Refugee education and parents’ daily acts of protest

• In Event: Refugee education: Balancing challenges and assets

Proposal

Parents play a central role in children’s schooling. Nonetheless, there is little research about the role that refugee parents play in their children’s education, and what research there is focuses on the minority of refugees who live in Global North settings (e.g., Sarikoudi, & Apostolidou, 2020). This paper seeks to address this gap. In it, I draw on 17 interviews with refugee parents living in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. The interviews examine parents’ aspirations for their children’s education. Together with a team of co-researchers, I conducted qualitative thematic coding of these interviews to understand the ways refugee parents engage with their children’s schooling and the barriers they face in doing so.
I find that, despite systemic constraints, refugee parents make choices about their children’s schooling. Their everyday acts of protest against the constraints of displacement fall along a continuum: parents choose schools, monitor these schools, and supplement what they offer. Parents exert agency in choosing where to send their children, both making huge sacrifices to leave countries of origin for the educational opportunities offered in Kakuma Refugee Camp and sending their children to particular schools once they arrive. Parents also actively monitor their children’s schooling by visiting school and speaking to teachers, and by checking children’s work once they return home. In some cases, this process of monitoring results in parents choosing to move children out of one school into another, and often prompts the third type of engagement, which is supplementing school. Refugee parents supplement what often feel like inadequate schooling through private tutorials, religious programming, and homework routines.

While some refugee parents manage to engage in this continuum of involvement, others face insurmountable barriers in doing so. For some parents, language(s) used at school are unfamiliar, making monitoring schooling impossible. Often parents’ own interrupted schooling means they don’t feel equipped to support or fully understand their children’s education. For others, resources are a hurdle: while parents might want to change or supplement their children’s schools, they aren’t able to do so because of policies that bar them from working. And finally, some parents feel they aren’t welcome due to limited formal invitations from schools to engage.

Both the agency that refugee parents demonstrate related to their children’s schooling and the barriers they face have implications for research, policy, and practice in refugee education. This paper points to key reforms: the first of these is language support for parents to be able to use the languages of school that might enable them to interact with teachers. Similarly, parents yearn for opportunities to develop the literacy that might allow them to monitor their children’s academic progress. They also point to the need for broader policies that would permit refugees to work in settings of first asylum and thereby earn enough to make choices about their children’s schooling. Finally, schools can explicitly invite and welcome parents to engage, acknowledging their role as pillars in their children’s schooling.

Author

• Celia Reddick, Lynch School of Education & Human Development, Boston College