De-Centering the Deficit Framework: Courageous Refugee Mentors in Educational Spaces

Like a Pig in Mud: Rejecting the Manicured Boundaries of the Patriarchy

“…The first project that Weiser and DeMartino worked on together began in the Spring of 2020, a messy time indeed (DeMartino, 2020). This project used post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle & Hofsess, 2016) to understand the experiences of educational leaders (PreK-12 and Higher Education) during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on the onset of the crisis.…”

“…Using data from several different projects collected over the past several years, we conceptualize a new way to consider not only data, but also how embracing new formations of leadership, which may appear messy, can work toward liberatory praxis. Drawing upon our archive of previous projects (DeMartino & Weiser, 2021;Weiser, 2018;Weiser et al, 2019, DeMartino, 2020 that have been published, as well as completed but not-yetpublished projects, we funk (Warner, 1993) up our relations to these archives (Cvetkovich, 2003;Manalansan, 2014) to uncover how we have been engaged in the act of making a mess through our research. Parallel to the idea of failure as distinctly queer (Halberstam, 2011),we aim to understand how engaging in the messiness of identity-based research using art and visual methods (Leavy, 2017) can provide pathways forward for educational leaders who are willing to get dirty in order to support members of the educational community who do not fit cleanly into cisheteropatriarchal standards.…”

Supporting and Advocating for Immigrant and Refugee Students and Families in America’s Urban Schools: Educators’ Agency and Practices in Everyday Instruction

“…Such deficit views often neglect “the community cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2005) that these students and families bring to school and prevent these students and their families from having equal “access to education, healthcare, employment, and housing, among other material conditions” (Nieto, 2007, p. 300). Consequently, immigrant and refugee students and their families, rather than structural factors and discriminatory institutional practices, are often blamed as the root causes of social problems and their own underachievement in schools (DeMartino, 2020; Li, 2008b, 2021; Valenzuela, 1999).…”

Education without evidence: Gaps in data availability for refugee, asylee, and humanitarian migrant students in US schools

“…Available data on the academic outcomes of refugee students in US schools appear to be a combination of small-scale studies and dissertation research, but educational policy and funding often relies on large-scale, standardized data that can be both compared across units (i.e., schools, districts, states) but also disaggregated by students’ classification as refugee, asylee, or humanitarian migrant youth. While high quality, small-scale, and often qualitative research is available (e.g., Daniel and Zybina, 2019; DeMartino, 2020), large-scale, comparative, standardized data on RAHM education do not exist in the US nor elsewhere, and there are no nationally- or federally-funded education data sets that would make data available to the public. Instead, there is a plethora of smaller scale research related to refugee students, in particular, on a wide range of education-related topics, including the association between brain hemisphere dominance and academic achievement; peer relationships; instructive barriers; academic self-efficacy; parental monitoring; and school engagement for students across the refugee, asylee, and humanitarian migrant spectrum (Andon et al., 2014; Ramzy, 2012).…”