Abstract
The current refugee crisis is the worst in 75 years and has led to the displacement of tens of millions of people around the world. Yet, despite the global scale of this humanitarian crisis and the culpability of their own country, suburban middle school students are generally unaware of this problem. In this article, I describe an inquiry project developed for my seventh grade world history students designed to help them confront their relative privilege and develop a critical understanding of the world rooted in empathy for those who are marginalized in our society. I begin with an overview of the students and school community and offer my pedagogical framework and goals in this setting. I then detail the steps in this inquiry project including students generating their own questions, reading and annotating part of a fictional book about refugees, engaging in focused research about the causes of the refugee crisis and the intersectional challenges faced by refugees, participating in a solution-oriented Socratic discussion, and reflecting on their learning. Samples of students’ questions, notes, ideas, and reflections reveal the extent to which an inquiry-based approach to critical teaching and learning can help expose students from an affluent suburban community to unfamiliar topics like the refugee crisis and lead them towards a critical understanding of the world and a justice-oriented empathy for others.
Highlights
The town of Mountainview, New Jersey is an upper middle-class suburb located about 20 miles outside of New York City
While different in its goals and application, this type of pedagogy is as necessary for students who are in a position of relative privilege
Complicating this work is, as Swalwell (2013) describes, the difficulty of finding the balance between engaging in critical pedagogy while avoiding the alienation of students and the accusations of indoctrination from administrators and parents. The latter point has become a more acute concern during remote instruction as the location of learning shifted from a physical classroom to the individual homes of students. (On most days, I had about a third of my students in person with the remainder joining through Zoom; the school shifted to a full remote schedule with all students on Zoom for half the time students were working on the project I will describe below.) The learning culture of the school is one where students are encouraged to think independently and creatively and engage in inquiry-based learning projects, reflective of what Anyon (1980) characterized as an “affluent professional school” in her work connecting school demographics with instructional philosophy. This environment creates space for in-depth student-centered exploration, but being situated in the broader community requires a careful navigation of politically charged topics, especially those that bring attention to the relative privilege of the student population
Summary
I aimed to create a series of learning activities that would enable students to understand the complexities of the refugee crisis on a macro and micro level; in other words, from the perspective of the single individual experiencing the myriad hardships of becoming and being a refugee, and by considering the role of countries in creating and exacerbating this problem This project was guided by several specific learning goals:. This model served to focus students’ learning while increasing their ownership over the process Students began their inquiry by sharing their own prior knowledge about refugees and the refugee crisis and generating questions they had and would need to answer to thoroughly understand the topic. Through the preparation for the discussion, the discussion itself, and the reflection that followed, students were able to sharpen their own thinking on the topic
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