Skip to content

Humanizing the Refugee Experience

Article

Senior Fellows Anna Linh Müller and Daniel Buchman both come from families who have been impacted significantly by border politics and migration. Daniel’s family fled from the Soviet Union as Jews and Linh’s father is a Vietnamese immigrant. Both Fellows have also lived and worked with refugees impacted by crises in Palestine, Syria and other parts of the Middle East. This drove them to create their Action Project which aims to Humanize refugees for students in Middlebury, Vermont.

Humanizing Refugees
2018 Student leadership awards, 5/2/2018 Atwater Dining

Linh and Daniel researched migration, the formal asylum process, and personal accounts of migrants and refugees.

Linh and Daniel researched migration, the formal asylum process, and personal accounts of migrants and refugees. They established a list of goals and takeaways for their workshop. Once this framework was complete, Linh and Daniel approached Middlebury College Center for Community Engagement to get feedback from local teachers. Eventually, Linh and Daniel had a thoughtful curriculum which would familiarize students with concepts of migration and borders, pushing them to examine critically the presence of international borders and laws and to consider their own privilege with regards to those topics.

The curriculum familiarized students with concepts of migration and borders, pushing them to examine critically the presence of international borders and laws.

Linh and Daniel presented this material in high school classrooms, making sure to engage teachers and students, in the hopes of beginning a longer dialogue on migration and refugees. The impact of the project was widespread and the Fellows were recognized for their work by the Middlebury College Student Government Association, for having Extraordinary Initiative in taking on a project of this magnitude. Looking to the future, both Fellows are updating their curriculum to make it accessible to the Center for Community Engagement in future years, hoping to engage local students for years to come!

Read more about their Action Project and the rewards it received here.