Member Benefits
How to Join
En Espanol
“Students learn when they feel safe emotionally, physically and psychologically,” said Meisha Lamb-Bell, program director of Re-Imagining Migration and one of two presenters at the “Fostering Safety and Belonging for Immigrant Students” AFT TEACH session on Sunday.
Unfortunately, providing that sense of safety for immigrant students has proven a challenge in an environment filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions coming from the highest powers in the land. That rhetoric, even at the adult level, impacts students’ lives—not only at home but also in school.
Co-presenter Kendra Fehrer, founder of Heartwise Learning, noted that students may not feel safe “whether that’s because they’ve seen their peers made fun of or they don’t feel like they can speak up because someone will make fun of their accent.”
The first step in creating a safe environment is for educators to understand and note how this lack of safety manifests in behavior. Students’ complaining about an upset stomach or shallow breathing can actually be examples of a stressed student. And students who don’t seem to be paying attention or who are avoiding eye contact may be suffering from a lack of psychological or physical safety.
The best way to address this lack of safety is to foster an environment of belonging, which the presenters defined as “a feeling of safety, support, celebration and civic agency within a community.”
“What does it look like to teach all young people that they are valuable community members who can make a difference?” asked Lamb-Bell. “A lot of times we think about teaching civic agency as voting, but what does that look like for a whole group of young people that can’t do anything until they are 18?”
Empowering students to be empathetic and act on behalf of other students in distress is just one part of the solution. To best aid educators, the presenters laid out four concrete strategies they can employ now to ensure they are creating a classroom that feels safe and welcoming for immigrant students:
- Use everyday classroom routines that support emotional safety.
- Talk and teach about migration to cultivate empathy and help establish healthy perspectives.
- Establish an inclusive classroom community and address anti-immigrant language and bullying.
- Empower students to create more inclusive school communities.
As the session concluded, the presenters challenged the attendees: How would you address a real-time scenario of a student using anti-immigrant language toward another student? The answer served as an accurate distillation of the entire session’s main theme—civic action.
“I’m going to stop everything else, and I’m going to address this right here and right now,” said Nikkina Osei-Holden, a school social worker and member of the New Haven (Conn.) Federation of Teachers. “Because if I don’t address it then, there will be no more learning for that student whether in my class or the next. It needs to be addressed immediately because I don’t want that student to feel that I am allowing this.”
[James Hill]