Language for an unknowable future: multilingualism, education, and forced migration

I am working on my first book, Language for an unknowable future: Multilingualism, Education, and Forced Migration. In it, I use ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews to examines how language-in-education policies and practices—and particularly those privileging English—influence refugee children’s relationships to school, self, and home, and the ways their experiences of language at school may differ from those imagined by education authorities.

I find that refugee families’ aspirations are not fully represented in the education policies and practices that impact them directly. Rather, I argue that assimilationist language policies and pedagogies undermine the multidirectional aspirations of refugee families as they strive to create futures that enable educational and economic opportunities in the present and future, and that facilitate relationships across settings. But it is not just the aspirations of refugee families that are marginalized in the face of English-only ideologies and pedagogies at school. Instead, I find that education policymakers, program leaders, and educators find their own lived experiences and aspirations minimized in the face of narratives about ties between English, education, and opportunity. I conclude the book with recommendations for policy and practice in refugee education, proposing approaches that move away from either/or approaches to language at school and toward a conceptualization of ‘mobile speech’ for an unknowable future.