Contextualizing the global: DMV perspectives on refugee education

• In Event: Accessing quality education: local and global perspectives from refugees

Proposal

The final presentation will bring together the four presentations and discuss higher-level recommendations and ways forward for policymakers, refugee practitioners, educators, and refugee scholars seeking to improve refugees' access to and quality of education in the U.S. education system. While our results are specific to the DMV area and are not a representative sample, they contribute to the growing movement to bridge research and practice while centering lived experience.

Our presentation will focus on each of the four stakeholders, incorporating interview data and conclusions from the other presentations to provide actionable insights and recommendations. First, the presentation will focus on policymakers. Our concluding question in our interviews with refugees asked for their advice to their local policymakers when creating refugee related policies. Using the refugees' responses, we call on lawmakers to listen to and learn from refugees themselves, be patient, and integrate refugee experiences into policy creation.

Second, the presentation will address refugee practitioners. While some refugee resettlement agencies and nonprofits do converse with each other, great information sharing, collaboration, and cooperation to improve programming is needed, especially when considering the large gap in refugee enrollment in higher education. Sharing resources and best practices can also generate synergies and improve overall advancements to overcome access barriers.

Third, the presentation will consider educators who work with refugee students. It will focus on those who provide and facilitate training on inclusive approaches to refugee education that incorporate refugees' prior experience and consider their complex identities. Encouraging and creating additional and extracurricular programming, or identifying non-profit run-programming, can help improve the quality of educational outcomes and instruction while addressing initial resettlement challenges, such as language and cultural barriers.

Fourth and finally, our presentation will provide scholars with a call to action. We will discuss differences between scholarship and refugees' lived realities, and highlight the need for more nuanced conversations that consider refugees' different identities, experiences, and educational needs. We will also turn to our decision to focus on research on the local experience of refugees in the DMV area, identifying how local context impacts what findings, opportunities, and pathways forward exist.

To conclude, we will consider how each of these stakeholders can work together, such as encouraging educators to help train refugee practitioners on inclusive education approaches, and for nonprofits to build partnerships with policymakers and educators to fund additional programming. By highlighting the experiences of refugees and providing concrete recommendations for policymakers, service providers, and school level administrators and educators, our research can serve as a guide for creating more inclusive policies, thereby leading to increased access and quality of education for refugee students in the DMV metro region as well as in the greater U.S.

Authors

• Katharine Claire Summers, George Washington University

• Jessica Marie Crist, The George Washington University

• Bernhard T Streitwieser, George Washington University