OUR RESEARCH
1. Rationale of the project
This project investigates the language and literacy education of youth refugees. The study addresses three urgent needs: (a) to help education systems and community groups understand how to support youth refugees to catch up to their same-age peers in school as quickly as possible; (b) to support youth refugees, for whom limited prior schooling, limited first language literacy and challenges of academic language learning (compounded by socio-emotional challenges) often present a barrier to learning, social adjustment and academic success; and (c) to develop innovative policies and pedagogical practices that engage with the digital, multimodal literacy practices of today's youth.
Over the past decade, the educational response to the resettlement of youth refugees and their families from various geographic regions (e.g., Columbia, China, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Hungary) has become a topic of much concern within provincial education systems. Refugee resettlement involves promoting social integration, including opportunities for participation and inclusion, and building feelings of security and belonging (Hynie & Hyndman, 2016). Schools are institutions that create space for youth refugees to build social connections and access educational opportunities that can facilitate resettlement and long term integration. However, the integration challenges youth refugees face frequently overlap and are attended to with varying degrees of success in schools. A number of large-scale, longitudinal studies of immigrant and refugee students (see e.g.Garnett, 2010; Garnett, Adamuti-Trache & Ungerleider, 2008; Gunderson, 2007; McAndrew et al., 2009; Toohey & Derwing, 2008) also advocate for a disaggregation of large-scale school-based data, warning that high numerical averages can “mask underlying significant differences” (Gunderson, 2007, p. 126) and lead to the conclusion that these students as a group are not at risk. Nor do they identify those learners that achieve exceptional success. Research that heeds this call has often considered context- or case-specific background factors including migration status, socioeconomic status, level and quality of formal schooling, and degree of marginalization along the lines of race, disability, sexual orientation, and gender (e.g., Watkins, Razee & Richters, 2012). Indeed, there is a growing body of case study research with refugee and immigrant students that has begun to attend to this complexity (see e.g., Cummins & Early, 2011; Kendrick; 2003; Stille, 2016).
Categorical differences between refugee and immigrant students have been described in terms of reasons for migration (e.g., economic possibilities vs. flight from persecution), migratory preparedness (including pre-migration language training), social and material resources to facilitate resettlement, and the (im)possibility of return to the home country. Major challenges concerning refugee learners and their teachers that have been consistently reported across the education literature include: limited or interrupted formal schooling (Menken, 2013); physical and mental health-related factors (Beiser, Simich, & Pandalangat, 2003); resettlement-related stressors (Watkins, Razee, & Richter, 2012); and lack of teacher preparedness (Cummins, Mizra, & Stille, 2012; Hamilton & Moore, 2004; Nelson & Appleby, 2015; Stille et al., forthcoming). Unlike their immigrant peers, the crises that refugees flee may “press in” on their lives, and have a negative impact on their social integration and learning if insufficiently addressed by schools and other social support systems (Hynie & Hyndman, 2016; Nelson & Appleby, 2015). Refugees may also be reluctant to “invest” in learning the dominant language as it can signal the improbability of returning home (Finn, 2010). Furthermore, because of the circumstances of their migration and the socio-political climate of the countries they flee, refugee students often have to contend with particularly negative stereotypes that are an “embod[iment of] the violence that created them” (Kumsa, 2006, p. 240).
Challenges with language and literacy are a particular subset of the educational issues that all adolescents face, challenges which are amplified for youth refugees who are in the process of developing proficiency in English and/or French, the languages of instruction in Canadian schools. This language and literacy development involves not only increasingly complex mobilization of reading, writing and multimodal (e.g., visual, audio, performative) resources for meaning making, but also enactment of social and cultural learning practices (McConachie & Petrosky, 2010; Moje & Tysvaer, 2010). Students need to use language in more sophisticated ways, and develop specialized discourses for learning across disciplinary subject areas (Cummins & Early, 2015; Schleppegrell & O’Hallaron, 2011). Despite these significant literacy learning needs and expectations, education research has shown that teachers at the secondary level often tend not to integrate explicit language and literacy instruction into subject matter curriculum (Shannahan & Shannahan, 2008). Moreover, teachers often expect students at the secondary level to be functionally literate at grade level, and have difficulty identifying how to address adolescents' literacy learning needs. These educational circumstances are challenging for students whose literacy practices do not align with the expectations of literacy in school; and may produce cumulative disadvantage and risk for youth refugees who are remaking their identities and their understanding of themselves in relationship to the world (Vasudevan & Campano, 2009). Supporting the integration of youth refugees therefore requires understanding both their literacy experiences, capabilities and capacities, and the attitudes, practices and policies of the schools they interact with. The proposed research attends to the critical realities facing youth refugees, as they acquire the language, knowledge and practices needed for access and inclusion in Canadian schools, and portrays these youth not as lacking or in need of remediation, but as creative and socially engaged participants and producers of knowledge in their educational communities.
The study draws on several interrelated and complementary theoretical perspectives on literacy, which we view as critical to language and literacy education for youth refugees:
Literacy ecology. Our study examines the relationships among the multiple settings in which youth refugees participate (e.g., family, classrooms, peer groups, digital social networks). Following Bronfenbrenner (1979), we view the ecological environment of youth refugees as, “a nested arrangement of concentric structures, each contained within the next” (p. 22), whereby each activity that takes place within the larger structures in the lives of youth (e.g., world events) affects the smaller structures in their lives (e.g., learning activities in classrooms), which in turn affects their personal and social development. More specifically, we adopt a “literacy ecology” of communities framework (Barton, 1994; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Hornberger, 2003), which, rather than isolating literacy practices in order to understand them, “aims to understand how literacy is embedded in other human activity, its embeddedness in social life and in thought, and its position in history, language, and learning.” (Barton 1994, p. 32). Thus, as Luke (1997) notes, while earlier psychological perspectives conceived of literacy as the acquisition of particular behaviors and cognitive strategies, more recent insights from ethnography, cultural studies, and feminist theory have led to increasing recognition that literacy is not only a skill to be learned but a practice that is socially constructed and locally negotiated (see also Fairclough, 1992; Heath, 1983; Luke, 2003; New London Group, 1996). For refugee populations in particular, mobility patterns in conjunction with the complex ways in which families, communities and schools interact and differ in their literacy practices point to the critical importance of context for literacy research and theory. Our literacy ecology approach emphasizes the situated ways in which youth refugees learn, negotiate, and access literacy both inside and outside school settings and integral to their daily lives (Auerbach, 1989; Delpit, 1995; Heath, 1983; Hull & Schultz, 2001; Polakow, 1993
Funds of knowledge. We draw on the concept of “funds of knowledge", which is based on a simple premise: ‘People are competent, they have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge’ (González et al., 2005: ix–x). Moll and Greenberg conceptualize funds of knowledge as ‘the essential cultural practices and bodies of knowledge and information that households use to survive, to get ahead, or to thrive’ (1990, p. 321). González et al. (2005) further argue that a funds of knowledge approach to research, which involves first-hand experience with families, affords a powerful way to represent existing resources, competence, and knowledge. Based on our previous research, (see e.g., Kendrick & Kakuru, 2012; Namazzi & Kendrick, 2014; Kendrick & Namazzi, in press; Stille, 2012), we adopt this approach because of its ability to alter perceptions of marginalized families and communities such as refugees and our desire to understand youth refugees in a more nuanced way that moves beyond a predominant focus on deficits.
Multimodal literacies. We adopt, and have contributed to (see e.g., Early, Kendrick & Potts, 2015; Kendrick, 2016; Stille & Prasad, 2015), an expanded view of literacy to include a range of modes (e.g., visual, audio, linguistic/multiple languages). Scholars in literacy education are increasingly recognizing that in any communicative mode, language, whether written or spoken, is only partial to the meaning-making process (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Indeed, any communicative event involves simultaneous modes whereby meaning is communicated in different ways through images, gestures, and speech. Kress (2000) asserts that, given the rapidly changing landscape of 21st Century communication, we need to take a completely fresh look at theories of communication in order to set a new agenda that includes the full range of semiotic resources in use in a particular society and by particular groups of people. Integral to this new agenda is how cultures select from and choose to develop particular multimodal possibilities as resources for learning and communication (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Central to this research is social semiotics, which attempts to explain and understand how signs are used to “produce and communicate meanings in specific social settings” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 264). Signs simultaneously communicate the here and now of a social context while representing the resources humans have “to hand” from the world around them (Kress, 1997).
Multilingual literacies. As previously noted, central to our study is a broad conceptualization of literacy, which includes multilingualism. We have contributed significantly to recent theorizing of multilingualism (see e.g., Blackledge & Creese, 2014; Coste, Moore & Zarate, 2009; Garcia & Wei, 2014), which has had a powerful impact on language and literacy education (see e.g., Abiria, Early, & Kendrick, 2013; Early & Kendrick, in press; Cummins, Early, & Stille, 2011; Early & Cummins, 2011; 2015; in-progress; Stille et al., forthcoming; Stille & Cummins, 2013; Taylor & Snodden, 2013).This theory of multilingualism highlights the functional integration of languages among multilingual individuals and communities, as people use of a "multiplicity of multilingual discourses" (Garcia, 2009, p. 53) to interact, communicate and make meaning. Importantly, this literature includes a central focus on multilingual literacy practices that frames
Phase 1: Inventory of institutional student services; online educator and key stakeholder surveys; educator interviews
Phase 2: online student surveys and interviews; digital storytelling projects
Phase 3: digital showcase/digital website
This research project is supported by SSHRC.
