An Effective Interprofessional Collaboration to Support African Refugee Students' Oral and Written Language and Social Integration

Abstract

Purpose: Two faculty members collaborated to advance educational equity by providing a summer camp experience to prevent summer learning loss for African refugee students in preschool through high school. Both faculty members educate university students in graduate programs, one for students aiming to become educators of English to Speakers of Other Languages and the other for speech-language pathology students. Method: Speech-language pathology graduate students provided supports for oral and written language within Tier 1 of a multitiered systems of support framework during camp. Interventions were provided within the context of the camp activities, rooted in the constructs of contextualized intervention, implicit learning, and feedback-free learning. The speech-language pathology students collaborated with the faculty members, camp director, community members, and the campers. Results: The speech-language pathology students learned to provide language support in natural environments, analyze writing, recognize strengths and areas for growth in multilingual learners, establish rapport with individuals from cultural and linguistic backgrounds that differ from their own, collaborate with other professionals, and build campers' confidence and self-esteem. The campers expanded their vocabulary, syntactic, and narrative production and developed teamwork, collaboration, and leadership. Conclusions: This program can be a model for others aiming to collaborate to advance educational equity. Speech-language pathologists have an important role in collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines to provide programs for language and literacy support, even when the students do not have underlying language disorder.