Refugee Resettlement in the United States by Emily M. Feuerherm & Vaidehi Ramanathan

Author:Emily M. Feuerherm & Vaidehi Ramanathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Published: 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

7A ‘Slippery Slope’ Toward ‘Too Much Support’? Ethical Quandaries Among College Faculty/Staff Working with Refugee-Background Students

Shawna Shapiro

Introduction

Over the past several decades, the population of immigrant and refugee students in US higher education has risen rapidly. These students currently make up approximately 10% of undergraduates nationwide (Kanno & Harklau, 2012) and comprise a much higher percentage in certain settings, such as community colleges (e.g. Kibler et al., 2011). The vast majority of these students speak a language other than English at home, and have been classified as English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 schools (Kanno & Harklau, 2012). One key finding in the scholarly literature on ELLs in higher education is that many have gaps in their academic preparation and thus rely heavily on academic support from faculty/staff (e.g. Kanno & Harklau, 2012; Rodriguez & Cruz, 2009). Refugee-background1 (RB) students in particular often have additional struggles stemming from limited or interrupted access to formal schooling prior to resettlement (DeCapua & Marshall, 2010), as well as from psychosocial issues that are the result of traumatic experiences (McBrien, 2005). Hence, while ELLs in general are often constructed as academically ‘needy’, ELLs with refugee backgrounds are believed to require an even greater range of supports – sometimes beyond what schools feel prepared to offer (Hannah, 1999; McBrien, 2005). Because most educational research does not distinguish between refugees and other immigrant groups, it tends to overlook the ways that involuntary migration and refugee relocation shape the experiences of RB students in US schools. Furthermore, the labels for national, ethnic and linguistic identification that are often applied to ELLs may not capture the complex identity configurations of those with refugee backgrounds. Hence, questions of educational access, equity and identity are particularly relevant to RB students.2 Rarely in the literature on this subpopulation, or on ELLs in general, is the concept of ‘academic support’ problematized. The dominant assumption seems to be that more support is always better for students. However, recent studies of RB students in higher education (e.g. Hirano, 2011; Vásquez, 2007) have begun to raise the question: Is there such a thing as too much support? Or, perhaps more accurately, could the strategies that faculty/staff employ in the name of ‘support’ at times become a detriment to students’ long-term success, or to the mission of the institution? While these questions appear infrequently in the scholarly literature, they likely have a familiar ring for practitioners involved in the day-to-day work of supporting ‘underprepared’ students, including those who came to the US through refugee resettlement.

In this chapter, I show how concerns about ‘too much support’ for RB students are informed by ideological tensions that have existed for decades in US higher education, as well as by deficit discourses around ‘refugees’ in general (Keddie, 2012; Kumsa, 2006; Shapiro, 2014). I introduce three ideological constructs – excellence, equity and agency – that shape conceptions of academic support in higher education. I then highlight areas of scholarly literature in which concerns about excessive or inappropriate support are most prominent. In

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