Humanizing Immigration and Refugee Experiences: A Student-Centered Approach to Teaching with Children’s Picturebooks in the Elementary Classroom

How might immigration experiences be complexified and nuanced in elementary settings? This article highlights how fourth-grade students engaged in a picturebook exploration guided by a critical social educator, Kara, centered on immigration and refugee narratives for an integrated social studies and English language arts unit. The unit spanned ten days within the sixty-minute daily literature block. We show how Kara and her 19 students engaged in exploration across 25 justice-oriented picturebooks depicting diverse immigration and refugee experiences. Kara wove various strategies together to encourage students to share their own immigration stories, connect with authors’ stories, and deepen their understanding by noticing themes such as “hard work does not always pay off,” “crossing invisible (linguistic) borders,” and “making new friends.” The students’ engagement led to deepening understandings and connections to a variety of immigration stories. Throughout this article, we illustrate how Kara and her students engaged in theme generation and exploration in ways that moved away from a single narrative of immigration and toward more humanizing, varied conceptions of immigrant experiences.