“Whoa… Welcome to America!”: Supporting Refugee Background Students’ Socioemotional Well-Being, English Language Development, and Content Area Learning

Abstract

In this qualitative case study, we draw from a larger, federally funded, multiyear study focused on preparing teachers to work with English language learners, which includes an increasing population of refugee background students. We report on the experiences and perspectives of two experienced upper elementary teachers teaching in a magnet school for refugee students, who make up 75% of the school’s population. The school is in a medium-sized school district in southeastern Washington State. Applying a culturally responsive, humanizing pedagogical perspective to our analysis of interviews, observations, and artifacts, a number of themes describing similar and different ways the teachers supported their students’ socioemotional well-being and learning emerged. The main similarities included: (1) opening up space for students to share their personal experiences; (2) partnering with families in support of cross-cultural understandings; and (3) scaffolding instruction, especially through modeling, schema building, and contextualizing. The main differences included: (1) approaches to relationship-building (focus on teacher-student versus student-student support systems), (2) ways of relating to students’ personal lives and background experiences (primary reliance on in- versus out-of-school support systems), and (3) differentiating for the varying levels of English language proficiency (e.g., differences in native language use).