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The Ambiguous Purpose of a Fragile Promise: Refugee Teacher Professional Development and Motivation in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

Wed, February 22, 1:30 to 3:00pm EST (1:30 to 3:00pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Independence Level (5B), Lafayette Park

Proposal

At the Global Partnership for Education’s Global Education Summit (2021) and the United Nations’ Transforming Education Summit (2022), refugee teachers were positioned as vital to the delivery of quality, safe, and inclusive education for all refugee learners (Henderson & Falk, 2021; UNESCO, 2022). At the same time, refugee teachers are often under-educated, under-qualified, and uncertified, all the while contending with the trauma of displacement and the hardships of work on the margins of national education systems (Adelman, 2019; Mendenhall, 2019; Shepler, 2011; Vega & Bajaj, 2016). Furthermore, as highlighted in the literature teachers are commonly burdened with blame when education responses fail to meet donor expectations (Ali, 2018; Ariko & Othuin, 2012; Hardman, et al. 2011; Mendenhall, Gomez, & Varni, 2019a). This ‘tar-brushing’ of teachers is then addressed by policy makers as ‘saviors’ or “bringers of new truths” through top-down and outside-in teacher professional development (TPD) initiatives (Samuels, 2018, p. xix). This dynamic is especially pronounced in the Rohingya refugee hosting context of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where the perceived lack of refugee teacher pedagogical knowledge and poor motivation are seen as barriers to educational progress for Rohingya learners. As this research makes clear, however, these perceptions are not entirely accurate and the deficit theorizing of refugee teachers has implications on the extent to which TPD contributes to teachers' sense of capability, wellbeing, and motivation.

Following a four-year ban on formal curricula in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps where one million genocide-affected Rohingya still reside, with an eye towards Rohingya repatriation to Myanmar the Bangladesh government recently allowed for the implementation of the Myanmar Curriculum Pilot (MCP). Beyond the complex political and psychological concerns that this development entails, the curriculum is written in and to be taught in Burmese, which neither the Rohingya or their Bangladeshi counterparts read or speak. In response, international humanitarian agencies and partner organizations have initiated TPD for over 7000 refugee teachers via 172 locally-employed master trainers. It is in these circumstances that my pilot project investigates the association between TPD and refugee teacher wellbeing and motivation. Theoretically, my work is anchored by Sen’s (1999) and Nussbaum's (2011) framing of the capability approach and socio-cognitive and socio-ecological conceptualizations of agency (Bandura, 1994; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). This mixed-methods study thus employs five theory-informed questions on teachers’ sense of capability, agency, and professional wellbeing. Qualitative interviews with key informants from humanitarian agencies (n=7) and focus group discussions with Rohingya and host-community teachers (n=25) were conducted. The resulting findings were then used to construct a quantitative survey to ascertain the prevalence of my qualitative findings across a larger refugee teacher population (n=500). My initial analysis has arrived at four overarching findings, which are: 1) there is a disconnect between humanitarian agencies’ understanding of the factors influencing teachers’ motivation to teach and teachers’ own attitudes about teaching; 2) numerous refugee teachers demonstrate promising pedagogical practices but lack opportunities to contribute towards the professional development of their peers; 3) there is a tension between low-quality TPD and the high-quality teaching that teachers are expected to deliver; and 4) cumulatively, these findings are associated with refugee teachers’ poor sense of capability, agency and wellbeing in Cox’s Bazar. As with previous studies in Lebanon, Uganda, and South Sudan, these findings are especially problematic when we consider the ‘transformative’ role that teachers in refugee settings are expected to embody (Mendenhall et al. 2021; Pherali, Mogli, & Chase, 2020; Soares, 2021). I therefore join the call for a ‘reactive rise’ of refugee teachers’ voices in TPD design and delivery to counter the top-down, one-size-fits-all, and disempowering ways of working that continue to undermine teachers’ capabilities, agency, sense of wellbeing, and motivation to teach (Khoja-Moolji, 2017).

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