Language for an unknowable future: How language ideologies and pedagogies shape the lives of refugee children

Abstract

Abstract

There are currently 65 million people living as refugees globally, half of whom are of school-going age, and these numbers are on the rise. Within this context, refugee education policy is increasingly focused on the inclusion of refugees in national school systems in host countries rather than their education in parallel, refugee-only schools, as was previously the trend. This shift in global policy aims to improve educational access and quality for refugees, but also means that refugee young people must increasingly navigate school in unfamiliar languages. Despite this pressing policy concern, there is little guidance about the linguistic inclusion of refugees in national schools, a gap my dissertation begins to address. My research examines how language-in-education policies and practices—and particularly those privileging English—influence refugee children’s relationships to school, self, and home, and the ways their experiences of language at school may differ from those imagined by education authorities. A comparative case study based in Kampala, Uganda, the dissertation integrates two primary sources of data: 1) ethnographic observations across schools and NGO/government convenings; and 2) semi-structured interviews with Sudanese and South Sudanese refugee families, Ugandan teachers working in schools attended by refugee and national students together, and policymakers and program leaders intervening in refugee education (n=106). I find that refugee families’ aspirations are not fully represented in the education policies and practices that impact them directly. Rather, I argue that assimilationist language policies and pedagogies undermine the multidirectional aspirations of refugee families as they strive to create futures that enable educational and economic opportunities in the present and future, and that facilitate relationships across settings. But it is not just the aspirations of refugee families that are marginalized in the face of English-only ideologies and pedagogies at school. Rather, I find that in many cases education policymakers, program leaders, and educators find their own lived experiences and aspirations minimized in the face of narratives about ties between English, education, and opportunity. I conclude the dissertation with recommendations for policy and practice in refugee education, proposing approaches that move away from either/or approaches to language at school and toward a conceptualization of ‘mobile speech’ for an unknowable future.