Empowering refugee-background students through transnational, multimodal, and critical pedagogy

Guided by the theoretical framework of critical transnational curriculum, this yearlong case study examines the pedagogical practices of high school teachers working with refugee-background students in the Midwest. By focusing on the underexplored context of refugee education in this region, the study highlights the need for more empirical research on how teachers across diverse regional and sociopolitical settings educate refugee-background students while navigating demographic, sociopolitical, and institutional realities and responding to restrictive educational climates. The study also calls for an expanded understanding of refugee education as a form of political and social justice praxis that resists assimilationist, nation-centric, and white-dominant paradigms and cultivates refugee-background students’ critical consciousness and civic agency in relation to the worlds they live in.