“I Want Others to Know:” Digital Storytelling as Participatory Multiliteracies Pedagogy for Refugee Adults

From Contradictions to Solutions: An Expansive Learning Analysis of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Parents Navigating Digital Exclusion in Western Sydney

Digital exclusion compounds the challenges that migrant and refugee parents already face in supporting their children’s education. As schooling becomes increasingly digitally mediated, this shift can intensify existing inequalities, particularly when the school and home systems present contradictions that these parents must navigate simultaneously. Grounded in expansive learning theory, this study examines the experiences of 18 migrant and refugee parents in Western Sydney, Australia. It draws on interview data to illuminate the contradictions encountered when supporting their children’s home learning. Through this theoretical lens, we highlight how parents take agentic actions and work to develop solutions tailored to their families’ specific needs and circumstances. The findings identify three broad types of contradictions and the strategies parents employed to overcome barriers to supporting home learning. We argue for a co-construction approach in which schools, parents, and community actors collaborate to promote expansive learning, positioning migrant and refugee parents as active participants in the redesign of school–home–community partnership systems.

Graffiti as public pedagogy: Cross-institutional collaboration for student expression, healing, and transformation

Higher education in South Africa has been widely critiqued for privileging Eurocentric epistemologies that marginalise local knowledge systems and distance learning from the socio-political realities students inhabit. Such dynamics constrain students’ capacity to critically engage the historical and structural forces shaping identity, belonging, and wellbeing. Responding to these concerns, this study examines how a collaborative, arts-based pedagogical strategy centred on graffiti can advance more inclusive and socially responsive teaching practices for diverse student populations. Grounded in critical pedagogy and decolonial theory and informed by the group psychoanalytic concept of the social unconscious, the study conceptualises a graffiti installation as a participatory archive through which students explore the intersections of identity, power, place, and collective memory. A qualitative, participatory design was employed with 12 postgraduate students (7 psychology and 5 design students) across 2 private South African institutions. Through a series of facilitated workshops, participants engaged in critical dialogue, collaboratively created a graffiti installation in a public campus space, and reflected on the meanings embedded in the evolving artwork. Data were generated through the visual artifact, transcribed discussions, participant reflections, and facilitator notes, and analysed using iterative thematic and visual analysis. Findings indicate that the collaborative process enabled students to articulate complex experiences of identity, belonging, and mental health while situating these within broader socio-historical dynamics. The installation functioned as a dialogical and multimodal learning space that supported diverse forms of expression, legitimised experiential knowledge, and uncovered both visible and silenced tensions. The chapter’s original contribution lies in demonstrating how participatory visual methods can operationalise intellectual decolonisation in practice while advancing inclusive teaching strategies that engage cognitive, affective, and spatial ways of knowing.

Nothing about us without us: rethinking positionality and power in refugee research

Participatory and reflexive approaches in migration research are often presented as ethical alternatives to extractive forms of knowledge production. Yet participation and insider proximity do not automatically dissolve power asymmetries. This methodological reflection examines the ethical, emotional, and epistemic consequences of researching one's own displaced community. The article draws on relational ethnographic fieldwork and reflexive autoethnographic analysis with Syrian refugee families in Germany. It is grounded in sustained engagement with Syrian refugee adolescents and families between 2022 and 2024, as well as earlier community-based educational work that became a critical entry point into the field. The analysis brings feminist situated knowledge, autoethnography, ethics of care, debates on migration knowledge production, and literature on secondary traumatic stress into dialogue with ethnographic vignettes. The article shows that refugee positionality can open forms of trust, shared language, and affective recognition through which otherwise hidden or fragmented narratives become speakable. At the same time, insider proximity produces unstable boundaries between researcher, teacher, community member, mother, and trusted listener. Insider positionality is therefore conceptualized not as an automatic epistemic advantage, but as a liquid, relational, and power-laden condition that enables access while also creating blind spots, expectations of care, and forms of double exposure to trauma. The article contributes to debates on “Nothing About Us Without Us” by showing that refugee-led research requires more than inclusion or representational proximity. It demands critical attention to authority, vulnerability, institutional power, emotional labour, and the costs of producing knowledge from within displacement.

The Needle and the Map: (Re)thinking Quito through Embroidery with Indigenous Youth

Our article explores how young Kichwa people who migrated from rural territories to Quito, and whose lives are structured by Ecuador’s racialized social hierarchies, imagine the city’s future. We developed a methodology grounded in critical, feminist, and decolonial geographies. Through embroidery, a culturally significant practice in Indigenous Andean communities, we created with students from the Intercultural Bilingual Educational Unit ‘Jatari Unancha’ a collective countermap to explore their current emotional relationships to the city and their visions for its future. The process revealed that participants’ aspirations for a greener, more playful, and inclusive Quito are shaped by actual experiences of insecurity and exclusion while drawing on memories of their territories of origin. We discuss the strengths and replicability of our methodology and further examine how the knowledge generated through such engaged participatory processes can be mobilized to influence policymaking and urban planning toward more just urban transformations.

“Not Just Boring Adult Stuff” Issue-Based and Critical Pedagogies for Civic and Political Learning in Welsh Primary Classrooms

“It's Human Nature to Search for Some Kind of Company”: Youth, Photovoice, and the Theory of Listening Literacy

In this article the authors introduce the concept of “listening literacy,” a merged research and instructional framework designed to address growing civic disengagement and political polarization in the United States. Drawing on Indigenous pedagogies, Deweyan democratic philosophy, critical pedagogy, and culturally sustaining practices, the authors theorize listening as a foundational literacy skill essential for democratic participation. To illustrate the framework in practice, the authors present findings from a photovoice project conducted with 15 high school students, exploring their perspectives on the purpose of school, factors that support and hinder their school engagement, and the role teachers play in their success. Student insights revealed that schools serve as vital sites of community and opportunity. The authors argue that “listening pedagogies” like photovoice empower students to articulate their experiences, develop self‐efficacy, and engage as citizens. The authors close with a consideration of implications for educators across disciplines seeking to cultivate democratic literacy.