We report on a two-part study drawing on semi-structured interviews, focus groups and classroom observations with experienced educators of refugee background learners to better understand the language and literacy needs/challenges and mindful pedagogical responses used to build relationships with these learners while mitigating factors that may be potential academic disadvantages.
Despite the considerable increase of refugee background families being resettled internationally, educators struggle to identify and meet the pedagogical needs of children and youth from refugee backgrounds. This is of urgent concern as many refugee background learners meet the criteria for all three student groups (English learners, low SES background, and socially marginalized) at risk of academic underachievement (Cummins, 2014). In this presentation, we report on a study situated in a school district in the Vancouver metropolitan area. We address two related research questions: 1) What do educators identify as the unique learning needs(language and literacy) and challenges for children and youth from refugee backgrounds? 2) What are the most appropriate and empowering school responses, including pedagogical practices, to meet curricular expectations and use language and literacy for social impact and identity affirmation? As an overarching theoretical perspective, we use Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Model (1979) and build on complementary theoretical perspectives of literacy, which we view as foundational to language and literacy education for children and youth from refugee backgrounds; namely, literacy ecology, investment, and multimodal and multilingual literacies. Our data for this presentation are derived from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders (n =16) conducted in their schools, one elementary and one secondary, and observations of projects and pedagogical practices, collaboratively designed and taught with three focal teachers. Thematic analysis was undertaken according to Braun and Clarke's (2006; 2021) six analytic phases, including generating codes, with the two researchers conferring regarding collating the codes into potential themes, refining and naming them. Our findings present illustrative examples for key features of mindful pedagogies: school-wide collaboration, environments for learner success, design meaningful tasks, harnessing multiliteracies, and knowing the learners. Four interrelated themes regarding lessons learned relate to valuing: relationships, cross-dimensional flows, interdependence, and elasticity + structure to promote appropriate and empowering school responses for children and youth from refugee backgrounds.
