This important book offers strategies, models, and concrete ideas for better serving newcomer immigrant and refugee youth in U.S. schools, with a focus on grades 6–12. The authors present 20 strategies grouped under three categories: (1) classroom and instructional design, (2) school design, and (3) extracurricular, community, and alumni partnerships. Each chapter provides research-based information, classroom examples, tips for implementing each strategy, and additional resources. Readers will find engaging profiles of schools, students, and alumni interspersed throughout the book, offering both varied perspectives and practical advice. Humanizing Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth will assist today’s educators, school leaders, policymakers, and scholars interested in the holistic success and well-being of immigrant and refugee students. Book Features: Practical strategies for educators and school leaders are rooted in empirical research and classroom narratives from across the United States.Multiple, real-life examples are used to illustrate each strategy.Each chapter concludes with a brief summary and recommended resources.School and student profiles demonstrate what the strategies look like in practice, as well as their benefits for students.Diverse perspectives are presented by researchers, classroom teachers, school leaders, and newcomer students.

Discover how to create a sense of belonging and connection for your immigrant and refugee students. This timely book, written by four award-winning teachers, offers compelling stories and practical applications to help you reach your students in the classroom and beyond. Topics covered include advocacy, using literacy to create a welcoming environment, connecting with families, building staff capacity and best practices for virtual learning. You’ll also find easy-to-implement lesson plans, as well as reflection questions throughout to help you on your journey. Appropriate for K-12 teachers, English Learner specialists and school leaders, this inspiring and useful book will help you make the necessary changes to create more positive outcomes for your immigrant students.

The focus of this book is on educational equity issues affecting immigrants and refugees around the world. Chapters highlight educational approaches that build from experiential knowledge, draw upon multiple languages, consider group identity, grapple with the complexities of inclusion, address family concerns, promote parental involvement, involve liaison with community agencies, and view cultural differences as educational strengths. While the book does not shy away from exploring the more challenging aspects of the refugee and immigrant experience, it avoids dwelling on victimology and rejects applying a deficit framework. Rather it offers hope, emphasizing the potential strengths of refugees, including their cultural capital and survival skills. The authors also make cogent suggestions for structural, pedagogical, and conceptual reform, with targets ranging from individual teachers to educational systems to social, economic, political, and cultural contexts.

A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced childrenÑand indeed all childrenÑbetter schooling and brighter futures. Half of the worldÕs 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments. In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like JacquesÑa teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local lawsÑand Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to Ònormal,Ó these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop studentsÕ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference. It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.

This timely volume uses critical ethnographic methods to trace the experiences and identities of refugee students from Burma as they move through their final year of schooling in an urban high school in the United States. Against the backdrop of increasing tensions surrounding immigration and identity in America, The Experiences of Refugee Youth from Burma in an American High School presents an analysis of the academic paths of adolescent immigrants and the challenges they face throughout their schooling. Delving into the historical and socio-political context of the school and surrounding landscape, this volume offers an immersive, insider perspective of the educational circumstances of SaySay, Paw Htoo, and Hlaing, the three newcomer youths—from Burma. Through detailed ethnographic narratives, readers are introduced to resilient adolescents who navigate their way through the maze of social expectations, language-learning demands, and ethnic-related tensions to rebuild their identities in the United States. By highlighting the students’ stories and identities, the book shows how racism is subtly woven into the fabric of education in the United States, and how schools can provide more equitable schooling for newcomers from other nations. This volume will benefit graduate students, researchers, academics, and pre-service teachers in the fields of English language learning, refugee and immigrant education, and the sociology of education. Those with an interest in urban and multicultural education will also find this text useful.

This volume explores the shared expectations that education is a panacea for the difficulties that refugees and their receiving countries face. This book investigates the ways in which education is both a dream solution as well as a contested landscape for refugee families and students. Using comparative, cross-national perspectives across five continents, the editors and contributors critically analyze the educational structures, policies, and practices intended to support refugee youth transition from conflict and post-conflict zones to mainstream classrooms and schools in their new communities.

Focusing on the actual experiences of L2 students who travelled from their homes to foreign lands as part of a faculty-led, short-term SA program, the author explores the linkage between intercultural awareness and sensitivity, language development (e.g., sociopragmatic awareness), and identity reconstruction in young adult L2 learners.