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    Harvard EdCast: What Do Immigrant Students Need? It Isn’t Just ELL

    Educators need to do more to address the basic social-emotional needs of immigrant children if they are to advance in learning, says Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco. She is the director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, where she’s focused on the practices that can change immigrant children’s lives in the classroom.

    Immigrant children make up 27% of student population in the United States, face many challenges, and also have many strengths and resiliences. However, those qualities often go unnoticed in the quest to learn English. “You have to address the social-emotional needs, and immigrant-origin kids have a number of them that a lot of educators are oblivious to. That’s my mission, is for educators to have a better sense of the whole child, to realize that there are a lot of challenges. There are also a lot of strengths and resiliencies,” Suárez-Orozco says. “They just have to have a better understanding of who these kids are. And most educational systems don’t address — most education schools don’t address this as part of education.”

    In this episode, she talks about the value of understanding the whole immigrant child and how to incorporate their personal stories into the classroom. To listen to the episode click here

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      Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students: How educators can help newcomers in the classroom

      Children from immigrant homes make up more than a quarter of the child population in the U.S. and are the fastest growing segment of school-age students, but many are invisible and unrecognized — schools don’t typically have a real sense of their presence or their potential according to Carola Suárez-Orozco, the director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard.

      If immigrant-origin children — meaning those who are foreign born or have at least one parent who was born abroad — are considered at all, they are typically thought of as English language learners. While learning English is important, Suárez-Orozco says it is a “very reductive way of thinking about the immigrant child experience.” She believes that much more needs to be understood to help newcomers integrate, and Suárez-Orozco shared her advice for ways that educators can begin the process.

      To learn more about how schools can lend a helping hand to immigrant children click here

       

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        Jóvenes latinos viajan más lejos y a más lugares en busca de trabajo

        This news article informs that young latinx individuals travel long distances to access work opportunities, sometimes even migrate constantly across states to secure an available work position. “Moving in search of better opportunities is perhaps more within the cultural and behavioral repertoire of these young adults than of those whose families have more distant migratory experiences,” says Professor Suárez-Orozco.