Iuliia Fakhrutdinova is a third-year doctoral student in the Applied Linguistics Department. After exploring the use of personal narratives for refugee-background youth literacy development as part of her MA thesis and volunteering as a teacher of refugee-background adult emergent readers for two years in the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, she co-authored a chapter on scaffolding with refugee-background adults with Dr. Rai Farrelly.

Iuliia reflects that: “This chapter was an important step for me as an emerging scholar and a researcher. After volunteering and working with refugee-background adults, we saw how academia is still unprepared to serve these communities. This chapter tries to make a shift from deficit perspectives on refugee-background home literacies and knowledge to an asset orientation when people’s cultures, stories, and backgrounds are embraced.”

Check out her chapter here! If you want to learn more about this state-of-the-art project, email Iuliia at I.Fakhrutdinova001@umb.edu

Farrelly, R., & Fakhrutdinova, I. (2020). Leveraging learner experience: Pedagogical scaffolding with refugee-background adults. In the Handbook of Research on Cultivating Literacy in Diverse and Multilingual Classrooms (pp. 615-642). IGI Global.