Local Defiance of Global Dominance: How Burundian Refugees in Tanzania Resist Western SEL

• In Event: Power & Defiance: Local Resistance to Global Social and Emotional Learning

Proposal

Currently, an estimated 224 million refugee and crisis-affected school-age children require education support (ECW, 2023). Social emotional learning (SEL) has been positioned by education in emergencies (EiE) actors as a promising practice that has the potential to improve academic achievement and support psychosocial well-being, trauma-recovery, and resiliency for refugee and crisis-affected learners and their communities (INEE, 2018; UNESCO, 2019). SEL is commonly understood, from a Western perspective, as an educational approach that claims to help children develop the thinking, behavioral, and self-regulatory skills needed for learning (Jones & Doolittle, 2017). Numerous scholars and practitioners have demonstrated that the way SEL skills and competencies are conceptualized, prioritized, defined, and displayed are highly tied to culture and societal behavioral standards that shape the way people understand, interpret, and make meaning of their experiences (Brush et al., 2022; Gay, 2018). Despite this discourse, the Western concept and approaches to SEL have been taken up by EiE actors as “global best practice”. Indeed, the assumption that SEL competencies found in Western frameworks are universally applicable to all children globally is pervasive among EiE practitioners, and education actors more broadly (INEE, 2016).

This paper draws on nine months of qualitative, ethnographic research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania that explores the effects of SEL programming with a variety of refugee and implementing stakeholders. From October 2022 to June 2023, I conducted 150 structured interviews, nearly 150 hours of observation, and document review of over 140 items. Study findings reveal a vast policyscape of global, national, and local actors that not only influence how SEL programming has been designed and delivered in the current Burundian refugee context, but also how these actors have historically impacted the interpretation and uptake of various forms of SEL by individuals in Burundi prior to their displacement. In particular, this study describes how global–and largely Western–international development and humanitarian actors influenced the Burundian national education curriculum to integrate elements of peacebuilding, social cohesion, and SEL upon the completion of peace agreements in 2005. These curricular elements significantly shaped how current refugee parents and educators in Tanzania, then students in Burundi, now conceptualize SEL for their own children and students. Additionally, findings highlight how the Burundian national and cultural concept of “ubushingantahe”, rooted in the values of respect and discipline, highly influence how refugee educators, parents, and community leaders interpret SEL, which is in direct conflict with most current “global” SEL approaches.

Based on the findings above, this paper illuminates how the Burundian refugee community in Tanzania exercises forms of resistance and protest against current “global”, or Western, SEL programming. This defiance takes place despite the fact that their current conceptualizations of SEL have been shaped by global actors over the last two decades. Thus, this paper demonstrates the complex, and historical, neocolonial power dynamics of delivering SEL in refugee and crisis-contexts, and the local struggle of the Burundian refugee community in Tanzania against the global dominance of Western SEL.

Author

• Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison