Emerging Voices: Emissaries of Literacy: Representations of Sponsorship and Refugee Experience in the Stories of the Lost Boys of Sudan

Two initial implications for literacy research and composition studies emerge from recognizing refugees as active participants in their own literacy learning. The first involves the direct promotion and support of English literacy education in refugee communities. As the author observed in his own experience as a volunteer tutor, this approach has less to do with specific, observed teaching strategies or a given set of best practices for working with refugee students, and more to do with the attitude one adopts toward the act of sponsorship. The second implication for literacy sponsorship involves assigning refugee narratives in a college writing course. With the author's own students, he focuses on unpacking terms like refugee and Africa while deconstructing aid videos or exploring identity issues in the diaspora in order to lay bare and unsettle dominant assumptions in the classroom. The writing we do is primarily reflective rather than interpretive.