Immigration Children and Youth

3 credits

In this course, we will examine the immigrant child and youth experience through intersecting and interdisciplinary lenses. The course takes a child-centered ecological, risk and resilience, and ecological framing. We will focus on how settings, practices, and policies, distribute and restrict opportunities to students based on their diverse political, transnational, (im)migrant, refugee, and other intersecting identities. We will also point to sites (and practices) of opportunity for more promising outcomes. While a range of settings will be considered, the course will particularly focus on the role of schools on outcomes and trajectories. Topics to be covered include adaptation/acculturation/integration; social belonging and inclusion; identity; immigrant family dynamics; language development; liminal status, among others. Goals: The goal of the course is to unpack what about the immigrant experience matters for child and youth development. This course is inter-disciplinary in nature though it takes a culturally informed developmental focus. We begin with a child-centered perspective moving towards a consideration of critical contexts of development that have implications for providing differential access to opportunities. The course is designed to provide a framework for approaching our thinking and work. Students will be provided an array of opportunities to reflect on this topicfrom theoretical, to research, to case studies, to a consideration of media representations as well as in the arts, in their own lives and those they serve (or plan to serve). The final project is designed to have students apply what they have learned toenvision possibility on a topic of interest (e.g., mental health; language; school climate, etc.), with regard to a population of interest (e.g., unaccompanied children; Muslim immigrant students, etc.),through the lens of their professional identity (practitioner/researcher/policy influencer, etc. and in a medium of their choice (e.g., educator brief, policy brief; blog, video, Op-Ed, lesson plan, etc.