Abstract
Young refugees resettled to the U.S. from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region face significant acculturative stressors, including language barriers, unfamiliar norms and practices, new institutional environments, and discrimination. While schools may ease newcomer adjustment and inclusion, they also risk exacerbating acculturative stress and social exclusion. This study seeks to understand the opportunities and challenges that schoolwide social and emotional learning (SEL) efforts may present for supporting refugee incorporation, belonging, and wellbeing. We completed semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 40 educators and other service providers in Austin, Texas, Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Detroit Metropolitan Area, Michigan as part of the SALaMA project. We conducted a thematic analysis with transcripts from these interviews guided by the framework of culturally responsive pedagogy. The findings revealed that students and providers struggled with acculturative stressors and structural barriers to meaningful engagement. Schoolwide SEL also provided several mechanisms through which schools could facilitate newcomer adjustment and belonging, which included promoting adult SEL competencies that center equity and inclusion, cultivating more meaningfully inclusive school climates, and engaging families through school liaisons from the newcomer community. We discuss the implications of these findings for systemwide efforts to deliver culturally responsive SEL, emphasize the importance of distinguishing between cultural and structural sources of inequality, and consider how these lessons extend across sectors and disciplinary traditions.
Highlights
MethodsSettingData collection took place as part of the Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration to America (SALaMA), a multi-year, mixed-methods study exploring the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of newcomers resettled to the U.S from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region
School-based providers comprised the majority of the sample at the district (n = 9) and school (n = 16) levels, with 37.5% of the sample consisting of community-based providers (n = 15)
The social and emotional learning (SEL) initiatives being implemented in these schools, with their focus on promoting strong relationships founded on social awareness and empathy, provided a unique opportunity to observe how educational practices at the level of individual provider, school, and community responded to the needs and preferences of newcomers from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region
Summary
SettingData collection took place as part of the Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration to America (SALaMA), a multi-year, mixed-methods study exploring the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of newcomers resettled to the U.S from the MENA region. We conducted interviews in Harrisonburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas during summer 2018 and in the Detroit Metropolitan Area (DMA) during fall 2019 [40, 42]. We selected these sites purposively, based on their histories of welcoming families from conflict-affected MENA countries and existing relationships with local school systems. Austin Independent School District (AISD) serves around 80,000 students, 27% of whom are English language learners (ELLs), with Arabic being the most common language after Spanish [45]. At the three GEE high schools in this study, about 53% of students are ELLs, with a significant percentage being newcomers from conflict-affected countries in the MENA region [48]
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