The trauma of displacement may negatively affect the physical, mental and emotional health of both students and educators, UB research has found.
The study, published in the International Journal of Leadership in Education, examined whether United States educational policies and practices helped or hindered school staff in supporting the needs of students who are refugees or displaced for reasons such as natural disasters.
The researchers recommend that schools implement alternatives to standardized tests for resettled students to graduate, develop new policies to confront gender-based violence and sexual trauma, provide support to school staff to prevent educator burnout, and increase multilingual and mental health support staff.
“Though many staff had deep knowledge about the student populations they worked with and respective academic and health needs, staff also were stymied by hindrances occurring at multiple policy and programmatic levels — which ultimately could contribute to educational inequity and ineffective integration of students beyond first points of contact,” says Melinda Lemke, lead investigator and assistant professor of educational leadership and policy in the Graduate School of Education.
“This educational reality also can be complicated by those educators who fail to understand refugee experiences as more than encompassing histories of violence and trauma,” she says. “Our findings offer a framework for anti-deficit, cultural and linguistically responsive, and trauma-informed practices to help students who, in rebuilding a new home in the U.S., can face new and continued forms of marginalization.”
Read more at Buffalo.edu.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.