See all articles from this issue

In Brief

• College graduates need intercultural competencies to work with immigrant families.
• Students can be prepared for careers working with immigrant families through classroom exercises, community-based service learning, and intensive, immersive educational experiences.
• Transformative learning experiences equip students to deliver preventive, educational, and intervention services.

Immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking families in the United States face myriad challenges, including the “four core stressors”: trauma, resettlement, acculturation, and isolation (Boston Children’s Hospital, n.d.; National Child Traumatic Stress Network, n.d.), as well as ambiguous loss (Solheim & Ballard, 2016). Immigrant families have many inherent strengths that foster resilience (Doty, 2016), yet resources provided by knowledgeable, compassionate professionals in their communities—Family Life Educators, social workers, health-care providers, criminal justice professionals, schoolteachers—is essential. Thus, it is incumbent upon postsecondary educators to prepare students for a variety of careers that serve this vulnerable population. College and university faculty can expose and sensitize students to the complex and ever-changing challenges that immigrant families experience by developing transformational teaching strategies that foster knowledge of immigration and allow students to gain experience with immigrants.
 

Transformative Learning, Transformational Teaching

University professors are tasked with developing future professionals who are equipped to respond to “wicked problems”—situations, such as those experienced by immigrant families, “where the parameters of the problem and the means available for solving them are changing constantly” (Hanstedt, 2018, p. 3). However, many undergraduate students begin college with firmly held ideas that they are unwilling to question, especially when encountering topics like immigration that have become politically charged; faculty often face student resistance to information that contradicts entrenched beliefs. The most effective way to lower these barriers is to facilitate transformative learning through transformational teaching strategies.

Transformative learning is the process that occurs when students encounter a “problem or anomaly that cannot be resolved” with their existing lenses, but instead requires that they transform their perspective (Kitchenham, 2008, p. 112). As Kolb (2015) explained, “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (p. 49). Therefore, beyond teaching basic content knowledge, faculty must expose students to new and different experiences, challenge them to consider others’ perspectives, critically examine their values, and reflect on their learning.

Transformative learning is facilitated through transformational teaching, in which faculty provide “experiential lessons that transcend the boundaries of the classroom” that challenge and encourage students’ “potential for intellectual and personal growth” (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012, p. 569). The core of any transformational teaching strategy is some type of “disorienting dilemma,” an “event that challenges [students’] beliefs and their expectations of what will happen next,” that prods them to begin questioning preexisting belief systems, and that is the “beginning of transformative learning” (Kroth & Cranton, 2014, p. 2).
 

Transformational Teaching Assignments That Facilitate Transformative Understanding of Immigrant Experiences

Transformational teaching strategies that facilitate students’ understanding of immigrant families and their experiences can be designed through many types of activities, in different locations, and with varying resources. Transformational teaching can occur within the confines of the classroom, within the local community, or through study-away experiences, and they can include a continuum of activities that range from interactive and engaging classroom exercises to community-based experiential learning or intensive programs that immerse students in the immigrant experience.

Classroom activities. Interactive and engaging classroom activities are one type of transformational teaching strategy that may help students begin to recognize some of the stressors and challenges of the immigrant experience. One way to facilitate understanding of immigrants’ experiences is to arrange for oral interviews with university faculty, staff, and/or students who are immigrants. Students often perceive the difficulties of immigration more deeply when peers or other individuals from the familiar academic environment communicate their stories. A second way to engage students is to have them listen to podcasts or documentaries about experiences with immigration followed by an in-class discussion. The podcast This American Life (especially Episodes 592, 593, and 688), and the documentaries Who Is Dayani Cristal? and Which Way Home? are excellent resources. Oral interviews, podcasts, and documentaries require few resources and are easy for instructors to implement in the classroom.

Educators can create a very powerful transformative experience by creating a brief “disorienting dilemma,” (Kroth & Cranton, 2014) such as beginning a class period in a foreign language and requesting that students do a mock assignment where the instructions are in that language. Multilingual faculty can facilitate this activity without assistance, but it is equally effective to bring in a foreign-language colleague as a “guest speaker” to deliver a lesson. The dilemma should continue for about five minutes to generate expressions of the emotions and behaviors of disorientation. Faculty can quell student anxiety by immediately beginning a discussion that explores how students felt; a word cloud can help students express their feelings about the brief disorientating activity. Faculty can then lead students to connect the exercise to immigrants’ experiences in multiple settings and everyday interactions. Potential topics for discussion include how language barriers interfere with access to health care, jobs, education, social services, and asylum or citizenship applications; the role of child translators in families; and the value of peer-to-peer resources for immigrants.

Community-based experiential learning. Professors can create opportunities for students to interact with immigrants by designing community-based experiential learning projects. The first step in this process is asking, “Who are the immigrants in the community?” and “How can students provide an even exchange of learning, so that both sides benefit?” The following are examples of potential community-based experiential projects that can increase intercultural exchange and awareness:

• Provide students the opportunity to teach English or offer art or music workshops to immigrants in the area. Collaborate with faculty in other disciplines and local agencies providing services to immigrants (e.g., immigration detention centers, refugee service organizations, local faith-based organizations).
• Contact area farms that employ immigrant agricultural workers and arrange for students to work alongside an immigrant for a day.
• Provide dinner for an area immigrant or refugee service agency, then engage students in conversation and a mutual exploration of culture.
• Identify international markets, places of worship, clubs, and community organizations where students can meet immigrants, learn more about their lives, and recognize the importance of these communities.

Community-based experiential learning projects such as these facilitate social contact between students and immigrants and can be pivotal in challenging students’ previously held stereotypes and prejudices (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). In our experience, students who previously had little empathy for immigrants begin to recognize their preconceived views were inaccurate and they openly express their realization that immigrants are people just like they are.

According to Mezirow (1998), student reflection is an essential component of transformative learning: Critical thinking about experiences continues the process of learning and makes the experience more readily available for future consideration. Thus, these projects should be followed by reflection assignments with cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions (Mälkki, 2010), asking students to consider not only what they learned but also how they felt and why, and how their understanding of immigrant family experiences has changed or been nuanced. Examples of student reflection assignments include: journaling (of critical self-reflection, not a diary entry), “freewrites” (stream-of-consciousness writing for a certain amount of time or a certain word count) and “voicing immigrant experiences” by creating podcasts or first-person recordings retelling the stories students have heard.

Immersive educational experiences. Educators can facilitate transformative learning through more immersive experiences, such as designing a course with a study-away component. Although these more intensive transformational teaching approaches require additional resources, they may have an even deeper impact on students. An example of such an immersive course is “Borderlines,” taught at Longwood University. Designed as a multidisciplinary, team-taught class focusing on immigration in the United States, the 6-week summer course begins with 2 weeks of predeparture readings, meetings, activities, and day trips to area organizations that provide resources to immigrants. Students and faculty then embark on a 9-day travel program that considers immigration on the border of Arizona and Mexico, and in the city of Tucson. Students meet immigrants and border patrol officers; they visit the border wall itself and talk with refugees seeking asylum; they see the terrain that undocumented border crossers face and walk in their footsteps on desert paths. Students also study literature, place-as-text, art, social policy, geography, and the ecosystem of the region.

Anecdotal evidence after two years of the course suggests that immersive experiences, such as the Borderlines experience, are transformative. Regardless of their political views, students typically become more aware of the effects of U.S. policy on immigrants. Previously unrecognized career paths can be identified from the experience. And amid the transformation, students may recognize, perhaps for the first time, the challenges immigrants face.

Summary

Ensuring the security, stability, and resilience of immigrant families requires the support of knowledgeable, compassionate, informed, culturally aware professionals throughout the community. Educators who provide opportunities for transformative learning through transformational teaching strategies will equip undergraduate students to provide collaborative prevention and intervention services for immigrant families.

Complete References

Boston Children’s Hospital. (n.d.). Refugee and immigrant core stressor assessment tool. Retrieved from https://redcap.tch.harvard.edu/redcap_edc/surveys/index.php?s=HRPDCPPA3H

Doty, J. (2016). Resilience in Immigrant and Refugee Families. In J. Ballard, E. Weiling, & C. Solheim (Eds.), Immigrant and refugee families (pp. 176–197). Retrieved from https://open.lib.umn.edu/immigrantfamilies/

Hanstedt, P. (2018). Creating wicked students: Designing courses for a complex world. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Kitchenham, A. (2008). The evolution of John Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. Journal of Transformative Education, 6(2), 104–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344608322678

Kolb, D. (2015). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (2nd ed.). Glenview, IL: Pearson.

Kroth, M., & Cranton, P. (2014). Stories of transformative learning. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

Mälkki, K. (2010). Building on Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning: Theorizing the challenges to reflection. Journal of Transformative Education, 8, 42–62.

Mezirow, J. (1998). On critical reflection. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(3), 185–198.

National Child Traumatic Stress Network. (n.d.). About refugees. Retrieved from www.nctsn.org/what-is-child-trauma/trauma-types/refugee-trauma/about-refugees

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

Solheim, C. A., & Ballard, J. (2016). Ambiguous loss due to separation in voluntary transnational families. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 8, 341–359. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12160

Slavich, G., & Zimbardo, P. (2012). Transformational teaching: Theoretical underpinnings, basic principles, and core methods. Educational Psychology Review, 24(4), 569–608. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9199-6