Evidence-Based Educational Practices for Working With Refugee Children

ABSTRACT

This article presents five main challenges refugee children experience in their learning and living in host countries, revealing an urgent need for reexamining their strengths and needs in education. It further reports an asset-based participatory research project with 18 preservice teachers (PTs) and 85 refugee children (K-5) engaged in an after-school English language-learning program in the United States. This research has two purposes. First, this study explores alternative perspectives on refugee children as multilingual learners (MLs). Doing so aims to offer novel counter-narratives to prevalent deficit thinking about young refugees, instead highlighting their assets, contributions, and learning potential. Second, it examines educational strategies that can enhance refugee children’s learning experiences and opportunities. Qualitative analysis and discourse analysis were combined to examine the researcher’s field notes, the PTs’ reflection logs, interviews with the children, inquiry papers about effective ML teaching strategies, and the children’s artifacts. The first part of the findings demonstrates how alternative perspectives of refugee children as multilingual learners may spark a fresh dialogue around their overlooked learning competence and potential. The second part discusses five evidence-based pedagogical strategies found in this study to be effective educational practices in working with refugee children.

KEYWORDS:

• Asset-based participatory approach
• culturally responsible pedagogy
• multicultural education
• refugee children
• transdisciplinary learning
• translanguaging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used for the research participants and the local school and organization.

2. We have no intent to devalue the mainstream or any culture.