GAP stands for Guadalupe Alternative Programs and stands to serve St. Paul's Latino youth living on the West Side for the last fifty years. Programs like GAP have existed to promote the wellbeing of St. Paul's, Minnesota's Latino student population by offering services like counseling, educational programs, emergency resources, and job assistance (GAP, n.d.). While GAP still assists the Latino student population, times have changes and the Latino population has decreased, opening GAP services to diverse ethnic backgrounds. This has led to a recent issue of understanding the needs of the current population of GAP students.The current population consists of English language learners, refugees (Karen refugees), and low income students. Social work interns at GAP recognized external factors that may affect GAP students. This has led to the desire to promote wellness among the current student GAP population. This research study is meant to provide an understanding of what potential hurdles the current GAP student population faces by asking GAP students if they were satisfied with GAP services and discover their level of awareness regarding resources available to them.
Statement of Problem
The community has seen GAP historically as an agency serving Latino students (GAP, n.d.). Established in 1967, GAP's main mission was offering various opportunities for Latino students in the areas of skills development, education, and personal growth. These Latino students were usually young high school dropouts living in the West Side of St. Paul, Minnesota. However, the mission objectives have changes in the last decade. It has grown from assisting underserved Latino youth to assisting underserved students from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
In the last few years, the dominant population being served in the agency are Karen Refugees. The need arose to understand the potential factors that may attribute to some of the experienced difficulties by the GAP student population. A couple of these issues are transportation, language barriers (most speak the Karen language), and need for legal assistance, educational opportunities, and job assistance. By recognizing the needs of the GAP students, GAP staff also recognized the lack of resources needed to offer such assistance. Lack of resources means GAP students cannot accomplish goals of academic success. To fully assist GAP students in meeting the demands of current academic avenues and handle the stress of perceived barriers, action must be done to understand further the student population and improve existing services in GAP that consider limited resources.
Literature Review
The Guadalupe Alternative Program has changed in the last decade. Prior to the recent changes, it has met the needs of a majority Latino student population of Minneapolis, St. Paul. While GAP has achieved success in the past helping the student population, the influx of Karen refugees in the agency has led to some ineffective practices and hurdles for both GAP staff and GAP students. This literature review is meant to show the barriers faced by Karen refugees as well as what services can be improved to meet the needs of the current student population.
Understanding the Karen People
To understand the current GAP student population, it is important to understand what life is like for Karen refugees. Karen refugee women for example, have traditions they partake in that help them keep some of their culture they lost when they migrated from their homeland. One article notes the standing tradition of weaving among the Karen refugee women. Weaving provides social support, economic survival, and empowerment for these women and serves as a clue towards helping Karen refugee GAP students find purpose and connection to their culture (Stephenson, Smith, Gibson, & Watson, 2013). By weaving, it provides roots as well as a means of socialization that the Karen people treasure.
The next article details literacy practices among the Karen refugee women and their children. It offers incite in Karen family literacy practices both inside and outside the home. For example, Karen refugees practice literacy through participant observation, memorization, reading texts aloud (recitation), and computer use (Quadros & Sarrob, 2016). Because there is not much research on the Karen people, these practices can shed light on ways to improve literacy among GAP's Karen refugee student population.
Another aspect of Karen refugees to consider is the language barrier. In Australian-based study examining English language participation, achievement and education by the Karen people saw perceived difficulties from the Karen refugee women when it came to English language communication and proficiency. They also demonstrated additional barriers to education such as socio-political, cultural and gendered factors (Watkins, Razee, & Richters, 2012). To improve outreach to...
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