Preparing Teachers to Work with Refugee-Background Students: Teacher Educator Action Research

Abstract

Working effectively with refugee-background students requires an understanding of their personal, educational, lingustic, cultural, and migration backgrounds in order to meet their learning and psychosocial needs. In other words, teachers need to be equipped with awareness, strategies and tools that can help support learning and adatpation. This paper describes an action research (Carr & Kemmis, 2005) project in which the authors incorporated a focus on the needs of refugee-background students into an asynchronous, online graduate-level teacher education course for current or future teachers of English for Speakers of Other Langauges (ESOL). The primary goal of this study was to foster educators' awareness of the typical backgrounds of refugee-background students by sharing some useful research, professional development resources, and instructional tools addressing the unique needs of this population. The paper describes the learning experiences incorporated into the course and reports the graduate students' reflections on the content and its relevance to their present and future teaching contexts.