Concerted Community Engagement: Refugee Education and Parents’ Daily Acts of Resistance

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reimagining Refugee and Migrant Education: Critical Methodologies, Agency, and Resistance Across Global Contexts

Proposal

This study examines how refugee parents and caregivers in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, actively engage in their children’s schooling despite profound constraints. While 40% of the world’s 35 million refugees are school-aged children (UNHCR, 2024), refugee parents’ roles in education—particularly in Global South contexts—remain largely absent from research. Drawing on a desire-based framework (Tuck, 2009), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), relational wellbeing (Kohli et al., 2024), and Lareau’s (2011) notion of “concerted cultivation,” this paper introduces concerted community engagement to describe how families choose, monitor, and supplement schooling to maximize educational opportunities in exile.

The research draws on interviews conducted in 2018 with 16 refugee parents of children in Grades 1–3, representing Burundian, Congolese, Somali, and South Sudanese backgrounds. Participants were recruited through four schools in Kakuma, with interviews conducted in person using translators. Although the original study focused on language of instruction (Piper et al., 2020), thematic analysis revealed a broader pattern of parental engagement, yielding 13 inductive codes related to strategies and barriers.

Findings show that choosing schools was often an act of resistance to educational limitations in countries of origin or within the camp. Some parents migrated to Kakuma specifically for schooling; others moved children between schools, even if it meant grade repetition, to secure better quality. Monitoring learning involved home-based assessments—such as asking children to read in Kiswahili or English—school visits, and leveraging older siblings or extended kin to liaise with teachers, especially when parents faced language barriers. Supplementing schooling ranged from home-based language instruction to arranging private tutorials, investing in technology, or facilitating afterschool religious and academic programs. For example, Ayaan invited a fluent English speaker to live with her family in exchange for lessons, which boosted her children’s exam scores.

Barriers to engagement included poverty, lack of communication from schools, language limitations, and feeling unwelcome in educational spaces. Some parents had never been invited to school before the research interview, which, in turn, shifted their perception of entitlement to engage. As Philip noted, an invitation made him “comfortable to ask” about his niece’s performance for the first time.

This study reframes refugee parents not as passive recipients of aid but as active agents mobilizing community resources to resist subpar education and cultivate opportunities for their children. Concerted community engagement underscores the collective nature of this work, involving extended kin and community networks in contexts where formal school–family partnerships are rare. For policy and practice, the findings call for schools to proactively invite and include parents, address language barriers through multilingual communication, and mitigate financial obstacles that limit engagement.
For CIES audiences, this research offers an empirically grounded framework to recognize refugee parents as co-educators and collaborators, demonstrating how their daily acts of resistance in constrained environments can inform more equitable, partnership-oriented models of refugee education.

Author

• Celia Reddick, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University