For a long time, welcoming refugees was an important part of America’s legacy.

Sami McKinsey
LING 4620: Teaching L2 Oral Skills
Advisor:  Professor Rai Farrelly
LURA 2021

    For a long time, welcoming refugees was an important part of America’s legacy. The traditional motto, E pluribus unum, or “out of many, one” reflects this spirit in America’s history and future. However, the refugee admissions ceiling in America has been dipping lower for some time, with the all-time low during Donald Trump’s administration, as the former President set the ceiling for just 15,000 refugees for the fiscal year of 2021. 

    While immigration has been politically divisive for years, refugees have historically been given special status. Being classified as a refugee has a strict legal definition, both internationally and in the United States. Not every migrant can be sorted to this definition, as being a refugee includes important rights and protections per the Geneva Convention of 1949. A refugee is defined as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted”. This definition and associated treaties means nations around the world have a moral and legal obligation to help refugees.

    Education is critical for refugees to navigate foreign contexts and for native English speakers to better understand displaced peoples. For LING 4620: Teaching L2 Oral Skills, two women, Hailey Parker and Betsy Carter, and I were assigned to create a curricular unit with a social justice focus. The three of us agreed that education about refugees was an essential part of our curricular unit. Social justice in general should be a critical component of any educator’s lesson planning and classroom management, as it has palpable effects on the lives of learners. Not only do students in most ESL classrooms experience injustices either from their countries of origin or in new countries, but also teaching on social justice increases compassion and empathy for everyone involved. Teachers, students, and others can benefit from social justice units, as they engender empathy and awareness for a variety of issues. 

    With this framework in mind, my peers and I set to work creating a unit for the purpose of educating people about refugees. We chose to direct our lessons towards mixed background, B1 (Intermediate) English level high schoolers. The assumption of a mixed background classroom was critical towards the development of our lessons; students may be from refugee, immigrant, or other backgrounds. Our ultimate goal was to create a unit that could function both as a tool to teach about who refugees are and what it is like settling in a new country, and as a tool for expressive storytelling and cultural memory. We hoped that through the unit, students could build personal connections and accurate understandings of the lives of refugees. If students have refugee backgrounds, this unit could provide an opportunity for them to feel empowered with their stories and to learn the vocabulary relevant to their lives. As the intended classroom was  high school age and up, we also worked with the intention of young people learning about the world and possibly about things their parents may have experienced. 

    The curricular unit in question is part of a collection of  social justice units located on an open access website for the public to view and use. Our three lessons included: Storytelling, Speaking and Refugee Resettlement, and Pronunciation and Cultural Memory. In tandem, we aimed to develop oral language skills through the theme of refugees; interweaving pronunciation, speaking, and listening activities with media about displaced peoples. This served two jobs: to make the pedagogy of these three oral skills more engaging and to create meaningful connections between lived experiences and social justice issues. Our units are intentionally designed to incorporate various types of media, including podcasts, videos, pictures, and drawings. In choosing these media, we tried to choose things that were accurate, authentic, and personal. Some of these media came from the UNHCR or stories from refugees. Above all, we wanted to present this information and then create activities that would enable learners to personally connect. One of my personal favorite activities comes from Lesson 2: Speaking and Refugee Resettlement. Using the Reflect ESL strategies, we designed an activity that would engage students to brainstorm about what obstacles and supports they think of in the journey of a refugee, and to draw a river in order to visualize these obstacles and supports. Many of our other activities resembled this one as we tried to encourage students to use their personal stories in order to understand the life of a refugee. 

    Through this combination of ESL oral pedagogy and relevant social issues, we created a curricular unit available to teachers around the world who would like to adapt the lessons and explore important global issues with their learners.  Hopefully this unit can be used for a variety of learners with the goal of creating a more equal and compassionate world. 

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