2018 Applied Social Issues Grant Recipient

Values Beyond ABC and 1-2-3: Leveraging the English-Language Classroom
to Support the Flourishing of Adult Refugees and Immigrants

By Debby Adams, M.A. TESOL
Ph.D. Student in Curriculum & Teaching
The University of Kansas

When I first began teaching in refugee resettlement, I was experienced in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), yet I found myself profoundly unprepared to face the complexities of my new context and students’ unique challenges and needs. Among these were the experience of war and displacement, the stress of adjusting to a new country, and discrimination. Yet mental health resources and programs to address these issues are grossly underfunded and inadequate. For these learners, the classroom becomes a community in which they are able to not only learn language but also find a network of support in their classmates and teacher.

Resettlement entails many factors that place refugees at risk for psychological threat. One response to identity threats is to defend one’s self (Branscombe et al., 1999), which can lead to further difficulty for adaptive coping (Cohen & Sherman, 2014). For refugees and immigrants, these adaptive coping skills are crucial for success in learning language and navigating the complexities of their new lives.

Interventions based on Self-Affirmation Theory (Steele, 1988) have exhibited impressive power to yield recursive benefits in educational contexts (e.g., higher GPA and better health among underrepresented minorities; Walton, 2014) and among individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hall, Zhao, & Shafir, 2014). Working in partnership with two resettlement agencies and a local employer, my project for the Applied Social Issues Internship extends this research to a new context by piloting a value affirmation (VA) intervention in a workplace-based English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class for refugees and immigrants in the garment industry.

The original study design involved three VA interventions integrated into the curriculum, though it quickly became evident that modifications were needed. While low literacy levels required some adjustments, the greater challenge was the abstract, individualistic nature of the prompts. Even though they were given in written and audio form in students’ primary languages, the content seemed to cause a disconnect.

Further, the “classic” experimental version of the VA intervention was difficult to scale into an ESOL context, particularly among lower-educated participants with no prior experience performing such tasks. The research I was able to conduct with SPSSI’s support allowed me to explore what happens when an intervention is given feet to walk out of the lab, out of the university, and into a messy, real-world ESOL classroom.

Based on these challenges, I attempted to present the intervention in more concrete terms in the course’s final project. With the help of volunteers, students wrote bilingual books describing the process of making something that gave them a great feeling of satisfaction (book example one; two; three). While psychological theory guided my thinking in developing this project, I found it took considerable adaptation to help the intervention cross cultures, educational levels, and contexts. I am now in the process of analyzing pre- and post-surveys and interviews of class participants. I would like to extend my gratitude to SPSSI and Ludwin Molina at KU, whose help and guidance made this project possible.

References

Branscombe, N. R., Schmitt, M. T., & Harvey, R. D. (1999). Perceiving pervasive discrimination among African Americans: Implications for group identification and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(1), 135-149. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.1.135

Cohen, G. L., & Sherman D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–71.

Hall, C. C., Zhao, J., & Shafir, E. (2014). Self-affirmation among the poor: Cognitive and behavioral implications. Psychological Science, 25(2), 619-625.

Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 261–302). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Walton, G. M. (2014). The new science of wise psychological interventions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1).

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