Sustaining Spaces: Culturally Centring Pedagogies for Students with Refugee Experiences

Calls for strength-centred practices such as culturally relevant pedagogies and culturally responsive teaching continue to amplify in K-12 schools throughout Canada. This equity seeking intention is coupled with a significant number of students with refugee experiences with intersecting identities that place them at the margins of schooling systems in multiple ways. The refugee experience is often truncated upon arrival resulting in a paucity of awareness and research on the post-migration experiences of refugee students. When experiences are researched, students describe issues of discrimination as well as bullying and racism that affect their sense of belonging and connection. In this chapter, culturally centring pedagogies is discussed as a way to disrupt colonial logics with attention towards ensuring that cultural awareness doesn’t become cultural fundamentalism or truncate culture at the shallow level of food and festivals. Focusing on culturally centring pedagogies, this chapter frames culture as complex, evolving, intergenerational, and locally situated and offers practical and pedagogical considerations for educators and researchers. In this chapter, the author argues that as educators begin to introduce culturally centring pedagogies into educational spaces, a deeper, more nuanced understanding of culture as it applies within the Canadian schooling context to students with refugee experiences is needed.