Ebook: Educating Refugee-background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts

This collection of empirical work offers an in-depth exploration of key issues in the education of adolescents and adults with refugee backgrounds residing in North America, Australia and Europe. These studies foreground student goals, experiences and voices, and reflect a high degree of awareness of the assets that refugee-background students bring to schools and broader society. Chapters are clustered according to the two themes of Language and Literacy, and Access and Equity. Each chapter includes a discussion of context, researcher positionality and implications for educators, policy-makers and scholars.

Reviews:
In these pages, socially aware academics have integrated educational and social issues, attending consciously to refugees as whole people. The editors and authors understand how the educational concerns of refugees are inseparable from their political, geographic, cultural and psychological contexts, and are to be commended for producing this worthwhile volume.
- James Simpson, University of Leeds, UK

This volume offers a wealth of information about what crossing (language) borders means for students with a refugee background. It demonstrates the opportunities modern technology offers them to stay connected to their heritage culture and languages, to create new bonds with host community members, and to foreground their voices. In doing so, it invites educators to go beyond the classroom walls to meet students’ experiences and needs.
- Jeanne Kurvers, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

With deeply nuanced and textured accounts of the various factors that influence the language, literacy and learning experiences of refugee-background learners of all ages and in many contexts, this volume will be of great value to anyone interested in facilitating refugee-background learners’ access to educational, social and economic opportunity.
- Doris Warriner, Arizona State University, USA