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Session Submission Summary

Navigating an unknowable future: language of instruction, teacher obligations, and aspirations of refugee youth pursuing education within national education settings

Mon, April 15, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Street (Level 0), Regency B

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The assumed narrative of refugee migration is a simplified one: fleeing from fighting, crossing a border, settling in a refugee camp or city, and one day enacting that migration in reverse. The lives of most refugees, even the youngest among them, usually involve on-going movement as they escape situations dangerous and detrimental and seek opportunities that are protective and enriching (see, for example, Bakewell, 2011; Bengtsson & Dryden-Peterson, 2016; Chopra & Adelman, 2017; Crawley & Skleparis, 2017; Horst & Grabska, 2015).

The experience of refugeehood changes the ways young people perceive themselves, pursue their education, and imagine and plan for their futures (Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Dryden-Peterson, Bellino, & Chopra, 2015; Sirin & Rogers-Sirin, 2015; Watkins & Zyck, 2014). Refugee youth must navigate great uncertainty about their possible futures as they are faced with both increasingly protracted conflicts – in 2014, the average length of exile for 33 conflicts globally was 25 years (Crawford, Cosgrave, Haysom, & Walicki, 2015) – and often hostile experiences in host communities (Culbertson & Constant, 2015; Hovil, 2016; Mendenhall et al., 2015; Zetter & Ruaudel, 2016). Education holds the possibility of disrupting these uncertainties and establishing opportunities for individuals to create productive and more stable futures (Collier, 2007; Davies, 2011; King, 2014).

In the first paper, we explore the ways that refugee children, youth, and teachers navigate education in pursuit of a future. The first paper draws on field work from Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya where refugees are integrated into public and private schools alongside Ugandan and Kenyan children, albeit with differences in policies supporting this integration. We explore refugee children’s, families’, and teachers’ experiences of language in this integrated setting and the implications of that language for both refugees’ present learning, identity-development, and sense of belonging, and for their hopes and possibilities in the future.

In the second paper, we examine how teachers working in the context of conflict understand their educational obligations towards their refugee students and how these understandings relate to teachers’ conceptions of their students’ futures. The author presents a comparative case study that explores the experiences of Lebanese host-country teachers and Syrian refugee teachers working in Lebanon to educate Syrian refugee learners. I find differences in how Lebanese and Syrian teachers prioritize learning development in their classrooms and that these differences mirrored how teachers conceived of the future for their students. Lebanese teachers had difficulty imagining a long-term future for their students given the tenuous circumstances teachers believed their students faced in Lebanon and the instability continuing in Syria. In comparison, Syrian teachers tried to develop a clearer vision of the future for their students, one that most often entailed a return to Syria and the rebuilding of their country.

The third paper explores the ways that refugee youth find a sense of belonging amidst displacement. In the absence of a nation-state-based anchor, three questions guide this investigation: 1) Which are the local and transnational communities where refugee youth are able to foster belonging and imagine any durable future? 2) What futures do refugee youth imagine for themselves and what, according to them, are the pathways that enable these futures? 3) How do refugee youth leverage their education opportunities to construct and shape these pathways? The paper draws on field work conducted with Syrian youth pursuing their education in Lebanon to understand their conceptualizations of and pathways toward the future.

The final paper offers a theory for the complex interplay between conflict, education, and migration. We examine how Syrian refugee students and teachers experience and explain migration decisions and the connection between those decisions and their views of and experiences with education. In particular, we examine a) how teachers and students understand and experience the structures and content of schooling, b) how these structures and content interact with conflict and migration dynamics, and c) how these educational experiences both shape and are shaped by their visions for the future and subsequent migration decisions. We find that education is an important factor that both forces and guides refugees’ decision-making about their migrations.

For refugee children, youth, families, teachers, displacement makes the future largely unknowable and, in some instances, unimaginable. This panel explores issues pertaining to refugee education from the perspective of what that education means for refugees as they navigate this unknowable future. We find that refugees’ experiences of the future are connected to their experiences of language of instruction; to the aspirations that youth cultivate amidst displacement; and to the futures that teachers imagine for their students. We draw these threads together through a theory that articulates the interplay between conflict, education, and migration.

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