Language-in-Education Policy Reform in Urban Schools Serving Refugee Students

• In Event: Plural Approaches to Education and Equality

Abstract

Fully 60% percent of the global refugee population lives in cities (UNHCR, 2017), a phenomenon that is often overlooked in both academic literature and the aid architecture targeting refugees (Koizumi & Hoffstaedter, 2015). Recently, refugee education policy has begun to shift to integrate refugee learners into national school systems in host countries rather than segregating them in parallel, refugee-only schools, a move that aims to improve educational opportunities for refugees and has resulted in increasing linguistic diversity in urban, host country schools (Dryden-Peterson, Adelman, Bellino, & Chopra, 2019; Dryden-Peterson, 2020). Despite the fact that millions of refugee children globally seek education in linguistically diverse, urban classrooms, there is only nascent research about this phenomenon and its implications for education policy (e.g., Abiria, Early, & Kendrick, 2013), a gap this paper seeks to address.
While scholars have called for educational policies that take into account and affirm the growing linguistic diversity across classrooms globally (e.g., Benson & Young, 2016), nonetheless, supporting and integrating the multiple languages that children bring to otherwise under-resourced schools continues to be seen as impractical (e.g., Hicks & Maina, 2019). Instead, many countries, including Uganda, revert to an English-only policy in multilingual urban schools. Acknowledging the challenges that teachers face in English-only instructional environments, this paper asks: What practices do teachers in integrated, multilingual urban schools employ to navigate their students’ linguistic diversity? What can these practices teach us about opportunities for language-in-education policy reform for urban schools hosting refugees? By highlighting teachers’ current practices and areas of strength within highly constrained policy and resource environments, this paper strives to identify possibilities for more inclusive language-in-education policies and practices where refugee and national students learn together.
Part of a larger comparative case study about language, education, and refugee status, this study integrates findings from interviews and classroom observations across three schools in Kampala, Uganda. I analyze classroom observations (n=23) of Ugandan teachers instructing linguistically diverse classes of national and refugee primary students as well as interviews with teachers about their pedagogical practices (n=21). I find that teachers employ strategies to buttress children against the challenges of the English-only language policy, including through intentional relationship building, encouragement of translanguaging in the classroom (García & Wei, 2014), and non-punitive classroom management strategies. Of course, teachers also employed many practices that likely do not support learners’ language development and learning, and I document these as well. In seeking to understand the successful pedagogical practices some teachers employ in a severely resource-constrained educational environment, I seek to “resist the more typical social science preoccupation with documenting pathology” and instead, following Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davies (1997), “begin by asking What is happening here, what is working, and why?” (p. 141-142). This paper proposes language-in-education policy reforms for urban schools and the teachers tasked with implementing educational integration for refugee and national students.

Author

• Celia Reddick, Harvard University