Reconstructing the language curriculum to promote Knowledge Democracy for refugee and non-refugee students

Students as autoethnographers is an empowering tradition which if combined with the Knowledge Democracy (KD) initiative can provide new insights and new educational perspectives for refugee and non-refugee students towards inclusive classrooms. More specifically in an Erasmus plus project in four European countries the combination of the students as autoethnographers approach and KD was combined creatively. The students in this case collected personal and family stories from their contexts and discussed them in the classroom with their classmates. By analyzing the students’ final artifacts (e.g. stories, identity maps, videos, pictures) and the open questionnaires from the intervention the finding showed that educational practices like the promotion of multiple language repertoires, translanguaging, multimodal texts and digital literacy can provide new potentials for educational inclusion. Furthermore, this combined framework enhanced newcomers initial academic skills and socialization by story sharing. These findings suggest that combination between KD and students as autoethnographers framework provides not only the opportunity to understand the complexity of the world and the acceptance of multiple ways of knowing and being, but also it promotes socialization with specific ways such as writing, designing, expressing, and understanding through story sharing