Person:

Dryden-Peterson, Sarah

In this study, we trace the history of policy development within the Global Partnership for Education to discern the drivers behind the uptake of its shifting policies relating to education in fragile and conflict-affected states. In order to elucidate how and why this international organization has altered its policy stance and funding modalities, we employ a process tracing analysis of document and interview data. Moreover, we provide three country case studies of Global Partnership for Education financing to Liberia, Madagascar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This article examines the use of testimony in the making of a new history in South Africa, situating this phenomenon in the context of public construction of memory and identifying history teachers as critical to the process. Through an ethnographic study of sixteen schools that illuminates the use of teacher testimony in Cape Town history classrooms, the authors explore the nuanced use of testimony as a pedagogic tool and probe the role of history teachers as memory makers. Finally, this article assesses implications of teachers creating space for dialogical memory making in post-apartheid South Africa and outlines lessons of this experience for other countries in democratic transition.

The number of refugees who have fled across international borders due to conflict and persecution is at the highest level in recorded history. The vast majority of these refugees find exile in low-income countries neighboring their countries of origin. The refugee children who are resettled to North America, Europe, and Australia arrive with previous educational experiences in these countries of first asylum. This article examines these pre-resettlement educational experiences of refugee children, which to date have constituted a “black box” in their post-resettlement education. Analysis is of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), key informant interviews in 14 countries of first asylum, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in four countries. The article argues that contemporary conditions of conflict usefully inform conceptual understanding of refugee education globally, including the types of schools that refugees access in countries of first asylum and their rates of access. It further identifies three empirical themes that are common to the educational experiences of refugees in countries of first asylum: language barriers; teacher-centered pedagogy; and discrimination in school settings. The paper examines the theoretical and practical relevance of these pre-resettlement educational experiences for post-resettlement education of refugee children.

This study examines how education can disrupt threats of conflict, specifically in the presence of ethnic diversity. We present a historical analysis of Botswana, using methods of process tracing drawing on documents, in-depth interviews, and Afrobarometer survey data. Post-independence Botswana engaged in redistribution of educational access across ethnic groups and promotion of common civic principles of social harmony. At the same time, it constructed through schools ethnically-based national identity, which excluded many minorities. Lack of recognition for ethnic minorities remains a persistent challenge, yet it exists in a context of high commitment to unity and the nation-state, even among minority groups, which may have allowed recent dissent to happen peacefully. The paper defines mechanisms by which educational redistribution and recognition can disrupt resource-based and identity-based inequalities that often lead to conflict. This model holds promise for conflict avoidance and mitigation in multiethnic states globally.

Abstract Education is one of the key tools of nation-building, as it aims to create future citizens. Yet what happens in seemingly 'futureless' contexts where refugees cannot access even social membership, let alone legal citizenship? In this introduction to our special issue on education for refugees, we explore the aspirations and conceptions of possible futures that students, teachers, governments, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and funders have when they promote and pursue education as the solution to the liminal position that refugees in protracted refugee situations find themselves in. Based on insights from the articles, we analyse disconnects between aspirations for education and realities of access to quality education and to opportunities after completing education. We argue that to address these disconnects requires us to move beyond temporal and spatial binaries—present vs. future, here vs. there—that are so common in refugee education discourse and policy. Our suggestion is to draw on and support stakeholders' work, powerfully exemplified in this special issue, to contribute to improved conditions through pedagogies, practices, and policies that address these binaries.

This chapter examines higher education opportunities and inequalities encountered by recently arrived immigrants in the United States. Through the portrait of one recently arrived Syrian youth in the United States, the chapter examines experiences of public education, particularly within the context of community college, an important social institution for newly arrived newcomer youth to the United States. The authors develop a conceptual framework that situates newcomers’ educational and life experiences at the intersections of a sense of self, belonging and purpose. Rarely do educational institutions recognise the confluences of these different factors, address newcomer youth’s pre-arrival experiences and educational trajectories or provide explicit support to navigate the socio-cultural scripts young people experiencing forced migration confront in unfamiliar host societies. The chapter argues that the obligation for building caring, inclusive and welcoming communities rests not only on newcomers but equally on long-time residents, particularly those within higher educational institutions. With community colleges and other higher education institutions in the United States poised to educate increasingly diverse student populations in the near future, this chapter begins filling gaps in understandings to enable higher education programmes that develop newcomer youths’ sense of self, belonging and purpose in connection with their academic institutions.

This paper addresses the role of instant messaging chat groups to support teacher training and gender equity initiatives in Kenyan refugee camps. Our findings are based on survey data with refugee teachers in Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps (n = 203), group interviews with refugee teachers in Kakuma (n = 21), and interviews with international instructors of teacher training programs in Nairobi, Toronto, and Vancouver (n = 14). In our analysis, we apply amplification theory, feminist science and technology studies paradigms, and considerations of transnational approaches to understand the use of instant messaging among refugee teacher communities. Our framework explores how social and cultural norms are amplified through transnational text and instant messaging related to teacher training and in support of gender equity. Peer-to-peer group chats draw on transnational learning opportunities and expand these engagements through group chats between men and women refugee teachers across camps as well as through community engagement about gender equity initiatives in education. International instructors identify both value and hesitation in navigating the quantity and content of these communications, such as learning more about refugee teachers’ daily lives in the camps and concern about following and managing the amount of communication that can ensue over chat groups. Our work has practical implications for transnational teacher training programs in refugee camps, illuminates how mobile technology and chat groups allow women and men in the community to engage and support girls’ education, and questions how text messaging affects the lived and day-to-day experiences of women refugee teachers

This article explores the types of family-school relationships that promote academic, socioeconomic, and social and emotional well-being of black African immigrant children in the United States. The data are ethnographic, drawing on one year of participant observation and interviews at two elementary schools. The findings are also set within the context of an analysis of data from the New Immigrant Survey. The article identifies mechanisms by which relationships between black African immigrants and schools are created and argues that intersections between demographics and school culture are central, particularly as related to the possibilities for relational power, which can allow parents and school staff to transcend persistent inequalities of race and discrimination.

This article examines nation-state policies that have prioritized toleration of diversity over recognition through comparative case studies of three junior secondary schools in Botswana. Through data collected in observations, focus groups, interviews, and Participatory Action Research, we demonstrate how the schools, which varied in the ethnic composition of their students, teachers, and surrounding communities, responded differently to the reality of their multicultural student bodies. Two followed national policies closely, while the third crafted school level policies adapted to its student population, yet tightly constricted by national policies and curriculum. In all three schools, students of ethnic minority backgrounds experienced varying degrees of shame, discrimination, and a sense of exclusion from the nation and found little recourse to discuss and address these experiences within the structures of their schools. We argue that schools could better develop students’ capacity for equal citizenship were they supported by national education policies and curriculum to recognize the cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity of Botswana’s ethnic minorities explicitly in schools.