"After the School Day, What's Next?": Exploring Refugee Youths' Participation in U.S.-based After-School Programs

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Part 2, Possibility Development in comparative and international perspective: Possibility mentoring as an application of Possibility Development theory

Proposal

BACKGROUND & PURPOSE: After-school programs provide essential contexts for youth’s development and well-being. Research has documented that involvement in after-school programs is beneficial to youth, improving students' academic achievement and reading and math test scores, creating positive health outcomes, and assisting with their ability to develop relationships with adults and peers. Moreover, they have the potential to serve as an anchor for refugee youth who lack familiarity with American schools and communities, functioning as a space to support motivation and achievement among refugee youth by offering them a layer of social capital. Although engagement with after-school programs would likely benefit their academic success, social adjustment, and integration into American society, previous research notes that refugee youth may have unique challenges engaging with after-school activities due to family responsibilities, lack of transportation, safety concerns, and a slew of other reasons. Due to their particularly vulnerable status, refugee youth may require tailored and comprehensive educational and social supports to succeed. However, limited research describes what that consists of, especially from the lens of refugee youth. Drawing on the Positive Youth Development Framework, which seeks to describe how adolescents require continuous support from the adults and institutions around them, this study explores refugee youths’ types of engagement and motivations around participating in after-school programs in Chicago, Illinois (USA), which has a rich history of resettling refugees into the city.

METHODS: Thirty in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with refugee youth who resettled to Chicago in the last several years. Interviews were conducted at local schools and community organizations, lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, and translators were available to facilitate the interview process. Verbatim transcripts of all interviews were generated, transcribed, and later coded using MAXQDA, a software program designed to support computer-assisted qualitative methods. In this study, inductive data analysis included descriptive and pattern coding to shed light on refugee youths’ levels of engagement and motivations around participating in after-school programs.

FINDINGS: First, refugee boys were involved in soccer, whereas girls engaged in arts-based programs to connect to peers with similar identities and process their past traumas. Second, refugee youth preferred to seek homework assistance from stakeholders associated with refugee resettlement agencies and organizations instead of school staff due to their high level of trust and familiarity with them. Finally, youth participated in community organizations that promoted civic engagement to advocate for refugee rights.

CONCLUSION & IMPLICATIONS: A major resource for after-school specialists, educators, and mental health workers, this research provides an empirical opportunity to learn about refugees’ firsthand experiences in after-school programs, their unique perceptions of these social contexts, and knowledge about what they need to feel supported within these settings. With increasing policy and program emphasis on access to and quality of after-school programs, recognizing that the needs of refugee youth differ from the needs of U.S.-born ethnic and racial minority youth has become critical. Therefore, the experiences and general participation of refugee youth in after-school programs are unique and must be treated as such, both within programs targeting refugee and migrant youth specifically and within those targeting the youth population in general.

Author

• Ashley Elizabeth Cureton, University of Michigan Ann Arbor