Cultivating Trust: How Educators Can Build Relationships with their Afghan Refugee Students
Resources for Educators
More than 20 years ago, I arrived to the US with my family. Two weeks later, I entered a first-grade classroom, silently repeating to myself the English alphabet and a list of phrases that my dad, an English teacher for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, reviewed with me the prior night. “Hi.” “Thank you.” “A-B-C.”
In the last year, a new group of Afghan children has entered American classrooms at a time when what it means to be Afghan and Muslim in America has shifted considerably after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rising Islamophobia, and xenophobia.
Recent Afghan refugees to the US come from all corners of Afghanistan with disparate educational trajectories, experiences with conflict and trauma, and access to resources and opportunities. Moreover, these children and their families come with differing levels of trust in schools. For American educators to support these new students, we must keep in mind the multiplicity of experiences that continue to shape their lives.
We know educators want to know about their students’ experiences to better support them. As an Afghan-American and education researcher, I draw on my understanding of experiences of students in both Afghanistan and the US to develop a resource that can support American educators to cultivate trust and build relationships with their new students. This process requires curiosity, openness to learning, grappling with our discomforts, and time.
I choose to use the words children, students, and new students and limit my use of ‘refugee’ to only when it is descriptive of specific experiences. This decision is purposeful. While these children have had experiences that have forced them to flee their homes and seek refuge, the word refugee often places them in a box that feels constraining and exclusionary.
Two central principles motivate this resource. Firstly, to authentically engage with our new students, we must create openness to discussion of hard questions and become comfortable learning about culture, religion, and conflict. In my work, I purposefully integrate common cultural and Islamic concepts that illustrate the sociocultural realities of Afghan children. Moreover, Islamic concepts are relevant because almost all Afghans are first exposed to mosque-based education and, for many, it’s the gateway to formal education.
Secondly, the process of building trust must embrace agency and expand the ways we learn from students and families. This resource provides practical suggestions for ways to elevate student and family agency and open conversations.
It is my hope that this resource can help us appreciate diversity and disrupt deficit frameworks through which, unfortunately, so many of us have come to know Afghanistan and Afghans.
The resource highlights three central elements that can cultivate trust:
Safe classrooms,
Community connections, and
Quality learning.
It ends with suggested questions for educators to facilitate conversations about each of the three elements of trust with students, families, and community leaders.
Citation (APA): Faizi, Zuhra. (2022). Cultivating Trust: How Educators Can Build Relationships with Their Afghan Refugee Students. Refugee REACH Initiative, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, USA.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this publication belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily represent those of REACH or the Harvard Graduate School of Education.