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Resettled Refugee Youths’ Stories of Migration, Schooling, and Future: Challenging Dominant Narratives About Refugees

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Abstract

In the United States and around the world, refugees are frequently portrayed as helpless victims, burdens of the host society, and potential criminals. Similarly, in schools even well-intentioned educators focus on what they lack, rather than the various stories, experiences, and perspectives they have to offer. To provide another perspective, we aim to find ways to empower resettled refugee youth and draw implications for education of former refugees and other marginalized students. Through interviews, we sought to understand the stories of ten former Burmese refugee adolescents with respect to their backgrounds, migration, and school experiences. Our analysis shows that they recognized their marginalized positionings in the United States that are attributable to their limited English proficiency, ethnicity and race, and former refugee status. They, however, authored narratives of themselves that contest such marginalizing narratives by providing diverse stories of refugees different from dominant ones and positioning themselves as valuable members of local communities and change agents for a more equitable society. These findings call for pedagogical approaches in which schools and communities provide space for stories that former refugee youths bring, value stories authored by them, and draw on their perspectives on inequity and social transformation.

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Notes

  1. Chin is one of the major ethnic nationalities in Burma/Myanmar. They live mostly in the Chin State, Burma/Myanmar but are also found in the Mizoram State, Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hills Tract, and India (Center for Applied Linguistics 2007).

  2. Currently, this period is eight months in the United States (Halpern 2008).

  3. All names are pseudonyms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, 100 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Minjung Ryu

  2. Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, 560 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Mavreen Rose S. Tuvilla

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  1. Minjung Ryu
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  2. Mavreen Rose S. Tuvilla
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Correspondence to Minjung Ryu.

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Ryu, M., Tuvilla, M.R.S. Resettled Refugee Youths’ Stories of Migration, Schooling, and Future: Challenging Dominant Narratives About Refugees. Urban Rev 50, 539–558 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-018-0455-z

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