Refugee education: Balancing challenges and assets

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel explores how research related to refugee education can better balance its focus on the challenges confronted by and the assets possessed by the learners, teachers, parents, and community members living in contexts of forced international displacement.

There is no doubt that numerous challenges are faced by the 224 million school-age children living in contexts affected by conflict and crisis, with specific challenges faced by the more than 35 million refugees who have crossed an international border to seek refuge in another country. When we turn to education, both displaced and host community learners are more likely to face struggles in terms of schooling access and learning outcomes. Meanwhile, teachers who work to provide education in settings affected by crisis, conflict, and displacement are neither compensated sufficiently and regularly, nor supported adequately to be successful in their vocation–with repercussions for their well-being and that of their learners.

However, despite the many challenges facing the learners and teachers involved in ‘refugee education’ contexts, they also bring numerous assets and demonstrate agency, capability, ingenuity, and skill in navigating their difficult circumstances. Aspiring learners traverse great distances and perils to access schooling, and help each other inside and outside of school. Teachers support each other through learning circles and support their learners drawing on their own experiences of crisis and their current resources and wisdom. Parents and communities draw from their own rich educational, linguistic, cultural, and economic traditions as well as funds of knowledge to expand the learning horizons of displaced children and assist them in realizing their right to relevant education.

Despite the many strengths and assets that can be found in the refugee education literature, the challenge and deficits have traditionally taken precedence. In the recent decade, there have been increasing calls to also look at the assets and agency of these communities and contexts, but most scholarly publications, gray literature, grant applications, and policy briefs continue to focus on challenges and vulnerabilities of displaced populations. One of the motivations for this is the incentive of researchers to argue that the issue addressed by their research is urgent and important. However, this risks objectifying the individuals that such research seeks to support, while ignoring the everyday acts of agency and protest that they undertake.

How can we as researchers of refugee education better direct our gaze towards the agency and capability of displaced populations and those who live, learn, and work alongside them? How can we better recognize their everyday acts of protest, resistance, and creation in the face of myriad educational challenges? This panel will explore this question through three presentations including a systematic review with corpus analysis, a participatory action research project with resettled refugees, and an exploration of family language assets.

The first paper will be presented by Dr. Daniel Shephard of Indiana University Bloomington covering results from a systematic review of refugee education literature and the patterns of negative and positive framing over time, by discipline, and by location across more than 1,000 journal articles. This will include sentiment analysis of the entire corpus and qualitative coding of a subset of articles to explore what it means to take a more asset-based approach to refugee education research. This presentation will provide an overview of the use of positive and asset-based approaches to refugee education research that will be illustrated and problematized by the subsequent presentations.

The second paper on a participatory action research exploring refugee storytelling and learning will be presented by Dr. Jihae Cha of George Washington University. This participatory action research aimed at providing opportunities for youth with refugee backgrounds, who have undergone a storytelling workshop over the course of seven months, to develop a program that will benefit their community, especially the youths. This presentation will reflect on the yearlong project, particularly focusing on the summer camp that was designed and implemented by the PAR participants for the 1.5 generation and second generation youths with refugee backgrounds in Clarkston, Georgia, to express their emotions and experiences through multi-modal storytelling. This work highlights the role of deeper participatory work and the use of displaced learners' own stories to challenge (or reinforce) deficit frameworks, and the importance of actively creating spaces for children and youth from refugee backgrounds to feel belonging and navigate identity in their new social milieu. Moreover, this project employs approaches that offer powerful ways of creating an inclusive, safe space for refugees to speak for themselves, thereby exploring alternatives to dominant narratives.

The third paper on family engagement in refugee education will be presented by Dr. Celia Reddick of Boston College. The paper will explore the efforts of parents and guardians to make decisions about and support their children’s educational opportunities under constrained circumstances. This project draws on 17 interviews with refugee parents and guardians living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and contributes a new framework to understand refugee parents’ acts of protest and agency in the education of their children. This paper demonstrates that refugee parents and guardians engage in everyday acts of protest against the constraints of displacement through a continuum of action: parents choose schools, monitor these schools, and supplement what they offer. It also reveals barriers to engagement that parents face, with important implications for policy and practice in refugee education.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Organizer

• Daniel D Shephard, Indiana University Bloomington and NORRAG

Chair

• Danielle Lorber Falk, International Rescue Committee (IRC)

Individual Presentations

• Asset and deficit discourses in refugee education: A systematic review and meta-synthesis of historical and disciplinary patterns - Daniel D Shephard, Indiana University Bloomington and NORRAG; Jihae Cha, The George Washington University; InJung Cho, The George Washington University; Isabella McCallum, Leading Through Learning Global Platform and EDC

• From Learners to Leaders: Youth with Refugee Backgrounds’ Reflections of Engaging in Storytelling Participatory Action Research - Jihae Cha, The George Washington University; Minkyung Choi, Montclair State University

• Refugee education and parents’ daily acts of protest - Celia Reddick, Lynch School of Education & Human Development, Boston College