Hiding and Seeking: The Educational and Socioemotional Needs of Asylum Seeker and Refugee Students

ABSTRACT

Focusing on asylum seeker and refugee students attending a school with the stated mission to cater to recent immigrants, asylees, and refugees in Texas, we explored the school experiences of asylum-seeking and refugee middle schoolers and how they see their education. Having obtained political asylum in the United States, they are hiding from strife in their native lands, but also seeking a schooling experience that will nurture their dreams. We explored that seeking by having students envision their ideal classrooms with a group drawing exercise and then discuss these visions, the experiences that shaped them, and how their current schooling experience compares to their ideal in in-depth interviews. Complementary school data were collected. By focusing on asylum seeker and refugee students, we sought to eschew assimilationist ideologies and to highlight the diversity of experiences and interpretations within this group. We explored the themes found in students’ conceptualizations of their ideals, including the high aspirations students hold, their comparative outlook on education processes, the centrality of relationships to student success, and the conflicted identities students have to negotiate daily.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We use the terms “racialized” and “minoritized” to stress that race and minority are not inevitable factors of tension, but that society works in a way to select some individuals, based on perceived physical and social characteristics, and treats them as less preferable contributors than the mainstream ideal. For a deeper exploration of minoritization (see Gillborn, 2005).

² These groups are those usually perceived as White, U.S.-born, and relatively wealthy individuals. Generally speaking, males hold more privilege than women in U.S. society. For more on the subject, see Choules (2007).

³ As education in the United States falls under the responsibility of state governments, there are actually stark differences in education policy across the states. Thus, there is not a single system of education in the United States. This is another variable assimilationist ideologies overlook.

⁴ The school examiner was a staff members hired by the school specifically to administer exams to students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tatiana Kan

Tatiana Kan is passionate about public education and building a world where refugees no longer have to be extraordinarily resilient in order to thrive. She has dedicated her career to improving teaching and learning and nurturing systems that take care of historically underserved learners and educators. She is deeply committed to investigating how educational research and wider academia can support asylum-seeker and refugee students in reaching their boundless potential.

Christopher J. Cormier

Christopher J. Cormier is a former special education teacher and an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. He has taught first through 12th in Title 1 schools in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area. His research program focuses on the social and cultural contexts of minoritized learners and teachers in special education. Under this overarching theme, he has two lines of scholarship. The first is on the professional and socioemotional lives of minoritized teachers. The second is on culturally informed identification of minoritized students in special education.