What unique challenges do refugee and migrant youth face during resettlement, and how can educational systems best support their integration and mental health?

Ilana Seff, a Research Assistant Professor at the Brown School at Washington University, and Jeremy Aldrich, Director of Teaching and Learning in Harrisonburg City Public Schools, delve into this crucial topic in this episode. Ilana highlights her work on mental health support for displaced women and adolescents in the U.S., particularly through the 'SALaMA Study,' while Jeremy discusses the significance of language and cultural belonging through his experience as an ESL teacher and leader in the Virginia Dual Language Educators Network. They discuss the vital role of schools in creating inclusive environments, the importance of family engagement, and the effectiveness of peer support in aiding integration and fostering resilience among refugee and migrant adolescents.

Check out the shownotes to learn more!

Takeaways:

• Refugee and migrant youth face significant emotional challenges while resettling in new environments.
• Schools play a critical role in providing support and fostering a sense of belonging for these students.
• Language acquisition is vital for social integration and academic success among refugee adolescents.
• Family involvement is crucial in helping students adjust and navigate the school system effectively.
• Peer mentoring can greatly assist refugee youth in understanding school norms and making connections.
• Mental health support is essential, as many adolescents experience heightened levels of distress and isolation.

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Hey, it's Hetal Baman with the global Health Pursuit podcast here with another episode.

Today we're talking about the challenges that refugees and the migrant youth population faces as they resettle into new countries, new schools, new languages, and the emotional weight that comes with starting over. How can our schools and communities best support these young people? How can we make sure that they don't just survive, but also thrive?

We've got two amazing guests joining us to help unpack this Ilana Sef, a research assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University who brings her expertise from working on mental health support for displaced women and adolescents.

She's been involved with the Salama study, which is a study that seeks to assess the mental health and psychosocial well being of high school students who have been or whose parents have been resettled to the US from middle eastern and north african countries. And then we've got Jeremy Aldrich, the director of teaching and learning in Harrisonburg City Public schools.

Jeremy has years of experience as an ESL teacher, and hes really passionate about the power of language and cultural belonging.

He also leads the Virginia Dual Language Educators Network, which focuses on creating bilingual environments that make students feel seen and understood.

In this conversation, we explore how schools can create safe, inclusive spaces for these students, why family involvement is so crucial, and how peer support can make all the difference in helping refugee and migrant kids settle in and succeed. As always, make sure you're subscribed, leave a five star review, and share this episode with someone who might find it valuable.

Again, my name is Hetal Baman, and you're listening to the global health pursuit. Alana and Jeremy, I was so stoked to have you guys on the podcast.

This is such an important topic to talk about, especially in the political climate that we have right now. This is a very specific field, migrant and refugee work, even language learning. What drew you guys into this field?

What made you so passionate about this?

Yeah, sure. It's a good question. I actually got into this space, I would say, via work on gender based violence.

So my kind of initial work, when I did my doctorate in public health and global health focused on violence against women and girls among forcibly displaced populations. Unsurprisingly, a lot of that work and intervention evaluation focused on mental health support for survivors for women and girls at risk of gbv.

And so that kind of brought me into this sort of mental health psychosocial wellbeing space.

And then that, you know, certainly people who have experience forced displacement or are in ongoing, protracted conflicts have a number of other, you know, exposures that warrant mental health and psychosocial services. And so then I kind of veered into that space, not just focused on services for survivors or understanding mental health issues for survivors.

And then Salama, the study that really going to be talking about more today, the study of adolescent lives after migration to America, was actually the first study where I worked on this issue domestically.

The focus here is really on adolescent populations who have been resettled from the Middle east and North african region and really trying to understand what they have been through, not just prior to migration, but even during the resettlement process and their mental health needs. I have loved working on this study. It has been a newer focus, though. The study itself has been going on for about seven years.

It feels like such an important topic.

And, you know, in the country, we're really facing a mental health crisis for adolescents, and it's only more pronounced for, you know, those in minority groups. It's felt really meaningful, I think, to work on this topic.

The most challenging student that I worked with was a resettled refugee from Kurdistan. We were just oil and water.

I wish I could go back and coach myself as a younger teacher in how to understand the pieces that that student was bringing to the table and how to respond in ways that could have honored his experience more. Throughout the years, I've had an opportunity to work with a variety of students from different migrant or refugee backgrounds.

We're in a very diverse school division here in Virginia. This particular study we connected to through our work with Qatar Foundation International QFI, who has supported our Arabic language programs.

We signed on to understand more about our students, and it's been a great journey.

And so I remember going to ESL class as well because English is not my first language. And so there was a very interesting. It was a very interesting time for me.

Yeah. Language layers onto identity and culture.

And so that used language even within our home environment is something that I'm sure your family has experienced.

Our family's experience of who speaks what language to whom, and what does it indicate about their roles within the family, their roles within the community, their identity of themselves. That actually came out in the Salama study of the importance of language acquisition and the importance of language as an aspect of identity.

Can you speak to how crucial this statement actually turned out to be? And then on top of that, what was it like in schools before this sort of pressure to welcome these refugees?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Not all of those are adolescents, but certainly for adolescents, schools are such a critical point of contact for newcomers, and they're such a consistent point of contact for adolescents. We know kids are going to school every day.

It presents an important opportunity to support them in their integration, in their language acquisition, adjusting socially, academically.

It's such a critical point of intervention for students, but I think importantly, not just students, but it also presents an opportunity to identify services that may be needed for families as well.

When schools have the resources to engage caregivers and to engage, you know, other kind of adults and students lives, they can really work with local organizations to share resources and ensure that, you know, there's these kind of cross checks that are embedded in to really support students, but also, you know, direct families to services as well.

One of the key pieces about school, and this is perhaps, I think, one of two of or two of, I would say the probably most important findings, I think, that came out of the whole Salama study, is that students born outside the US exhibited greater levels of suicide ideation.

Oh, I saw that.

That was a big one. This was driven especially by the students from the Middle east and North african region.

But the kind of second piece to that was this really substantial and statistically significant role that perceived school belonging played in buffering against that risk. So students who felt like they belonged in their schools had lower rates of suicide ideation. They exhibited greater overall resilience.

And so not only do students kind of offer this opportunity to intervene, but it's also imperative that they create a space where students feel like they belong or they risk potentially contributing to these really more serious mental health issues.

Yeah, I think that was really where I was gonna go next. Jeremy, as somebody who has worked directly in the school systems.

What have you seen like, what were your direct experiences like in the school system setting? What were you witnessing there?

Well, we have a lot of immigrant and refugee students and have a strong history of welcoming post conflict folks from all over the world. You can follow the international news and see who the next wave of students that might be coming to Hershenberg would be.

Generally speaking, we see students in crisis, often bringing things that aren't directly related to school, that the social emotional needs or the psychosocial needs are about what's happening beyond their school day to a great degree.

But we do know that students who feel connected, who feel loved, who feel supported both at school and at home, have more resilience, can have a more robust response to the stressors they experience.

When you think about adolescence is hard enough as it is, and when you add in other factors of having experienced violence or going through major life changes or family separation, all these pieces that add up to create stress in any human being, much less an adolescent who's already experiencing the highs and lows, it can be explosive, for sure. We see that in our school population. I think it was interesting to see.

I think it highlights again that need for thinking of the student as a whole person and thinking of what they're experiencing outside of school and what they bring to the table. And then also, how can we promote their resiliency factors?

When I was growing up, I always felt as, especially as the firstborn, my parents were also just trying to figure it out. Going through schools and then going through ESL, I've always felt like I was alone, like I had to figure it out.

For example, if there was an exam coming up or a project that I had to do, I couldn't really ask my parents. You know, I didn't have that resource. So I had to go out and find that, whether it be in the schools, a friend or a friend transparent.

I completely understand where that comes from.

Yeah.

And I think you bring up a really good point that I want to touch on because we conducted focus group discussions with newcomer adolescents and, you know, we asked them what, what supports would you wish to see for students like you who are, you know, coming from conflict affected arab majority countries? When you first get here and you're in this school system, what supports would you want to see?

And I think one of the things that came up quite often is like, teach us what the norms are in this school system. And you're kind of talking about like, you have a test, you don't know who to go to. Like, what is this test gonna be like?

And even small things, like, can I have my cell phone out in the hallways? Things that we just take for granted as being, like, you know, the rules. And they're coming from a very different context. They don't know the rules.

And really having a peer mentor or someone that can kind of show them the ropes, ideally, someone who has already been through that process and had to adjust to the new school system and now can impart that wisdom to someone else. So I think that's a common struggle you talked about.

Yeah. Especially being the first born, too.

And it was like, and then all of my cousins and my brother was born, and I was the one that they had to go to to say, okay, I need help with this project, or, I need help with this subject, or, I like this boy. Talk to me about this. I was like, oh, my gosh, I made so many mistakes going through all of this. How can you ask my help?

I was one of the only few people they could go to. It makes sense to have that peer mentor, that person you can go to, that won't judge you.

That makes so much sense now, Jeremy, I want to ask you, because you focus a lot on learning languages and the language experience for refugees and migrant workers. You were the first president of Virginia Dual Language Educators Network. What is it? And then why was it created? How does it support young students?

We're really proud of dual language education in Virginia, and we're piggybacking on successes around the country. Dual language is an educational model where students learn for half of the day in one language and half of the day in another language.

In our case, it's Spanish and English, our dual language programs, we're majority hispanic districts, so that language combination makes sense. It results in all kinds of benefits.

The reason that we do it, it does end up resulting in higher academic achievement over time, but it also has lots of social emotional benefits. It allows students coming from different language background homes to have greater access to teacher and family communication.

It also reinforces positive identity for students who speak a variety of languages. We've been very happy to see dual language continue to grow in Harrisonburg and throughout Virginia.

So we started the Vadlund, the Virginia dual language educators network to support that growth and to build a network.

You were talking a minute ago about your experience as an child of immigrants and oldest child, and how you took on the role of the person who was trusted, knowledgeable, and available. And I think those three pieces are what everybody needs. Whatever role they're in. Right.

We need people around us who are trusted, knowledgeable, and available. And if that's true for educators as much as it is true for our.

Students, Alana, with your research, since you look at it in a different perspective or lightning, how critical is it for you in terms of the language component?

Yeah. So, I mean, I was talking earlier about the focus group discussions we had.

We did this participatory exercise where we asked them, like, what supports would you want? And I think we did 14 different focus group discussions across, you know, it's in Harrisonburg.

We did them in Austin, Texas, and Detroit metropolitan area in Michigan. And the thing, the only thing that was brought up organically in every single site was language learning.

So it's critical, and it was ranked one of the highest as well. As Jeremy was saying, it's not just about academic performance and the need to learn in English in schools.

It's critical for integrating socially and being able to kind of, you know, make friends and engage in extracurricular activities, but also just the confidence that it provides them to be able to speak in English.

And, you know, I think, you know, you hear mostly about english language acquisition, but it's also important not to forget home language retention piece and.

And how critical, as Jeremy was saying, that is really for identity and also for kind of continuing to connect with your family and recognizing that that may be the language they're speaking at home.

And so having these opportunities to continue to learn that language, you know, when you're in high school, when, you know, in 10th grade, I was still learning English. Right. And so these, these students have come over, and they may still be learning their home language.

And so having opportunities to continue to do that as well, I think is really important.

That hits home for me because my Gujarati is not great anymore. I was the most fluent when I was, like, five or six.

So then you go into school, and then you're really focused on learning English, and then you're speaking English with your parents, too, because my parents are also trying to learn English. And the only person that is left to speak Gujarati with is my grandmother or my grandparents.

And I think over the years, I started to realize my Gujarati kind of sucks.

But I do wish in schools maybe if there was an option to continue speaking in Gujarati for, like, I don't know, a couple periods or have somebody to be there and to reinforce the fact that, like, hey, don't forget this language. My last grandparent had just passed away. She was the person that I was.

I would always speak it with even like, doesn't matter how broken it was, she would still respond. She was the one person who wouldn't laugh at me.

Now I have to make a concerted effort to make sure my language retention in Gujarati is not 100% gone in a few years. I wanted to ask you, Alana, you've studied so many students through this salama study.

What were the other findings or difficulties that you've seen within these adolescents?

You know, we spoke about just being a normal kid growing up in the States, puberty, growing hardships with friendships, liking other people and relationships. What have you seen with migrants and refugees in this context?

Yeah, you couldn't pay me a million dollars to go back to middle and high school. It's already a tough period.

I think the students that we collected data from, they have so many exposures and challenges, really, throughout the migration process. So before they migrate, often they're exposed to conflict, breakdown of social order. They've potentially lost loved ones.

They may be separated from loved ones as their I migrating to another context, they maybe experience violence. They've probably been out of school and had to discontinue their education for a period of time.

And that's just, you know, before migration, during migration, again, they, you know, they can be exposed to violence often. Again, kind of a period of no schooling, potentially. And then once they get to the US, they really continue to face challenges.

It's, you know, a lot of those issues are kind of inherently resolved when they get to the US and they're not experiencing conflict, but they may feel very kind of socially or culturally displaced.

They may be experiencing poverty, they're continuing to be separated from loved ones, and then they're facing kind of all of the challenges we've talked about already in terms of integrating into a new educational system, learning a new language, new norms, new standards. And so there's really many layers to the challenges that they're facing.

And as Jeremy said, you know, it's so much of it is not just what's happening in school. They bring a whole history with them and that. It's a lot.

It's a lot. Yeah. And on top of that, we have these crazy things that happen in the world, like Covid.

So, Jeremy, I want to ask you, like, as somebody who works in the school system, what did you see with, like, what happened with these students? I'm sure it was a hugely jarring experience for them. Can you speak to that experience?

Yeah. It feels like it was a million years ago in some ways, doesn't it? But yet it wasn't.

We have a large group of people who for several years experience, didn't experience the positive things about school, even though they were still marginally attending school online. I think that we saw a decrease in that sense of belonging. I think that's exemplified by classrooms where all the kids have their cameras turned off.

Right. And so you've got a virtual classroom where there's not a lot of connection happening, student to student, student to teacher.

I think that carried over even when we were able to resume in person learning. We saw a disconnect.

And some students who even still use the mask not only as a health support, but as a way of shielding themselves from being perceived.

Interesting. Wait, talk more about that, because I've never heard that.

Even in an online classroom setting, and then you're in an in person setting, and if you feel comfort with that invisibility, you can still do things pulling your hood over your head or wearing the mask or having earbuds in when you walk through the hallway. So you're not really in the space that you're in the.

And we see a lot of those behaviors, and some of them are typical adolescent behaviors, but I think they've been exacerbated by students experience during the feeling isolated, as well as all kinds of political, cultural factors that lead students to feel marginalized. But we know that belonging and hope are so, so important to resilience.

And so we've got to find ways for students to feel they belong and to, to create school environments where people do, in fact, belong. And part of that is inviting them to lower their shields when they're with one another.

Turn on the camera.

Turn on the camera. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

In light of talking about best practices or things that we've implemented, especially even through the study, Salama study, a lot of what are some things that you've learned and want to kind of implement into schools, school systems, like going forward?

Yeah, I can talk about a couple, and then I'd also am curious to kind of hear Jared. Yeah, for sure, you know, what they've implemented, too. So I know there's a couple have been a real success in his schools.

But, you know, I think one of the things is kind of twofold. One, you know, that it can be difficult to engage families.

You talked about, oftentimes the student may be the one in the family, especially if they're the eldest, that is learning English and learning it the most quickly, and is responsible for kind of being the liaison with families or caregivers who don't speak English as well, and figuring out ways to still ensure that families are engaged.

We saw in the school system that we did some research in, in Detroit metropolitan area, when automated messages went out to caregivers, for example, that there would be a snow day or some other school announcement, they had them automatically translated into other languages, including Arabic.

And so schools were able, or caregivers were able to receive that message, and you were sure it was getting to the caregivers and not getting to them through an adolescent, which may not always be the exact message that you intended to pass along, ensuring that you have staff that share these identity dimensions with students.

So if you have a sizable population of arab heritage, that you have providers or someone at the school that shares that ethnic or linguistic or country of origin background, and that can be a cultural liaison as well. And I'll actually pass it to Jeremy here because I think kind of that piece is something that was done really well in the Harrisonburg setting.

Yeah, we're pleased to have what we call family school liaisons, where their full time job is to help our families and schools connect better with each other.

So that does involve some interpretation and translation, but it also is really translating cultures, almost more so than translating language, helping both sides to understand where the family's coming from, where the school is coming from, and to work through issues as they emerge to create effective onboarding practices.

A related thing that we've done over the years has been an ESL class for parents, focused on building their capacity as education partners and building an understanding of what our school system looks like and what we can say, schooling in the US. But we know that local schools are very different from one another. It's important to help families contextualize and do that.

Like Alana said, building that family language connection, helping them to see that school is not something that they have to deal with only through english speaking family members, or in your case, their eldest child, but that they can interact directly and confidently with people in the school for the betterment of their students. Another thing that we've done is building peer connections.

And so there's an after school club that meets called peer leaders, where students, typically from refugee backgrounds, get together and enjoy sometimes social activities, sometimes learning activities. But all with that idea of, here are some people, I'll go back to what you said earlier, that are trusted, knowledgeable, and available.

And so here's the person you can ask about how do we navigate dating relationships in this context, and how do we do the college application process and what classes should I take? And should I avoid the.

All those things that are a part of not only your success, but also your feeling of belonging and your feeling of inclusion rather than marginalization?

Yeah. What I'm hearing is that, number one is belonging, making sure that you know that, hey, I belong here as well, and I'm not an outsider.

And I think that's. Yeah, that's something that I think people who listen to this episode will really resonate with.

So thank you so much, Alana and Jeremy, is there anything else that you want to share? Any exciting things happening for the future?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's nice to be able to. As I mentioned, the study's been going on for, I think, seven years, and we're kind of in that closing year.

And so it's nice to be able to reflect on kind of the evolution of the study and all the different things that we've kind of learned and the insights. One thing we didn't get to talk about are some actual interventions that came out of the findings that we've kind of piloted in different settings.

So, you know, a peer kind of social support life skills intervention, a photovoice intervention where students are kind of sharing their voice and experiences through picture taking. And I think there are plans, hopefully, to. To pilot and evaluate these on a larger scale across the country.

So we're keeping our fingers crossed that, you know, that will come through and we'll really be able to do that and ensure that these interventions are getting to more students. So that's, I think, hopefully a next step that is in our future kind of building on salama.

Yay.

Yeah.

This study has been just an incredible experience for me personally, and getting to connect with people who care about some of the things that I care about most deeply and to do good and important work. And so I just want to celebrate the whole team.

And certainly you can find out more about the Salama study as well as the findings, as well as best practices or promising practices online through the website.

But I just want to encourage everybody who's listening to this and who cares about global health to find your network, put your ripples out there, and connect with people, because there's a lot of great work happening, and you're going to. You're going to go further and longer by connecting with people who care about the same things you care about.

So I celebrate everyone who is doing something to make the world a better place. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to this episode. If you'd like to learn more about today's topic and guest, head over to the show notes linked in the description of this episode.

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It helps me get in front of more people just like you and continues to elevate the causes we are so passionate about. I'll see you in the next one.