2025/01/27 by Mark Pegrum · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Literacy, Media, and Education
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003422891-4
openalex publication_date 2025/01/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16
This conceptual chapter explores how the development of digital literacies can contribute to digital empowerment for refugee and migrant learners. It brings together, in a spirit of provocation, several disparate concepts. Superdiversity relates to the diversification of diversity as a result of global physical and digital mobility, which refugee and migrant learners – especially, but not only, adult learners – have typically both experienced and contributed to in their transit and destination locations. Jagged learning profiles relate to these learners’ varying profiles of strengths and weaknesses as developed on their mobile trajectories, during which they may have missed certain educational opportunities while, conversely, building up rich and diverse understandings, skills, and experiences – in effect, funds of knowledge (FoK) – on which they can draw. Digital literacies are key to empowerment, and recently arrived learners may require targeted support from educators to develop some aspects of these literacies; but they also bring with them valuable FoK that can inform the development of other aspects of these literacies. Educators need to offer refugee and migrant learners a strong grounding in digital literacies, while simultaneously helping them recognise and draw on their existing assets to support their own and their peers’ development of these skills.