Education Commons^™

Digital Storytelling With Refugee Youth: A Tool For Promoting Literacy And Youth Empowerment And A Catalyst For Social Action, Christina Chen

Master's Capstone Projects

For my master’s project in the International Education concentration, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I chose to conduct an action research project where I worked with refugee youth aged twelve to fourteen in Springfield, Massachusetts, to facilitate them in creating digital narratives about their lives and experiences coming to the United States. From November 2014 through March 2015, I recruited seven students to participate in a 22-hour workshop I facilitated over twelve weeks. During the workshop, they learned about digital storytelling, wrote their stories, and created multimedia videos of these narratives. They shared their digital stories with each …

A Child With Two Motherlands: Child Sojourners And Cultural Identity, Krayushkina Tatiana

Master's Capstone Projects

The main focus of the research for my Master’s Project has been children who sojourn in a different culture for several years. When studying social phenomena, social scientists often focus on adults, representing their perceptions and attitudes towards these phenomena. Children are assumed to follow the parents as silent absorbents of the parents’ views, decisions and attitudes. I, however, have foregrounded the perspectives and voices of children themselves. In this research, I have explored the following:

How children view their cultural identity/ies;

how they practice agency in choosing one;

how identity/ies change over time;

and what influences such changes

In …

Permanently Temporary: Roma Refugee Youth Seeking Schooling, Karen N. Binger

Master's Capstone Projects

This study investigates the experiences of education in exile from a small case study of Roma refugee male youths from Kosovo temporarily settled in Macedonia as ‘asylum seekers.’ These refugees are at an overlooked age where they have slipped through the cracks between the post-war, short-term relief and longer-term development efforts in terms of education. Many of the frustrations of this community stem from their difficulties in accessing education, and their uncertain legal limbo or ‘permanently temporary’ situations.

As adolescents, refugees, and Roma, the youth are at a triple jeopardy of marginalization and invisibility. Through conversations with four Roma refugee …