Letter from the Editor

Linda Molin-Karakoc, University College London, London, Greater London area, United Kingdom

Dear colleagues,

Welcome to the fall edition of the RCIS newsletter! I hope you have had an invigorating summer, including some well-deserved time to unwind from the hectic life of teaching or other professional activities. 

For many TESOLers, this time of year involves reflections on the past academic year, planning for the new school year, participating in professional training and/or entering new collaborations and projects. It also provides a particularly meaningful time to stop and think more deeply about our role as educators and learn from and alongside colleagues in our field. It is therefore my pleasure to bring the latest newsletter issue to you, where our contributors share their stories and work, offering a wealth of contexts and perspectives on refugee matters, and providing important food for thought for us all. 

The newsletter begins with a letter from our new chair, Fatima Aldajani. In her letter, Aldajani raises several critical questions regarding who gets to represent refugee voices and from which place or position—questions she traces to Edward Said. Her message reminds us that representation is never neutral: how refugee and other multilingual learners are described, whether as vulnerable or resilient, case study or author, is shaped by the positionality of the writer. Aldajani’s letter also foregrounds how this issue resists the “single story” often imposed on displaced populations. She points to contributions that centre proximity, specificity, and humility: work written from inside the conditions it describes; analyses grounded in particular contexts rather than general claims; and scholarship that lets learners’ own narratives set the terms. Her words invite readers to keep open the question of positionality—not to resolve the distance many of us write from, but to keep noticing it.

Aldajani’s letter is followed by three articles that foreground equity-oriented approaches to refugee education, including incorporating strengths-based pedagogy and engaging family members, listening to and providing professional development to teachers working with this population and enhancing refugee learners’ digital inclusion through the use of smartphones. 

In the first article, Hadid and Hauber-Özer introduce a special issue on educational equity for refugees, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies. In their article, the authors propose a holistic lens and humanizing framework for educating refugee learners based on a synthesis of the special issue contributions, where some of the principles they share include, for example, involving families and moving from deficit to asset-based thinking. 

The second article, written by Izuchukwu Light Chime, foregrounds key challenges and professional development needs of teachers working with refugees in Nigerian contexts of displacement from the perspective of a teacher educator. In her text, Light Chime sheds light on common difficulties and pedagogical strategies to overcome these difficulties used by the hardworking, resourceful teachers she works with, including translanguaging practices and trauma-informed pedagogy.

In the third article, Talley Caruso provides a practically oriented account of how to embed digital learning activities in ESL writing classrooms, particularly in settings marked by low resources and uneven digital skills. Through a demonstration of tools and strategies she has used with Afghan-background learners in her own classroom, Caruso shares useful activities and provides a critical analysis of things to keep in mind when integrating smartphones in this setting. This entails, for instance, understanding refugee learners’ different entry points to digital learning and setting high standards to support students’ academic journeys.

The newsletter also includes a review of the book Investment in Second Language Learning and Higher Education: Narratives of Syrian Refugees in Turkish Universities, authored by Melissa Hauber-Özer and reviewed by Onur Özkaynak. In his review, Özkaynak emphasizes the need for more works like this book that focus on the lived experiences of Syrian young adults in the Turkish education context. He highlights its novelty in terms of the research methods employed and the advocacy-oriented, humanizing framework Hauber-Özer’s work provides for supporting refugees in navigating higher education and life in the country. Özkaynak also points to the book’s key implications for research and practice by showing how language learning, university access, and future-making are deeply tied to recognition, power, and belonging among refugees both in Türkiye and elsewhere.

Having introduced the pieces that make up this edition, I hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as I have enjoyed working with the authors to compile and curate it. If you would like to contribute an article or a story to help us foreground more voices from the field, widening the representation of refugees, families, educators or others, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

I wish you a great start to the new academic year and look forward to our continued collaboration as we keep shaping refugee education and TESOL toward a more equitable, humanizing direction.

Sincerely,

Linda

Editor, Refugee Concerns Interest Section

Linda Molin‑Karakoc, PhD, is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow and Early‑Career Impact Fellow at University College London’s Institute of Education. Her work focuses broadly on computer‑ and mobile‑assisted language learning and inclusive pedagogical design for refugee and immigrant‑background students. Drawing on participatory, design‑based methodologies, her current research examines how emerging technologies can be integrated equitably to support multilingual learners and language teachers in TESOL contexts. Linda has over a decade of international teaching experience working with multilingual learners in the U.S., U.K., Finland, Thailand, and Ukraine.