Refugee Children and Adaptation to School: An Analysis through Cultural Responsivities of the Teachers

Abstract

Schools have a key role in adapting refugee children from different sociocultural structures to social life. In recent years, approaximately 4 million people have had to emigrate from Iraq and Syria to Turkey. With the participation of so many refugees in social life, their educational processes have become an important actual problem. The existence of refugee students has led to cultural diversity and trigerred the emergence of social conlicts in schools they attend. Culturally responsive education based on the argument of creating a learning environment in which students’ cultural backgrounds are considered and valued forms the conceptual framework of the study. The aim of this study is to analyze teachers’ experiences of teaching to refugee students through culturally responsive education. This study is a qualitative research. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 14 volunteer teachers from four different schools in Ankara, where the refugee population predominantly lives. The findings obtained from the analysis of the data were gathered in three themes: (1) What teachers know about the students; (2) Teachers’ approaches to the education of refugee students; and (3) Teachers’ experiences of preparing culturally responsive learning environments. It is the most general result that the lack of knowledge about cultural backgrounds of refugee students and systematic problems arising from that the Turkish educational system was not ready for refugee education are the main obstacles to culturally responsive education. The other important result, regarding to the first one, is that the teachers do not have sufficient tools to overcome these problem in pedagogical terms.