations

Chair

• Amir Michalovich, University of Manitoba

Papers

• Language use and literacy practices in multilingual refugee-background families from Burma and Afghanistan - Aijuan Cun, University of New Mexico

• Places of equity: Exploring place-based literacies in a young refugee-background child’s life - Harini Rajagopal, University of British Columbia

• Identity positionings of refugee-background youth in a digital multimodal composing school-based project - Amir Michalovich, University of Manitoba

• Refugee-background teachers' remedies and repair responses to Canadian schooling of students from war zones - Sofia Noori, University of British Columbia

• Homes as transnational and translingual Sites: Pre-service teachers and refugee-background families read picturebooks - Nermin Vehabovic, Elon University

• A place- and community-based approach to teacher preparation for English language learners education - Xia Chao, Duquesne University

Discussant

• Aijuan Cun, University of New Mexico