“We are under so much control, we cannot do anything properly”: Teacher agency and Rohingya refugee teachers’ motivation to teach

• In Event: Articulations of teacher agency in conflict-affected settings: Research with, for, and by teachers in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Proposal

In settings of forced displacement such as Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where nearly one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar reside, teacher agency is exercised under restrictive and racialized hierarchies of control within a United Nations-led and government-regulated parallel system (Henderson, 2025; Shah, 2023). The Rohingya crisis underscores how refugee teachers’ work is shaped by the political dynamics of donor-driven programming and host government rules (Henderson, 2025). But despite these limitations, Rohingya teachers’ experiences of agency—within and beyond the classroom—shape, in sometimes confounding ways, their overall motivation to teach (ibid).

Drawing from mixed-methods research with 494 Rohingya refugee and Bangladeshi host-community teachers, this study finds that ‘agency’ exerts only a modest but statistically significant effect on Rohingya teachers’ motivation to teach (β = 0.10, p < .0001). Based on a four-point Likert scale, quantitative results show that Rohingya refugee teachers report marginally higher levels of agency (n = 301, M = 3.10, SD = 0.40) than their Bangladeshi host-community peers (n = 193, M = 2.94, SD = 0.38), reflecting how teaching is intertwined with and complicated by Rohingya aspirations for professional recognition and eventual repatriation to Myanmar. Qualitative data, for which refugee teachers interpreted the quantitative findings, then reveal how Rohingya teachers experience agency through quotidian practices: by adapting curricula to children’s needs, creating safe and protective spaces, and using the classroom to assert Rohingya identity and aspirations for citizenship in Myanmar. In other words, refugee teachers see themselves as everyday educators and protectors while also acting as ‘nation builders in waiting’ (Falk et al., 2023; Henderson, 2025; Waters and Le Blanc, 2015). In this regard, teacher agency extends beyond pedagogical decision-making to include acts that preserve dignity, construct identity, and engender a sense of resilience and hope for the future (Brandt & Lopes Cardozo, 2023; Henderson, 2025).

These findings resonate with the broader literature on refugee teachers which highlights the ‘parameters of hope’ and ‘impossible fictions’ that circumscribe teachers’ work and agency in protracted crises (Adelman, 2019; Dryden-Peterson & Reddick, 2017). At one level, refugee teachers navigate systemic restrictions on the realization of their political aspirations all the while trying to nurture Rohingya children’s sense of protection and belonging at another. This duality illustrates the limits and the transformative potential of teacher agency in contexts of forced displacement. Recognizing and strengthening teacher agency in Cox’s Bazar and similar contexts is therefore essential to education systems that affirm teachers’ role as active agents of change rather than passive system inputs (Pherali et al., 2020).

Author

• Christopher Henderson, NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute