Working with immigrant and refugee families: broadening cross-cultural understanding with immigrant/refugee families

Abstract

Parent engagement programs are in high demand these days, particularly as they pertain to immigrant and refugee families. But working with families entails purposeful communication with families (Valdés, 1996). Yet, often families are caught in cross-cultural divides that forces them out of engagement with those running the program (Machado-Casas, 2012). Cultural disconnections often times become ways in which minority families find themselves trapped (Nieto & Bode, 2011). Some researchers have looked at non-traditional pedagogical spaces to challenge future and practicing educators and community members to examine how the process of normalization privileges dominant groups while simultaneously oppressing 'others' (Cary, 2006). When this happens the process of «pimping families» through discourses that «talk» at them rather than to/for them lead to furthering hegemonic practices often aimed at minority families. Through interviews with families, and educators, this paper will highlight the «cultural confessions» of educators, and families who utilize non-traditional spaces to expose how prejudice and privilege have influenced their perceptions of «legitimate knowledge», legitimate spaces, and legitimate cross-cultural communication. This paper will present data obtained form Communities United for Education (CUPE) a family involvement Cómo referenciar este artículo / How to reference this article

Nationality as an Influential Variable with Regard to the Social Skills and Academic Success of Immigrant Students

“…Therefore, it can be deduced that social skills are linked to the nationality of the young immigrant participants to a greater degree than place of residence, age and gender. Subsequently, the correlation between the social skills, nationality and qualifications variables was corroborated by calculating the Pearson correlation, ass recommended [142] (Table 8). The value of the mean academic scores achieved by the participants ranged between 4.33 and 9.22, with the latter being the highest.…”