"Don't Call It Math — No One Will Come": Learning to Teach Mathematics While in Refuge

• In Event: 63.026 - Teaching and Learning Mathematics: How Identity Keeps Count as a System Premised on Multidirectional Dimensions

Abstract

Purpose
Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, created in 1991 for people seeking refuge from civil war, drought and famine, now hosts close to 300,000 refugees, most from Somalia (UNHCR, 2017). Refugee teachers in Dadaab’s six secondary schools have little or no prior experience of teaching and no formal training. Some have lived in the camp for over 20 years; others were born there. Having completed only a secondary education degree in Dadaab, these refugee teachers rely on their own school experience to inform their pedagogy as teachers. In 2014 a 2-year secondary teacher education diploma began in the camp. The program is a partnership between Kenyan and Canadian Universities through a humanitarian project called the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees. My research is part of a larger project designed to study refugee teachers’ experiences of living, learning and teaching in a refugee camp. This paper explores the experiences of learning to become a mathematics teacher, while remaining a refugee.

Context
Teacher education within a refugee camp presents challenges to relief models of refugee assistance programs (UNHCR, 2016; Waters & Leblanc, 2005). Relief programs focus on immediate survival and temporary relief. Education, on the other hand, requires decisions, negotiation, and collaboration on framing the rationale, and addressing such as education for whom, which curriculum and pedagogical approaches to use, and how it should be funded. In Dadaab camps, those who graduate from secondary school with passing grades will be asked to return to their schools as teachers. Recently, 90 students graduated from a teacher education diploma program offered within Dadaab camps. Eight of these students specialized in secondary mathematics education.

Methods and Data Sources
Data for this paper draws from transcribed individual and focus group interviews collected between 2014 and 2018 with teachers enrolled in the program. Analysis used Mignolo and Tlostanova’s (2006) theorizing of border thinking and epistemological shifts. Analysis focused more specifically on the 8 mathematics teacher education students, their shifting understandings of identities as mathematics teachers, and their hopes for a life other than being a refugee.

Results indicate refugee teachers held views and experiences of mathematics similar to experiences of teachers elsewhere. All spoke of challenges of teaching a subject not well liked by their students. In preparing for the first refugee camp “Math Market” (or math fair) participating teachers invited others to engage in mathematics problems. Teachers were adamant that mathematics not be used in the title because it advertises a disliked experience and therefore “no one will come!”

Results and Significance
Results point to teachers’ shifting understandings of their teacher identities and the community recognition provided; acknowledgement of their own innovate pedagogical strategies used within a resource-limited environment including distributed expertise within collaborative teacher learning communities; and questioning what higher education in a refugee camp really offers as they continue “to be more refugee than human being.” Implications of this work contribute to research on teacher education in urban, rural, and international contexts where the stories and shifting identities of teachers in refuge are seldom heard.

Author

• Cynthia C. Nicol, The University of British Columbia