Language, Agency, and the Contradictions of Refugee Inclusion: Afghan Students and Teachers in Pakistan

• In Event: Language, Identity, and Belonging in Refugee Education

Proposal

Global refugee education policy has increasingly shifted towards the inclusion of refugees in national systems, most prominently through UNHCR’s Refugee Education 2030 strategy. While this approach promises sustainability, it has simultaneously exposed deep contradictions, particularly regarding the language of instruction. This study examines these tensions through the case of Afghan refugee education in Pakistan, where Afghan Refugee Village schools were mandated to replace Pashto—the mother tongue of both teachers and students—with Urdu and English.
Drawing on Priestley et al.’s (2013) ecological model of agency, the research explores how teachers and students navigate these policy shifts. The study employs a qualitative, multimodal design, combining interviews with 10 teachers and arts-based body mapping with 40 students across two refugee schools. This dual perspective extends teacher agency frameworks to also include student agency, offering insights into how displacement and linguistic change intersect with structural constraints.
Findings reveal that while Pakistan’s integration policy appears inclusive, its enactment constrains agency across three dimensions. Iterationally, the accumulated skills and Pashto-based knowledge of students and teachers are marginalised. Projectively, refugees confront the dual precarity of insecure residency and the devaluation of credentials, while also striving to preserve Afghan cultural-linguistic identity. Practically, teachers engage in pedagogical resistance by strategically deploying Pashto, even as resource shortages, tokenistic training, and structural inequities undermine implementation. These dynamics illustrate how “inclusive” reforms, when divorced from refugees’ lived realities, erode rather than enable participation.
The case of Afghan refugees in Pakistan illuminates a broader paradox in global education policy: inclusion often becomes assimilation, where bureaucratic efficiency takes precedence over cultural and epistemic recognition. This pattern resonates with refugee education in Lebanon and East Africa, revealing how technocratic approaches reproduce symbolic violence through linguistic erasure while masking material neglect.
By centring the voices of Afghan refugee teachers and students, this study challenges prevailing narratives that reduce inclusion to enrolment figures. It demonstrates that language is not a neutral medium of integration but a site where power, identity, and belonging are contested. The findings underscore the need to reconceptualise refugee education by:
1. Recognising refugees as stakeholders in policy design rather than passive beneficiaries;
2. Reframing refugees’ linguistic and cultural resources as assets rather than deficits; and
3. Linking inclusion policies to material investment, legal protection, and participatory structures.
In a world marked by displacement and division, the Afghan case compels the global education community to rethink the relationship between education and peace. Rather than imposing uniform solutions, meaningful inclusion requires policies that are context-sensitive, equitable, and responsive to the political economy of displacement. This study offers both theoretical insights into agency and practical recommendations for creating more just, empowering education systems for refugees worldwide.

Authors

• Naureen Durrani, Nazarbayev Univeity

• Muhammad Yasir Khan

• Mario Novelli, University of Sussex