Thank you for the pertinent reference!

I agree that developed countries should help to accommodate refugees as much as they can. After reading this post, I did a mini online research on how the international societies should provide to accommodate the psychological meets of psychoeducational needs of deaf refugee children from journal articles. I found a journal article which include some interesting findings. Tane & Ester (2000) point out the three levels of intervention which can satisfy this needs to this group of people. Teachers should develop specialised plans for this group of students and acknowledge their specific cultural characteristics. Also, both emotional and learning needs of students have to meet. Parents’ participation is important as schools and teachers can have a better understanding towards students. The use of sign language is a favorable factor for teachers to communicate with deaf students and build up a relationship with them.

Just some thoughts,

Lawrence

References
Tane, A. C. & Ester, C. (2000). Meeting the psychoeducational needs of deaf immigrant and refugee children. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 15(2), 1-18.

The topic of this article is definitely new to me.
Living as a migrant must be harsh since they have several difficulties that they have to overcome in their lives.
Also, living as a disabled person is also tough since there are many difficulties in their lives due to physical or mental health problems.
However, I have never thought about disabled migrants and their difficulties before I read this article.
Since for both parties, there are not proper services, facilities, and structures that are supposed to be.
Then, I can’t even imagine how challenging for disabled migrants to adjust in new situations under poor service, facilities, and structures without proper supports. It is good that this book was published to fight for disabled migrants!

What rights we do take for granted in Australia – hearing aids or cochlear implants, the right to learn Sign Language and join the Australian Deaf community (where we can make other Deaf friends), Auslan Interpreters, extra educational, legal and career help access to glasses and so much more! (e.g. provided by Deaf Society of NSW, Parramatta). I suspected this happened to some degree in different parts of the world, but this article really was an eye-opener.
I also agree that it is very well to blame individuals for their disabilities, because people think it is easier than taking a look at society as a whole and its structures that favour some people, and not others. Thank you, Laura for this post!

That’s great news! You’re right. It starts with educating those in power and then hoping that they are persuaded to apply this new knowledge to the policies they draft and enact. Good luck with your advocacy, Laura! 🙂

I can’t help but think about a conference I attended about poverty in Canada, where it was mentioned by several speakers that knowledge of services targeted at reducing poverty remained low, and a professor of mine asked whether that could be an intentional, but unwritten cost saving feature. I think that this demonstrates the need for pressure to be put on governments to produce programs that don’t sacrifice effectiveness and reach (including for minority language speakers) for budgetary reasons, and to treat refugees as human beings with rights and intersectional needs, and not a buck to pass along.

Thanks Tricia! We do make some recommendations throughout the book, but I really believe that the most important step, at least as a first step, is simply to become more aware of these structures and the effects they have – drawing attention to these things is so important. It starts encouraging those in positions of power and decision-making to consider how they design programs and where they spend funding. Even just over the course of the three years of our fieldwork, for example, we noticed big positive developments in the way the NGOs we interacted with were working.