A Comparative Case Study of Curriculum Development for Rohingya Refugee Education through Multilateral Educational Organizations

• In Event: Comparative Studies in Education (I)

Proposal

Since the 1990s, there has been a rising interest in education for children in conflict zones. This concern accelerated after the mounting realization that reaching the international targets of Education for All (EFA) would be impossible without addressing the conflict-affected states because it is estimated that more than 50% percent of the world’s children are out of school (UNHCR, 2022). These targets initiate and necessitate the thinking of curriculum choices or options for refugees to facilitate an equitable and quality education within their host countries and in their resettlements so that this recognized vulnerable among us can either engage with education in an empowering way.
First, by definition, refugees are stateless people, so the choice of curriculum to teach or which identity, culture, or citizenship to associate them with is challenging (Waters & LeBlanc, 2005), particularly the inclusion model of refugee education variably impacts the curriculum choices and options (Maysa Jalbout & Katy Bullard, 2022; Sarah Dryden-Peterson et al., 2019). Second, the political dimensions of curriculum choice in the refugee context are another complex issue. Since the decisions in developing the curriculum for refugee education have to be filtered through a set of actors and levels in global, national, and local stakeholders, including the United National agencies, home states, host states, donor states, and the refugee themselves based on their situation of the repatriation, integration or resettlement in the host states. Among the multiple actors, the main actors in carrying out formation and implementation for the refugee context, UNHCR and the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), have a significant influence in formulating an implementing curriculum with the host country government and other influential policymakers within local NGOs and civil society (Jakobi, 2009; Srmp & Kamal, 2019).
This study has been taken up as a case: the Rohingya Refugees in the Bangladesh camps to understand the curriculum's adoption and development in refugee contexts. The United Nations defines Rohingyas as one of the most persecuted communities in the world (Milton et al., 2017). The Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the recent most significant ongoing humanitarian emergencies. On 25th August 2017, attacks in Rakhine state by the Myanmar military forced Rohingyas-an ethnic minority group, to flee to Bangladesh from Myanmar. Since then, more than 773,000 Rohingya—including more than 400,000 children—have fled into Cox’s Bazar. These people found temporary shelter in 34 extremely congested refugee camps around Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. In today's refugee camps in Bangladesh, around 600,000 school-aged children do not receive formal schooling (Fahmina Karim, 2020; Karim & Hussain, 2019; M. Prodip & Garnett, 2019) but attend informal learning centers with a locally developed curriculum aligns with the INEE minimum standards for Education in Emergencies and Bangladesh government-provided guidelines (Karim & Hussain, 2019; M. A. Prodip, 2017).
Thus, this study will use a vertical case study (Barlett & Vavrus, 2016) to discover how the curriculum takes shape after the adoption and connection among the international, national, and local non-governmental institutions lead to the formation of the curriculum for the Rohingya refugee children in the camps in Bangladesh.
In seeking to understand the de facto curriculum for the Rohingya refugee children in the camps of Bangladesh, first, this study will examine the global (the INEE minimum standards) curriculum for refugee education and how it is understood and adopted by the national-level actors in Bangladesh and finally how that is implemented in the learning centers for the refugee education. Thus, by using the vertical case study, this study will analyze how the particular understanding of the curriculum for refugee children is produced in the INEE minimum standards at the global level and articulated and how this has been taken up to develop curriculum at the national level by the actors for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Since the vertical comparative case study approach (CCS) adopts a process-oriented offering of the traditional common compare and contrast logic but evokes “tracing across” sites or scales. (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, pp. 38-42). Furthermore, the vertical CCS allows understanding and incorporating the perspectives of the social actors and their cultural production of structures, processes, and practices of power, exploitation, and agency.
This study will use a range of primary and secondary sources to look closely at international curriculum guidelines and frameworks that have shaped the national guidelines for the curriculum and helped produce a curriculum for the Rohingya refugees. All the documents ranged in and from the official decisions and guidelines adopted by the multilateral organizations at global, national, and local levels for the emergence and development of the curriculum for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh will be collected and analyzed as the primary source of data. This study will conduct interviews with the multiple actors involved in the curriculum development process to incorporate the perspectives of the social actors to examine cultural politics.
This study will provide a more holistic understanding of the curriculum for the Rohingya refugee through the examinations of the relationships and the transfer of the guidelines across the international, national, and local levels as well as the range of the organizational actors active in each level. From this holistic understanding, the paper also captured some of the complexities of the implications of quality education through curriculum development and implications such as coordinating the actions, dealing with misalignment between the language and context of the Rohingya refugee learners, resource challenges, and dealing with refugee learners uncertain futures. This study argues that it is necessary to devise a curriculum that can be a foundation for developing specific learning programs and literacy, e.g., scientific and numeracy, that will allow the refugee learners to access and overcome the barriers of the educational systems and chart a new direction to their future endeavor and a vehicle to transform their social conditions despite their oppressive social and economic conditions.

Authors

• Shukufe Rahman, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Patricia Kubow, Indiana University - Bloomington