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This case study focuses on the perceptions of frontline educators, including social workers and settlement workers, across all levels of two Canadian school boards in Central and Southwest Ontario. These jurisdictions attracted significant numbers of Syrian newcomers since January, 2016, both those sponsored publicly and privately, but also directly among Syrians themselves who had heard about the ‘great reputations’ of these school boards. The case study describes how educators responded innovatively – on the fly – to meet new needs, through policies, structures, staffing, partnerships and curricular changes. We documented educators’ stories, hopefully capturing the optimism as well as the stress created by welcoming the newcomers. Our findings and implications remain tentative as in ‘too soon to tell’, thus the expressions of dilemmas in leadership and policy as we witnessed successes towards Syrian integration into schools, communities and Canadian society.

In 2017, 22% of the Canadian population are foreign-born immigrants and one in five is a visible racial minority. Canadian schools and classrooms mirror the diversity of the society and are populated with more and more immigrant and refugee students from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds each year. Uprooted from their home countries and familiar environments, immigrant and refugee students experience barriers and challenges in new living and educational environments. The increasing number of immigrant and refugee students and their unique educational needs and challenges have called building welcoming and inclusive schools a priority in Canadian education system. This chapter addresses the urgent need for high-impact policies, practices and praxis to build welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students through cross-sector community engagement. Based on several empirical studies, critical and extensive literature review and authors’ professional reflections, this chapter introduces a theoretical framework of building welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students and introduces the promising strategies of engaging community stakeholders, including educators, students, parents, governments and community organizations and agencies.

The Remain in Mexico Policy, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), forced asylum-seeking children into seemingly untenable situations and conditions across the United States’ South Texas border. This case study examines stories told by the children of Tent Zero and their parents about the conditions and experiences they faced as a result of MPP. Their stories reveal that the conditions asylum-seeking children at the South Texas border faced have been severe and include, but are not limited to, a lack of adequate food and water, extreme weather, inadequate sanitation, and a lack of appropriate or consistently available schooling. Prior research has not fully investigated how educators can and should work with students who have experienced such severe conditions, which often result in compounded emotional suffering. By examining the effects that the MPP, which was instituted during the Trump administration, has had on youth and families staying in Matamoros, Mexico, as a result of this policy, this case study not only provides a glimpse into the lived experiences of asylum-seeking children and families at the South Texas Border, but also provides insight and guidance for educational policymakers, educators, and communities where these youth transition to and continue in school in the US. As a starting point, all of the asylum-seeking children who participated in this study expressed their interest in and longing to go to school demonstrating both the practical and symbolic importance of formal education in asylum-seeking communities like those at Tent Zero.

In a university/district collaboration, three college professors and authors of this chapter co-taught with four teachers over a period of seven years. This study explores the perceived changes in thought and practice of both groups as a result of providing three-week summer school programs for fifth and eighth grade emergent bilinguals. This research is grounded in qualitative methodologies of self-study and case study. We present our joint story as a self-study. Data were collected in the form of lesson plan notes, yearly journals, personal notes, audiotapes of meetings, and in-depth interviews/discussions of those involved in the bounded context. Resulting themes were situated meaning, hybrid language, and a 5R Instructional Model. A case study design is used to present the data from the four in-service teachers. Data were collected from field notes and interviews. Several themes emerged from the teacher data, all of which are components of situated meaning: professional development as side-by-side teaching and learning, recognition of and interest in curriculum integration, and change in classroom practice. Findings indicate that the summer program was a meaningful avenue for professional development (PD) for both groups. However, within group similarities were stronger than across group. The experience changed the way we teach and how we develop PD for teachers. The implications for professors and K-12 teachers are discussed and suggestions for further study and PD are given.

Using conceptions of transnationalism to (re)evaluate the field of comparative and international education (CIE), this chapter analyzes educational programming and policy for migrant refugee youth at the margins and borderlands of the nation-state system. Drawing from newspaper articles about displaced youth on Kenya’s eastern border and the southwestern U.S. border, this chapter focuses on comparative and international education’s potential influence on programming and policies in borderland regions. Both populations present the need for targeted educational programming within and outside of formal education systems and urgency for research linked with practice. We argue that CIE scholars can fill a critical, activist purpose to draw attention to educational access and curricular content in educational projects at the borders of the nation-state system, to investigate programming, and to work with practitioners and policy makers to address the needs of youth on the physical and figurative margins of education.

This chapter builds on theories of culturally responsive teaching and translanguaging pedagogies to explore teaching strategies that linguistically, culturally, and educationally empower Muslim immigrant emergent bilinguals in the classroom. These students are often speakers of less commonly used languages, not shared with other adults in the school, thus teachers and school leaders often do not know how to use home languages as teaching tools. This study sought to find practical solutions by going straight to the source – the students themselves. Through a one-year qualitative arts-based study, 15 recently arrived Muslim immigrants provided information about their language use and meaning-making of school experiences. Using interview, observation, and student-created artifacts, data were collected during after-school sessions that also included intensive group discussion and peer interviews in home languages. It was found that these students are facilitating and regulating their own bilingual and multilingual educations through cultural communities of practice. However, it was also found that these students perceived messages from the larger school community as discriminatory, thereby negatively impacting feelings of belonging and value in a school setting. One classroom where students and their languages were valued is profiled in this chapter offering practical ways teachers can engage learning through all languages, especially minority languages, regardless of a teacher’s own linguistic abilities. This chapter offers transferable ideas that may be adapted to diverse classrooms with similar student populations and needs. It is understood that classroom contexts differ based on resources, students’ home language literacy, and curricular demands.

This chapter summarizes a therapeutic art-based education project in Houston and two United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement camps in Burkina Faso, a small landlocked country in West Africa. The project, which was developed and led by the authors, Be the Peace – Be the Hope, was born from a spirit of hope and concern for the plight of children; particularly, for the mounting numbers of children displaced by war and conflict. Many of these children now live in resettlement camps. The ages of the participating students ranged from 8 to 22 in the camps. Many participating Houston middle and high school students had arrived recently in the United States and several had been refugees themselves.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.