This Challenge Investment Fund (CIF) research project focuses on supporting refugee and asylum-seeking young people and families in education and health care, a collaboration between Moray School of Education and Sport and the School of Medicine, University of Edinburgh.

The purpose of the study is to prepare a series of workshops and guides for student teachers and student medics to develop inclusive practices. Our aim is to ensure that student teachers and student medics feel confident in supporting refugees and asylum seekers, and that refugee and asylum-seeking young people and families experience sanctuary and care and feel included and involved in their education and in healthcare settings.

To do this, we want to speak to those involved who can share their experience, advice, and expertise: refugees and asylum seekers, student teachers and student medics, doctors and nurses, tutors and programme directors, teachers, and external support agencies.

Project Team

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The project aims to:

1. Gain insights into how youth from refugee/asylum-seeking backgrounds understand their needs and experiences in health care and educational settings in order to develop socially, culturally and linguistically responsive trauma-informed programmes for medical and school-based education in university settings.
2. Develop cross-sector relationships and understandings to address the complex, multifaceted needs of youth from refugee/asylum-seeking backgrounds who have experienced displacement, violence and trauma.
3.  Explore how student teachers/medics, doctors and nurses in hospital emergency departments, teachers in schools, and external agencies understand their own needs and experiences, and those of refugees and asylum-seeking youths, as they seek to communicate opportunities for sanctuary, care, safety and wellbeing across work contexts.
4. Produce a series of three practitioner workshops and case studies to address the challenges that minoritized citizens face when navigating the embedded social and cultural assumptions and norms in institutional practices.
5. Develop, trial, and evaluate workshop resources using image, video and sound to integrate Art expressions to explore student medics’/teachers’ own backgrounds and assumptions, along with their perceptions of children’s and young people’s experiences of displacement, identity formation, language and culture.
6. Produce a cross-university digital manual that will have outward facing functions to enable other disciplines (e.g. Social Work/Psychology) to communicate effectively in diverse contexts.
7. Submit a research grant (AHRC/ESRC) application by March 2023. This will draw on data from the CIF pilot and demonstrate our ability to reach across professional and disciplinary boundaries to explore and address current societal needs. 

About Our Project / Intercultural Approaches to Student Education by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0