A Useful Knowledge Workshop: Educating the World's Refugees
Join the GW Graduate School of Education and Human Development for a workshop featuring four sessions focused on educating the world's refugees! Check them out below:
9:00-9:10am (ET)
Welcome and Introductions
Session 1 - 9:10-10:00am (ET)
Accessing quality Education
Dr. Bernhard Streitwieser, Katharine Summers, and Jessica Crist, the editors of the new book, Accessing Quality Education: Local and Global Perspectives from Refugees - A case study of the Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, will share how this book, written by the students in GW’s Refugee Educational Advancement Laboratory (REAL), came together. They will discuss the rationale for the book, working with 12 student authors on data collection and analysis, and lessons learned interacting with the editors and publisher at Lexington Press/Rowman Littlefield.
Session 2 - 10:00-11:00am (ET)
The Power of Storytelling
Join Dr. Jihae Cha as she shares the preliminary findings from a study she conducted in Clarkston, Georgia, where youth with refugee and immigrant backgrounds participated in a weeklong storytelling summer camp that provided a platform for active listening, connecting, and sharing stories. Interweaving frameworks of youth agency and narrative identity, Dr. Cha examined the role of non-formal educational space in enabling youth with refugee backgrounds to exercise varying degrees of agency in creating their own narratives through multimodal storytelling.
This study aims to offer educators, practitioners, and policymakers the opportunities to consider how they can actively create (non)formal spaces for children and youth from refugee backgrounds to better navigate their sense of identity and community in their new social milieu.
Session 3 - 11:00am-12:00pm (ET)
Understanding the Experiences of LGBTQ+ Asylum Seekers
Laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals are not well-established in many countries; thus, individuals are persecuted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. For these reasons, some LGBTQ+ individuals seek refuge by immigrating to the United States and seeking asylum.
In this presentation, Drs. Mina Attia and Bagmi Das will discuss two of their research studies conducted amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and published in the Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling and The Counseling Psychologist. Through a phenomenological approach framed by intersectionality theory, they sought to understand the experiences of trauma, adjustment, post-traumatic growth, and resilience of LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. Drs. Attia and Das will discuss their findings of the meaning-making experiences of these asylum seekers. They will also discuss implications for clinical practice, education, and recommendations for stakeholders working with this population.
Session 4 - 12:00-1:00pm (ET)
Student Refugee Panel