Fostering a Sense of Belonging Among Refugee and (Im)Migrant Students through a Design-Based Educational Model

• In Event: Negotiating Belonging Across Borders: Education, Migration, and Identity Formation

Proposal

Abstract
Through this presentation, I share emerging findings of a practitioner research exploring how educators co-design migration-affirming pedagogies that center belonging. Grounded in the Re-Imagining Migration (RM) framework and theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy, this study centers around one U.S. context to develop and analyze design principles that treat language, memory, and civic storytelling as tools of inclusion. My emerging findings include observations from classroom practices, systemic tensions, and tools that reframe welcoming as a daily civic act.

Introduction
Considering the current U.S. education policy climate that aims to control and limit multilingual and justice-oriented teaching, schools remain conflicted spaces of civic possibility (Giroux, 2022). Millions of children experience the realities of migration in their lives; however, there's a need to enhance research on teachers' asset-based perspectives on migration, ensuring narratives are expansive and not monolithic (O’Malley & Dittmar, 2021). Against this divisive political context, I ask: How might educators, students, and communities co-design pedagogies of belonging, affirming movement, and memory across school contexts?
In this presentation, I will share emerging findings from a practitioner research project grounded in the RM framework (Strom et al., 2020). My work centers around a school-based design intervention. Across three schools, I engage educators, students, parents, and resettlement caseworkers as co-designers of migration-affirming pedagogy to center belonging in communities and schools, through iterative cycles of reflection, curricular design, and tool development.
I see my presentation closely aligning with the conference theme of Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World as a stance and a design imperative in school and community spaces. When we design classrooms for inclusion and belonging, we recenter stories, narratives, and humanizing ways of being in society and education. This means to interrupt the silence and enable the voices and stories of the civic lives, linguistic practices, and community knowledges of migratory students as foundational to justice-centered education.

Supporting Literature
Research shows how migratory students often encounter schools as spaces of exclusion, where their identities are framed through othering, risk, remediation, or exoticization (Free & Križ, 2022; Russell et al., 2021). This is especially true in spaces supporting young learners, where framings focused on developmentalism may discourage engagement with civic or transnational realities (Brezicha & Miranda, 2022). Children are capable of social reasoning and ethical imperatives when supported through relational and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Jaffe-Walter & Lee, 2018; Souto-Manning et al., 2021), and often through literacies, stories, and sense-making.
I also explore the power of multilingual education for immigrant-origin youth (Wiesleder et al., 2024). Scholarship in multilingual education positions language as a communicative and expressive tool, and as a means for sharing memory and civic identities (García & Wei, 2015; Weisleder et al., 2024). In critical civic education (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Rubin, 2021), scholars argue for centering narrative, emotion, and collective responsibility. These frameworks remain underutilized in the education of newcomers about belonging in schools and the community.
Finally, design-based and practitioner research traditions have called for participatory approaches that position teachers and students as agents of justice-oriented educational change (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). This project draws on these strands to investigate what happens when educators explore migration as a civic and pedagogical commitment.

Theoretical Framework
I draw on two theoretical frames to reimagine belonging as a justice-centered and relational practice. First, I will build on culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) to elevate pedagogies of belonging that must actively sustain the linguistic, cultural, and civic lives of (im)migrant students. This framework positions schools as spaces where immigrant-origin students’ identities are affirmed and celebrated, rejecting deficit-based narratives that erase their agency and contributions.
Further, translanguaging theory (García & Kleyn, 2016) positions language as fluid, relational, and central to the production of civic voice and community. Translanguaging is a civic and affective practice through which individuals navigate, resist, and reshape systems of power. By recognizing the interplay of languages, I argue that translanguaging affirms students’ identities while disrupting monolingual ideologies marginalizing multilingual learners.

Methodology
I engage in multi-site design-based research (Reinking, 2021) grounded in practitioner inquiry to explore and develop migration-affirming pedagogies. My approach centers educators, students, parents, and community interest-holders as co-designers, emphasizing iterative cycles of collaboration, implementation, and reflection in the Southwestern United States, in which bilingual education protections are limited. My data sources include meeting notes, educator and student surveys, lesson artifacts, student work samples, field notes, and reflective memos. These varied data streams allow me to capture the complexity of educators’ practices and students’ experiences across sites and situate the data in the local community contexts.
Across school sites, I prioritize iterative cycles of co-design, implementation, and reflection. This process enables educators to navigate tensions between systemic constraints and relational commitments while refining tools and practices that affirm migratory students’ civic and cultural identities. By grounding my work in practitioner inquiry, I position educators as active participants in shaping migration-affirming pedagogies that respond to local needs and sociopolitical conditions.

Significance
This project makes multiple contributions to research and practice in civic learning, multilingual literacies, and justice-oriented teacher inquiry. By positioning migration as a civic and pedagogical imperative, I reframe the role of schools in affirming the civic presence, emotional lives, and contributions of (im)migrant students. My work builds on and extends frameworks in culturally sustaining pedagogy and critical civic education, while grounding them in practitioner-led, design-based research.
This study also expands the landscape of elementary education, which often sidelines migration as too complex to address. Storytelling, memory, and language are necessary civic tools for building ethical and relational classrooms. By centering these elements, I contribute to emerging scholarship that treats language practices and belonging-making as core dimensions of civic identity formation.
This project models a research approach that is dialogic, iterative, and co-constructed. Through design-based practitioner inquiry, I surface both the possibilities and tensions of creating migration-affirming spaces within systems that are not neutral but actively shaped by political ideologies and linguistic hierarchies. The resulting framework, grounded in lived classroom practices, offers transferable design principles that can inform policy, professional learning, and curriculum development.

Author

• Nasir Kaihan, Arizona State University