GSE Scholarly Articles

Currently 26 million people live as refugees, 40% of whom are school-aged. As global policy shifts to include refugee children and young people in education systems in settings of exile, language-in-education emerges as an under-explored challenge for refugee learners and the education systems they join. Refugee young people face uncertain futures, prompting questions about which languages can enable refugees to realize their multi-directional aspirations. Drawing on 80 semi-structured interviews with 45 Sudanese, South Sudanese, and Syrian refugee young people living in Uganda and Lebanon, we analyze the linguistic experiences of refugees across locations, ages, and educational stages. We find that current practices of inclusion within national education systems in exile only partially attend to refugees’ linguistic needs. Global policies of educational inclusion focus almost exclusively on the languages of school and work in exile, an approach which fails to support refugees in meeting three key needs in exile: the need for opportunity, connection, and stable roots. Attention to these three needs can support refugee learners’ diverse linguistic repertoires as they develop the linguistic skills needed to navigate education in exile while also sustaining the languages that root young people in places, communities, and relationships of origin

‘What language?’ Over the past two decades of work in the field of refugee education, this is the question most asked in conversations with parents, students, teachers, government officials, policymakers, in local, national, and global decision-making spaces. What language will I use to speak with my teacher? What language will enable me to have opportunities in the future? What languages will support me in maintaining relationships of love and care? What language will allow for lives here or there, or here and there? For all actors, this question – ‘What language?’ – reflects personal and political experiences and preoccupations, with responses to the question tied to reverberating implications for lives now and for the future. In his essay, Suresh Canagarajah cautions us away from Eurocentric conceptions of migration and proposes a model that links spatial, social, and geographic mobilities with implications for language pedagogies. I discuss two additional mobilities that emerge through our work on refugee education, which also have broad relevance for what, how, and why children and young people learn, including as related to language in education. They are cognitive mobility and temporal mobility. Aspirations for these mobilities emerge from refugee young people’s experiences of uncertainty, placemaking, and future-building. I explore each of these three themes in turn after some brief background on refugee education vis-à-vis language.

In the United States nearly one third of children under five live in homes where a non-English language is spoken. However, many of these language-minority (LM) children shift towards English monolingualism after beginning school in early childhood. While language input and usage are central to acquisition and maintenance in each language, less is known about parents’ perceptions of bilingualism and how perceptions inform parents’ actions to support their child’s bilingual development in early childhood. By applying a family language policy framework to data from 14 in-depth qualitative interviews, this study explores the beliefs and practices of Spanish-speaking mothers of preschoolers in a small northeastern US city. Thematic analyses revealed that mothers viewed Spanish maintenance alongside English acquisition as essential for economic opportunity and family communication, yet differed in their perceptions of how bilingualism was best supported. Some implemented a Spanish-only-at-home policy, delegating their child’s English development to the school setting. Others avoided setting rigid boundaries, instead employing various discourse strategies to motivate their child’s active Spanish use at home and seeking out school-based supports. Social pressures on the child, incomplete knowledge of local bilingual programs, and the current political climate countered mothers’ efforts to support their child’s emergent bilingualism.