Here I am Now! Critical ethnography and community service-learning with immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and youth |
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| Abstract: | Here I am Now! is the title a multi-ethnic group of immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and neighboring urban Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee youth gave to their participatory photography installation. The exhibit was the culmination of undergraduate students’ participation in a series of Community Service-Learning (CSL) courses offered through CIRCLE (Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While CSL has become an established educational practice at most US universities campuses, little research has been conducted viewing the educational impact of this pedagogy on diverse student populations. The majority of the scholarship focuses on the experiences of white middle-class students engaged with communities from unfamiliar and different socio-cultural, racial, ethic and economic backgrounds. This paper examines how immigrant and refugee undergraduate students understood their participation in a creative community service-learning experience where they mentored youth from familiar and similar ethno-cultural contexts. To understand this meaning-making process I employed critical ethnographic approaches and analyzed student narratives and interviews. Through the prisms of critical pedagogy, situated learning theory, and funds of knowledge concept, I viewed the higher education context, analyzed the situation under study and developed an emerging framework for CSL pedagogy with diverse communities. These theories inform the view that culturally relevant pedagogy emphasizing peer-learning, critical thinking, artistic potential and community resources offers diverse undergraduate students alternative and creative spaces of critique and possibility in their higher education and community service-learning experiences. |
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