ABSTRACT
The growing numbers of immigrant and refugee students have been challenging schools and teacher education programs to better understand and serve these diverse populations. This chapter details how I, as a Lao American refugee scholar, have resisted the neoconservative political platform that argues that refugee communities lack the “right” cultural values for success. By centering my Lao refugee identity in all aspects of teaching and research, I challenge the academic notions of “objectivity” and “leadership.” I demonstrate how I negotiated substantial structural barriers that were meant to keep refugee of color scholars out of higher education institutions. The framework of social capital (Bankston, 2004; Noguera, 2004) is used to explain how immigrant and refugee scholars might enter and thrive in predominantly White education programs and universities.
