TDNet Discover

The purpose of this action research study is to analyze the structural factors shaping enrollment, persistence, and completion in the ESOL certificate program for immigrant and refugee women at Mohawk Valley Community College (MVCC) in Utica, New York, for purposes of redesign. Structural factors will be defined as program design elements that reproduce or fail to account for the conditions under which immigrant and refugee women manage resettlement, caregiving, and household sustenance. The theory guiding this study is Social Reproduction Theory, rooted in Marxist and feminist theory, as it examines how unpaid reproductive labor shapes women’s access to formal education, reframing enrollment gaps as structural design failures rather than individual deficits. This study is guided by two primary research questions: (1) How has MVCC’s ESOL certificate program design, including the 2024 redesign, structurally shaped enrollment, persistence, and completion for immigrant and refugee women in the Mohawk Valley region? and (2) What redesign recommendations, grounded in Social Reproduction Theory and triangulated across existing data, would make the program more structurally responsive to this population? The study will be conducted at MVCC in Utica, New York, a major refugee resettlement site in the northeastern United States. Data will be drawn from three existing repositories: MVCC enrollment, success, and retention dashboards, the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR) service utilization data, and American Community Survey and U.S. Census regional data, supplemented by existing focus group data on ESOL enrollment barriers.