Transnational/transitional linguistic ecologies - teaching and learning with children + youth from refugee backgrounds

This proposed symposium examines language and literacy teaching and learning with children and youth from refugee backgrounds, engaging with critical sociopolitical issues relevant to social policy, applied linguistics and education research.  Given that the number of global refugees is higher than at any other point in human history, further knowledge is crucial not only to support these children’s social and educational integration, well-being and personal development, but also to engage with the inequities of displacement of marginalized people and communities. The symposium is comprised of five empirical papers, highlighting research conducted with, not on, children and youth.  Taken together, these papers document dynamic identities, relationships and practices, as well as experiences of migration, and critically examine what these understandings mean for research in applied linguistics

Presentation Titles:

Language and Literacy Education of Youth Refugees in Canadian Schools: An Emerging Framework of Learning Needs and Challenges, Margaret Early & Maureen Kendrick, University of British Columbia

Me Mapping: Identity-focussed Workshops for Syrian Children and Youth, Antoinette Gagné, Emmanuelle LePichon-Vorstman, & Dania Wattar, University of Toronto

Middle years refugee students’ negotiations of subject positions, languages, and literacies in a community initiating the reception of federally-funded refugee families, Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou, Brandon University

Building teacher capacity to enable at-risk teachers to deal with at-risk youth refugees,  Shelley K. Taylor, Western University

Translanguaging pedagogies – Transforming learning for refugee youth, Saskia Van Viegen, York University