Refugee Education

Theorising Practice in Schools

Joanna McIntyre, Fran Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367208653
• eBook ISBN: 9780429558849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the last five years, more child refugees have made perilous journeys into Europe than at any point since the Second World War. Once refugee children begin to establish their new lives, education becomes a priority. However, access to high-quality inclusive education can be challenging and is a social justice issue for schools, policymakers and for the research community. Underpinned by strong theoretical framings and based on socially just principles, this book provides a detailed exploration into this ethically charged, emotive and complex subject.

Refugee Education offers an interdisciplinary perspective to critical debates and public discourse about the topic, contextualized by the voices of young refugees and those seeking to support them in and out of education. Shaped by practitioners, the book develops an inclusive model of education for refugee children based on the concepts of safety, belonging and success, and presents practical tools for planning and operationalizing the ethics of inclusive education.

This book includes a wide range of case study examples which reveal the positive outcomes that are possible, given the right inputs. It is essential reading for teachers, senior leaders and policymakers as well as academic researchers in education, social policy, migration and refugee studies.

1 Introduction

Joanna McIntyre and Fran Abrams

Of the 25 million refugees across the world, more than half are children. This book is about how to provide an inclusive education environment for refugee children, a topic of global significance which also has huge implications for classrooms in localities many miles away from zones of conflict, persecution, political instability and increasingly inhospitable climate environments. These children, many of whom have, in recent years, made their way to Europe on forced migration routes, are trying to establish new lives in countries vast distances from their homelands. Since 2015, Europe has been home to more child refugees than at any point since the Second World War (Save the Children 2016).

Once refugee children have reached a point of safety and begin the process of resuming their lives in their new contexts, access to education becomes a real priority. Refugee education operates at global, national and local levels. Although there are international agreements about the ways in which nation-states should operationalise their commitment to provision of high-quality inclusive education and opportunities for lifelong learning, education systems are experienced very differently at the local level by refugee children who have resettled in different countries (Dryden-Peterson 2016). Those working in the field of refugee education in high-income countries often have to negotiate between the competing demands of highly meritocratic and performative national education systems and their own vocational commitment to compassionate inclusive education for all.

The local context for the research evidence discussed in this book is England, but the evidence and arguments are also intended to speak to other similar international resettlement contexts. The main contribution the book seeks to make is to provide a theoretical model for the inclusion of refugees in national education systems. This theoretical model has been shaped by practitioners; it is responsive to the voices of young refugees for whom education represents the first steps in rebuilding lives with possibility and meaningful futures. We see the model not as an abstraction but as a practical tool to be used in planning and operationalising the ethics of inclusive education.

This introductory chapter sets out why and how we’ve come to write this book, which we hope will be both thought-provoking for policymakers and supportive of day to day practice in schools and colleges.

The rationale for the book and our approach

The focus of the book is on the challenges faced by young refugees and by those working to include them in secondary education in schools and colleges. Refugee education is an extremely significant, ethically charged, emotive and complex subject. By its nature it is multidimensional and interdisciplinary, drawing on different kinds of voices and approaches and knowledge from different disciplinary areas. As authors, we bring some of that interdisciplinarity to this project: Jo’s work is as an education academic and Fran is a journalist. The book therefore brings together two different professional perspectives; we come from different traditions and work with different professional codes of ethics ¹ and different styles of writing. Resolving some of these differences and deciding on how best to present our findings and thoughts has been, at times, a challenging process. But, since our first collaboration, when Fran joined Jo on a field trip to compare the experiences of education practitioners working with refugee children in Sweden and England, it has seemed to us that the benefits of bringing our perspectives together have outweighed the challenges. The debates we have engaged with together and separately have shaped the development of this book, which reflects our differing perspectives and the traditions of our fields. Drawing from different disciplines and expertise is integral to furthering understanding of the challenges that young refugees face. What unites us is a commitment to refugee education, to improving the experiences of the young people and those who work with them.

The process of developing our ideas and evidence for this book involved researching different elements of the book separately, then coming together to discuss our findings and plan how best to communicate them. We have sought to retain the distinctiveness of our voices and approaches to understanding the issues rather than trying to produce one authorial voice that blends different perspectives and starting points. Accordingly, we have attributed individual authorship to the sections of the book each of us wrote and readers should expect a change of voice and approach at each transition point. To set the context for the reader, we take this opportunity to explain a little more about the different approaches we took to preparing the different chapters within the book.

Jo’s work in and with schools

Jo is an academic working in a School of Education in an English university. She was a teacher for a number of years before starting work at the university. She is committed to working with teachers and to portraying the work they do and the communities and children they work with through an asset-based perspective. As well as the comparative work with Sweden, Jo has adopted a place-based approach to understanding the challenges and opportunities for those working to support older refugee children in education in England. This work, and the findings underpinning the theorisation of this book, have been informed by her research with practitioners in the field, experienced teachers in schools that have been identified as sites of good practice for refugee education.

Jo is an experienced teacher educator and works with practitioners at different stages in their careers, including those just entering the profession. In her work, Jo often notices that teachers feel pulled in different directions as they try and enact the role of the ‘good teacher’ (Connell 2009), fulfilling obligations to ensure strong pupil outcomes, as measured by mandated assessments and audited in performance management regimes and school league tables. At the same time, she knows that there is a fundamental vocational dimension to teachers’ work, often unrecognised in performance terms but manifest from the outset in a pre-service teacher’s desire to become a teacher. This is the sense of wanting to make a difference, a commitment to social justice and to contributing to making their students’ lives better. This is especially the case for school leaders who seek to maintain a commitment to strong inclusive values predicated on social justice agendas within an education landscape where league tables and the marketisation of school choice create ‘moral dilemmas’ (Stevenson 2007). This moral tension is often particularly marked for head teachers seeking to foster an inclusive school environment for refugee pupils (McIntyre and Hall 2018).

The school leaders and teachers in the case studies reported by Jo in Section 1 of this book were selected because they adopt and have maintained an inclusive stance towards refugee pupils. We sought out examples of teachers who are demonstrating an ethos of compassionate professionalism towards students who are often marginalised in mainstream education. These teachers’ attitudes echo those ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Section 1 Theorising practice in schools
• Section 2 Contexts
• Section 3 Ways forward
• Index