Supporting When Not Supported: Policy Inconsistencies and Teachers’ Coping Mechanisms in Refugee Education in Uganda

• In Event: Rethinking Inclusion: Power, Policy, and Teacher Agency in Refugee Education

Proposal

Teachers play a key role in education as the most important influence in the educational process and are regarded as the human face to learners’ educational achievements. In refugee contexts, teachers undertake additional responsibilities, offering refugee students hope and the opportunity to envision and plan for different and unknowable futures (Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Zakharia, 2013) of resettlement, home return, host country integration and transnational existence (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017; Dryden-Peterson, Adelman, Bellino, & Chopra, 2019). Teachers who are refugees themselves even have the additional task of helping their fellow refugee students develop skills that will benefit the rebuilding of their countries or communities of origin when and if they are able to return home (Kirk, 2004).
Yet, many of the teachers working in these refugee contexts are without the requisite experience and skills to effectively assist the refugee learners (Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies, 2019). Besides, the teachers of refugees also have personal, as well as family and community obligations (Adelman, 2019) that interventions undertaken in refugee education do not adequately deal with (Adelman, 2018; Mendenhall, Gomez, & Varni, 2018).
As Uganda hosts an estimated 1,501,552 refugees, with about 60 percent of these refugees being children and youth (UNHCR, 2023), education is one of their most critical needs. Consequently, teachers are an essential demand in this context. Uganda is acclaimed globally for its unique refugee policy that provides a welcoming haven for those fleeing strife and insecurity and harboring the Nakivale refugee settlement area—the oldest in Africa. Refugees are welcomed to the country, enjoy freedom of movement, are given land, and provided with basic services (Valassopoulou, 2024). Uganda has recently been piloting the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 Protocol and the 1969 Refugee Regulations of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). A lingering question remains: To what extent has Uganda’s progressive refugee policy permeated policies, structures and practices of teacher education and support?
This critical preliminary assessment of the interaction between global and national policies and practices, exposes aspects of inertia in new policy uptake. Through the policies and practices of institutions and structures and the experience of teachers in refugee contexts, it reveals cracks masked beneath popular rhetoric. As a result, teachers manifest their agency through their resilience and coping mechanisms amidst constraints. Teachers’ circumstances are amplified here to critically examine the context of their inclusion in refugee education and how the teachers are impacted by such policies. This adds another layer to the analysis by seeking to understand the way policy operationalizes inclusion in refugee education from teachers’ experience and agency. It makes recommendations for design and adaptations in policy and practice for teachers’ education, training and capacity development to work with refugees and in other crisis-affected contexts. This also raises further interesting questions about the framing of 'knowledge gaps' - both academic knowledge gaps and those of the teachers involved, exposing overlaps but also revealing what they each hold.

Author

• PASCAL PAX ANDEBO, University of Maryland College of Education