This study examines how educational leaders enact policies and practices to support the integration of refugee students in schools.  Campus leaders establish programs for refugee students to grow academically and integrate into the school community. The research questions for this project are related to how school leaders promote sustained integration of refugee students. Through resettlement, refugee students face systemic acculturation in schools as they adjust to social and cultural norms. Innovative school programs have instituted an intercultural approach to support refugee. This research incorporated a multi-sited ethnography to develop a relational study of how school leaders support refugee integration. The results of this research have implications in both school leadership and community development.

Schools represent the places where learning and discovery occur for youth and adolescents, as these institutions prepare students for social participation.  Refugee students face the challenge of assimilating into school cultures. The school remains a first place for social interaction. Often schools fail to provide quality education to refugees, and refugee resettlement has led to both social and cultural inequities (Capps et al., 2015; Pinson & Arnot, 2007). The objectives of this research project focused on intercultural efforts by school and community leaders, through both campus-based change efforts and partnerships with stakeholders, to provide more equitable spaces for learning and interaction. Campus leaders support the integration of refugee students through equitable, culturally responsive practices.  The inclusion of intercultural aspects in school-based programs promotes refugee integration in both the school and greater community.

As a focus of this research, students from refugee communities establish cultural wealth through connections with fellow students and family members of the heritage country.  As new citizens of the host country, refugee students depend on these aspects of cultural wealth, as they serve as a resource for members of specific ethnic or cultural group within a larger, culturally diverse society.  This study incorporates the work of Yosso (2005) in its focus on the impact of cultural wealth in social environments, such as schools. The present study examines policies in place to facilitate effective programs established by school and community leaders to integrate refugee students into the school culture.  This project considers change efforts by school and community leadership through a multi-sited ethnographic study of refugee student integration.

The conceptual framework of this study also draws from work that places an emphasis on the inclusion of cultural wealth of refugee students in the school community, as these transnational students arrive in a new school community with social knowledge and cultural experiences from a diverse context (Yosso, 2005).  Community and school leaders valuing students’ cultural wealth operate through a paradigm of cultural exchange that promotes diversity. This perspective considers the ecology of influences and sociocultural intersections involved in the analysis of policies and practices to support integration of these displaced students.

The following research questions were used to guide this study: 

• Why are the issues of programs and policies for refugee integration important for school leadership and stakeholders?
• What are the most effective practices that school and community leaders employ to promote an intercultural approach to education that encourages dialogue and mutual respect among all stakeholders?
• When do school leaders incorporate cultural experiences of refugee students into campus-based practices? 
• How do school and community leaders define and measure program effectiveness?
• What are the skills, dispositions, and worldviews of effective school and community leaders?

To address these research questions, the study analyzes the relationship between improvement efforts and aspects of cultural inclusion in relation to integration of refugee students across campuses and communities.  The study considers effective programs as those promoting diversity, interaction, and cultural inclusiveness.  

This research study employs a multi-sited ethnographic approach to examine the experience of school and community leaders. A multi-sited ethnography allows the researcher to develop a fluid, organic view of a subject by situating the study in different locations (Marcus, 1995; Pierides, 2010). As part of the multi-sited study, I conducted research at schools and partnering organizations in the region of Eastdale, in Central Texas, and The Hague, a city in South Holland, Netherlands. This research takes a critical approach to examine refugee programs in the school setting. This investigation was developed through critical inquiry as part of reflexive research and analysis of data sources. This project considers the political nature of qualitative research that posits beliefs about equity, social justice, and inclusion within the research subject itself (Hatch, 2002). Shaw and DeForge (2014) described the development of particular views through aligned research, stating that “the more we put particular beliefs into practice in our research, the stronger and more tacit those beliefs likely become” (p. 1578). In this way, the investigation informs the practice of inclusive education by establishing a critical inquiry through observations, discussions, and interviews within the context of the ethnographic research process. The participants’ and the researcher’s conceptualization of inclusive practices and intercultural educational exchanges evolves organically through reflection, dialogue, and participation, similar to the way Guajardo et al. (2016) described the development of dynamic social processes to inform both research and community involvement. Multi-Sited Ethnography For this research project, I implemented a multi-sited ethnography to study how school leaders devise and monitor programs and policies to integrate students experiencing refugee resettlement. This type of ethnographic approach provides an insight into how people and organizations interact, respond, and develop across different locations, as each place exists with different social and cultural realities (Marcus,1995). Through this method, the subject of study is situated in multiple contexts through an analysis of separate events and places; the research itself attempts to comprehend and define the subject within particular conditions and systemic influences (Marcus, 1995; Pierides, 2010). I opted to use this particular methodology to understand how educational leaders devise school programs in coordination with community support to address refugee student integration. The study design for this research employs a methodology that analyzes a subject existing in different locales through a relational analysis of observations, interviews, site visits, and other types of data (Marcus, 1995).

I focus on three specific themes that emerged from the findings of this ethnographic research process. I concentrated on these themes after the process of analyzing the data and identifying themes that emerged across data collected from conversations, observations, and other data sources. In this part of the discussion, the findings specifically derive from the input, participation, and observation of the research partners of the study, which included campus leaders, teachers and educators across the two sites, students in these schools, and me, as both researcher and educator. In order to provide a descriptive and organic nature to these findings, I present excerpts of the data, including reflections, stories, and thematic narratives, in order to demonstrate the major themes that emerged from this ethnographic study. I intend to highlight Guajardo et al.’s (2016) ecologies of knowing, or how the perspectives of the self, organization, and, community encompass and define the actions, attitudes, and aspirations of educators, community leaders, as well as students across the different sites of this study. Classroom Communities as Sites of Shared Knowledge Across the two different sites of this ethnographic research project, I spent time in classrooms and observed teachers consistently making pedagogical decisions and engaging in interpersonal exchanges that created welcoming, inclusive classrooms. In this section, I present perspectives of teachers in the ISK program at Vrede College to show how efforts by teachers to engage with the classroom community supported student integration. In some of these narratives, teachers practiced intercultural dialogue to develop a positive, culturally responsive classroom community. Yet, at other times, it seemed that the main purpose of the classroom dynamic was to increase students’ Dutch language proficiency, as the teacher encouraged the students to embrace the Dutch culture and society and to further their secondary and university education in the Netherlands.

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