“I Close My Eyes and Dream”: Documenting Refugee Community Cultural Wealth Through Storytelling

Amidst steadily increasing forced displacement, anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist right-wing populism have risen in many host countries. This increasingly hostile environment underscores the continued urgency of calls for second language educators to engage in public dialogue and advocacy on behalf of refugee learners. Resulting from an adult ESOL program established through a university-community partnership in the Midwestern United States, this paper demonstrates the potential of storytelling pedagogy to document refugees’ community cultural wealth. The findings feature stories written by four refugee adult learners of English from Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Russia, providing evidence of multiple, interrelated forms of capital through which learners solved problems, navigated oppressive circumstances, aspired to better futures, and resisted injustice. Rather than filtering their words through conventional outsider analysis and interpretation, we present refugee storytellers’ experiences as valid and valuable knowledge and as counter-stories to xenophobic narratives about refugees. In this way, we also seek to decolonize academic writing by including community-based researchers meaningfully in published research, resisting artificial divisions between academy and community.