Building bridges between schools and everyday learning spaces for refugee students: a response to Eileen Honan

This paper responds to Eileen Honan’s productive engagement with community literacies, outlining The Knowing and Learning in Everyday Spaces (KaLiEDS) project where young refugees’ everyday literacy practices are constructed as valued forms of capital. We situate the study in earlier research which moves away from literacy as a set of cognitive skills, towards socially-situated practices. The findings of the project argue strongly for the overt as well as tacit knowledge built up in informal settings which serves as capital for productive futures in the adopted country. The response concludes with a range of recommendations for teachers to adapt their approaches to a more community-based set of strategies for sound literacy teaching and learning.