Highlighted Session: From afterthought to action: Putting teachers at the heart of the global refugee response

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In the lead up to the 2023 United Nations Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, NORRAG brought together 48 researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to reflect on the role of refugee teachers as the heart of the global refugee response. The impetus for a ‘policy insights’ publication on refugee teachers arose from a recognition of the important role and function that these individuals play in emergency response and recovery efforts on the ground, and the concerning lack of attention that has been given to refugee teachers and teachers of refugees amongst states, humanitarian donors, researchers, education policy makers, and practitioners.

This Policy Insights publication, titled Refugee Teachers: The Heart of the Global Refugee Response, is organized by three key themes: the inclusion of teachers’ voices in policy making and practice; policies that address the challenges of teachers’ work and wellbeing; and opportunities to improve teacher professional development. This CIES panel will spotlight the work of four papers from this publication to explore the following two questions:

- Why have teachers been an afterthought in refugee education funding, policy making, and practice?
- What evidence, advocacy, and actions are required to bring teachers to the forefront of refugee education funding, policy, and practice?

In addressing these questions, this panel will critically examine the wider political economy within which refugee teachers’ work is situated. In doing so, the authors will assess the social, political and economic drivers which promote or hinder agendas of refugee inclusion in national education systems (Carvalho and Dryden-Peterson, 2024), and a wider politics of belonging (Yuval Davies et. al, 2019) around refugee resettlement and hosting. Our panel therefore explores how refugee teachers—-as professionals but also as individuals who simultaneously experience displacement—-are both affected by and seeking to alter this terrain. At the same time, attention and focus will be given to the changes that are needed or necessary to address the issue of unprecedented teacher shortages and counteract the ongoing devaluation of the teaching profession in crisis-affected settings and its consequences, including among teachers who are not themselves refugees but who work to enable refugee education (UNESCO, 2024). Tracing an arc that starts with critical theory, continues with policy analysis to explain why teachers of refugees have been an ‘afterthought’, and finishes with examples of promising ‘actions’ that chart a way forward, panelists will draw on a combination of empirical and field based evidence along with policy- and literature-based reviews to present diverse perspectives on this critical issue.

The first panelist, Ritesh Shah, will frame the theoretical and conceptual focus of the session by introducing the wider political economy of refugee inclusion and teachers’ work in education systems around the world today. In doing so, the intent of this first presentation is to highlight how many of the issues that refugee teachers face are wrapped up in the wider debates, tensions, and concerns around the governance of human mobility and the ability of capitalism to exploit these political and social structures, within which teachers’ labor is entangled.

The second panelist, Mary Mendenhall, will build off Shah’s premise and draw on recent empirical findings from 16 refugee-receiving contexts to question how refugee teachers’ work represents the “racialization of expertise” (Bian, 2022) and notions of “inclusionism” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2020). Mendenhall’s presentation will show how, in the global push for refugee learner inclusion, refugee teachers have either been left out by design or by policy barriers that the humanitarian sector is both complicit in enabling and inadequate in redressing. Illuminating the devaluing of the teaching profession and the social injustices that refugee teachers experience, the evidence presented will show how policies and practices that aim to improve teacher management systems in humanitarian contexts, including technology-driven ‘solutions’, in fact exclude and disempower refugee teachers, denying them the agency needed to improve their situations.

In “Toward inclusive refugee education? Host country teachers, refugee students, and the limits of policy”, Celia Reddick will then highlight the disconnect between global policies that emphasize the inclusion of refugees in national education systems and the lack of support for or engagement with national (“host country”) teachers in implementing these policies. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with national teachers working in refugee hosting contexts, Reddick reveals how the traditional tools of education policy implementation, including in curricular materials and teacher training, are largely absent from the work of refugee educational inclusion. Bringing further focus to Shah and Mendenhall’s positions, this paper questions how globally determined humanitarian commitments can, if at all, be translated into nationally-led policies and implementable practices at the local and classroom levels.

Finally, completing the arc of this panel, Anne Smiley and Martin Omukuba situate the work of PlayMatters within the tensions identified by previous panelists and highlight the complex hierarchy of priorities that donors, humanitarian actors, and governments must contend with in the prioritization of refugee teachers’ work. This paper shows how PlayMatters teams in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda collaborate with local government education officials to deploy a Minimum Quality Standards tool that assess schools for safety hazards and materials gaps, which they address prior to co-delivering interventions that focus on skilling and supporting teachers. In this sense, to prioritize the needs of refugee teachers, Smiley and Omukuba advocate for an approach that first remedies holistic needs and works with and through host-government systems rather than circumventing them.

Together, the four panelists traverse the political and practical tensions that define refugee teachers’ work and wellbeing in humanitarian policy and programming. By doing so, this symposium speaks in broad terms to a core concern raised in this year’s conference theme about what key actors in refugee education are doing and why they are doing things this way with regards to supporting (or not) refugee teachers’ work and wellbeing. Importantly, the panelists highlight that often, technical 'solutions' such as digital technologies –- including the ‘promise’ of artificial intelligence-assisted interventions –- to longstanding issues with refugee teachers’ work are insufficient for addressing the more systemic and structural challenges facing education systems in humanitarian settings today.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Christopher Henderson, NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute

Individual Presentations

• Bordering and othering: The governance of refugee teachers’ work. - Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland

• Beyond the classroom: The struggle for refugee teacher professionalization amidst national inclusion efforts. - Mary Mendenhall, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Toward inclusive refugee education? Host country teachers, refugee students, and the limits of global policy. - Celia Reddick, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University

• Strengthening (not circumventing) government systems to bring refugee teachers closer to the center of EiE advocacy, policy, and practice. - Martin Omukuba; Anne C Smiley, IRC

Discussant

• Christopher Henderson, NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute