Abstract

The latest continuous arrival of Afghan refugees in the Bay Area is a repetition of the first wave of Afghan immigration to the US in the nineties. Pertinently, Madhani (2021) reported the first group of 37,000 Afghan evacuees’ arrivals are slated to resettle in their designated destination states by the states’ governors and state refugee coordinators across the country. The administration has requested funding from Congress to help resettle 65,000 Afghans in the US by the end of September 2021 and 95,000 by September 2022. According to the State Department data, California is projected to take more arrivals than other states, that is, more than 5,200 people (Madhani, 2021). In my perspective, as a public school teacher in the School District of San Francisco in the nineties, this current Afghan immigrant resettlement in the US is a vivid reminder of the Afghan refugees’ arrival and resettlement in California in the late 90s and early 2000s. These Afghan families who arrived in the 90s initially landed and stayed in San Francisco, CA and, gradually, relocated to the suburban counties of Fremont, Newark, Alameda, and Union City. While staying in San Francisco, these Afghan young learners attended school in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and underwent placement as ESL students based on their level of English proficiency. Consequently, as a tenured ESL-Bilingual teacher at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, SFUSD, I had the valued opportunity to serve and teach the Afghan high school learners in the school site. The ESL-Bilingual Department enrolled the Afghan and other immigrant students from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Jordan, and Yemen, who, also, arrived in the Bay Area in the 90s, in my ESL Reading and Writing, Math and Sciences classes. Teaching multicultural classroom of limited- and non-English Speakers was a very challenging endeavor. To address this, I used multicultural teaching approaches and methodologies such as Outdoor Education, Natural Approach, Sheltered-English approach, and Cooperative Learning teaching methodologies to meet the educational needs of this student population in their learning and teaching journey (Norman, 2018). In this respect, this reflection seeks to highlight the efficacy of outdoor education learning experiences on the students’ ecological behaviors, academic success, and servant leadership in the helping, healing, learning, and teaching process in both indoor and outdoor learning environments. In doing so: (A) firstly, I illuminate and explicate the following concepts and constructs: (1) servant leadership, (2) outdoor education, (3) STEM education, (4) ecological behaviors, (5) academic success; (B) secondly, I share my valued experiences of teaching and helping this student population in the healing, teaching, and learning process, (C) thirdly, I review relevant literature, and finally, draw my conclusion in this writing.

Keywords: Multicultural teaching approaches, Outdoor education, Natural approach, Sheltered-English, Cooperative learning, Ecological behaviors, Academic success, Servant leadership, STEM education