Refugee education: Education for an unknowable future
Sarah Dryden-Peterson
ABSTRACT
Conflict and displacement are increasingly protracted, requiring rethinking of refugee education as a long-term endeavour, connected not only to the idea of return but to the ongoing nature of exile. In this essay, I examine how refugees conceptualize education and its role in creating certainty and mending the disjunctures of their trajectories as refugees. Through a portrait of one refugee teacher, the essay explores technical, curricular, and relational dimensions of refugee education that assist refugee students in preparing for unknowable futures.
The Uncertainties of Contemporary Conflict
Abroon1 arrived in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya when he was nine. He and his family initially thought they would quickly return to Somalia. Yet, twenty-three years later, Abroon is still in exile, still living in Dadaab. Abroon is one of 21.3 million refugees globally who have been forcibly displaced outside of their country of origin (UNHCR, 2016). Mainstream media would have us believe that the refugee crisis generated by the contemporary conflict in Syria is unprecedented. It is true that the number of refugees globally is at its highest level since the Second World War and that, in 2015 alone, 1.8 million people were newly displaced to become refugees (UNHCR, 2016, p. 2). The most recent mass movements have resulted primarily from conflict in Syria, but also with the onset and re-ignition of conflicts in Iraq, Mali, and South Sudan, among others.
Furthermore, Abroon’s experience is just one example of how the phenomena of forced migration and exile are not new. The 1.8 million newly displaced refugees in 2015 joined almost 17 million others who have remained refugees for multiple decades, from ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and from Abroon’s country of origin, Somalia. Historically, 40 million people were displaced across Europe by the end of the Second World War. Independence movements across Africa saw more than 850,000 people become refugees in the single year of 1965. Between March and May of 1971, more than 100,000 people per day entered India from East Pakistan; by the end of 1971, there were 10 million refugees in India. One million refugees crossed from Rwanda into what was then Zaire in July 1994, 15,000 each hour on one day (UNHCR, 2000, pp. 51, 52, 59).
The degree of uncertainty that refugees face has changed since the end of the Cold War (Collier, Hoeffler, & Söderbom, 2004). Critical for refugee education is that conflict and conflict-induced displacement are increasingly protracted (Dryden-Peterson, 2015). For example, between 2005 and 2015, two-fifths of all refugees were displaced for three or more years at any one time, and, in 2014, in 33 protracted conflicts globally, the average length of exile was 25 years. The current length of displacement is nearly three times as long as it was in the early 1990s (Crawford, Cosgrave, Haysom, & Walicki, 2015; UNHCR & Global Monitoring Report, 2016).
Previously, with an understanding that conflict was short-lived and that return from exile would be imminent, refugee education was conceptualized as a return to “normalcy” through the provision of access to schooling (Nicolai & Triplehorn, 2003). As Davies and Talbot wrote, “the implication [of this thinking] is that it would almost be enough to get the children back into school and that the routines of schooling are as important as its content” (2008, p. 513). Understanding that conflict and displacement are not temporary requires a rethinking of refugee education as a long-term endeavour, connected not only to the idea of return but to the ongoing nature of exile. In this essay, I examine how refugees conceptualize education and its role in creating certainty and mending the disjunctures of their trajectories as refugees.
The Shifting Landscape of Refugee Education
When Abroon was young, his mother told him, “I want to educate these [refugee] children so that tomorrow they help themselves and they also help us.” Abroon has taken on this responsibility on behalf of his mother. He now teaches in a refugee camp secondary school. “I’m making a good contribution to society,” Abroon says, “because I am building their brains and their future.” Teachers of refugees play a central role in helping their students to conceptualize what that future might be and how to prepare for it.
Teachers of refugees play this role within the confines of interactions among global and national structures governed by the politics of migration, funding sources, local economies, and the state of national education systems, among other factors (Dryden-Peterson, 2015). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the global organization mandated with the protection of refugees’ rights and the provision of services, including education, poses three “durable solutions” for refugees, in effect three possible futures. They include return to the country of origin; integration in a country of first asylum (usually a low-income country); or resettlement to a third country (usually a high-income country).
Yet for Abroon, as for most refugees globally, none of these options is a realistic possibility. It has not been safe for him to return home; his country of origin, Somalia, has been engulfed in conflict for almost three decades, among the top countries of origin for refugees in every year since 1988 (UNHCR, 2016, p. 56). He has not been able to integrate into Kenya, because he does not have the right to work and xenophobia toward refugees is high (Foulds, 2016). And he cannot access resettlement, an option that is available to less than one percent of refugees globally (UNHCR, 2014). His situation is one of “radical uncertainty,” where there is imperfect knowledge and the future is unpredictable (Horst & Grabska, 2015). Faced with an unknowable future, Abroon envisioned that his education might facilitate mobilities — physical and cognitive — that would help him to build a more certain future.
Like most refugees globally, however, Abroon’s mobility is restricted. His access to social services and to the protection of his rights is tied to his residence in a refugee camp, limiting his freedom of movement (Lindley, 2011). And yet, it is the very concept of mobility that has shaped his educational experiences to date and that drives his future aspirations. As Abroon said:
education is a very key tool. When war breaks out, you run away… leaving your everything. If you don’t have education, then you’ll become poor. But if you run away with only your shirt and you have the brain, you can work somewhere and earn a living…. Education is a very essential tool. Also, education is light.
Education is the “light at the end of the tunnel,” Madad, fellow teacher in Dadaab and colleague to Abroon, said. Yet Abroon was thinking of a different kind of light; he meant that education is not heavy. The lack of weight meant that it was portable. Education was mobile, just as Abroon hoped that his future would be.
To examine how refugees conceptualize the role of education in creating certainty and mending the disjunctures of their trajectories as refugees, I present a portrait of Bauma Benjamin. Bauma, as a teacher, a parent, and a student, has navigated educational structures and created educational opportunities across multiple spaces: in his conflict-affected country of origin, DRC; in his country of first asylum, Uganda; in his country of resettlement, Canada; and as a transnational actor on issues of refugee education. I do not present Bauma’s experiences as a journey to be reified but rather as one of many possible trajectories. His experiences of multiple contexts of conflict, exile, and migration, and the meaning he makes of each one, illuminate the roles of education in the unknowable futures inherent to refugeehood and the ways in which individuals can navigate, and shift, the structures that circumscribe them.
Portraiture is a qualitative social science methodology that intentionally seeks to pursue, understand, and convey the “authority, knowledge, and wisdom” of the perspectives and experiences of research participants (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, pp. xv, 103). It involves intense engagement of the researcher and research participants in dialogue and co-construction of knowledge. This portrait draws on multiple sources of data, which derive from several discrete studies related to refugee education in Uganda (see, for example, Dryden-Peterson, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2011). For this essay, I draw on original data that I collected, including 12 hours of life history interviews; three one-hour semi-structured interviews in the context of Bauma’s work as a teacher at a research site; seventeen interviews with Bauma’s students and their families; and participant observation at Bauma’s schools over six years; these research endeavours have also grown into a 14-year relationship with Bauma and his family. Most of the interviews and conversations between Bauma and myself were in French, although some were in English; I have done all of my own translations to English, yet I have included certain short fragments of text in French, with English translations that follow, in order to signal the language of the setting. Interviews with students and families were conducted in several Bantu languages, with the assistance of a long-term translator and research assistant.
I deliberately frame the portrait of Bauma with the vignette of Abroon, above, drawn from long-term research with Somali refugees in Kenya with colleague Negin Dahya (see, for example, Dryden-Peterson, Dahya, and Adelman, under review; and Dahya and Dryden-Peterson, 2016). While their experiences and meaning-making differ in multiple ways, I am compelled by the resonance across contexts of the dilemma of what education for an unknowable future consists of. I argue that the resonance of this dilemma, and the ways in which refugees navigate it, provides an important framework for understanding and re-imagining the curriculum of refugee education.
Navigating Uncertainty and Disjuncture Through Education: A Portrait
Bauma Benjamin sits on the edge of a wooden chair. It has big, thick armrests and overstuffed blue cushions on the seat and back, and there is a bright yellow embroidered doily carefully draped across the top, behind Bauma’s head. It is almost seven o’clock in the morning and, in the equatorial country of Uganda, that means the sun has just risen, no matter the time of year. The room is dark, though. There are no windows pushed through the concrete walls and the lacy, white curtain that covers the one, narrow doorway to the outside has not yet begun its fluttering dance in the as-yet calm and windless morning.
This may be the one time of day that Bauma is alone, that his guard is down, that his mind is quiet. His two children are at the back of the house, in the little laneway that separates this row of concrete homes from the next. In the rainy season, the laneway fills with a creek of dirty, sewage-like water and flocks of malarial mosquitoes. This time of year, this time of morning, it is filled with soapy and laughing children. The children splash water from brightly coloured plastic basins onto their still-warm-from-sleep skin and wriggle with the chill. The lucky ones, those for whom a day of learning stretches ahead of them, know that every inch of their bodies must be clean before putting on the perfectly washed and pressed white shirts of their school uniforms. Bauma’s children are among the lucky ones.
This was not always so. When Bauma arrived in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, in 2000, there were no schools that accepted refugee students (see, Dryden-Peterson, 2006a; Turney & Dryden-Peterson, 2015).
“They do not know that we are refugees,” Bauma says of his children. “[My son] knows that he is Congolese, he knows that he comes from Goma. He knows that his grandmother and grandfather are in Goma. [My daughter] knows that also. They do not think they are Ugandans, but they do not think we are refugees.” But not a day goes by when Bauma is not reminded that he is a refugee. The Bauma of home, the husband, the father, does not dare enter the streets of Kampala as himself.
When he kisses his wife goodbye and walks away from his immediate neighbours, he becomes a different person. Small in stature no matter the situation, in the streets of Kampala, Bauma becomes small in presence. His eyes are always focused on a destination, never a face. His body, stiff and rigid, weaves between the crowds of people shining shoes, selling tomatoes, walking to their myriad destinations. The broad smile that is always on his face when he is in the company of family and friends seems to have forever disappeared. So changed is his look and disposition that he is unrecognizable.
And that is his goal. Bauma was a human rights activist in Congo. His work began on a very personal level, protesting the persecution of his minority Bahunde ethnic group in his home districts of Walikale and Massisi. As the conflict in Congo grew and grew, he became involved with a non-governmental organization that fought, more visibly and in many districts, for the rights of civilians. Government forces and rebel militia are powerful in Eastern Congo; over five million people have been killed there since 1998 — the highest death toll in any part of the world (Council on Foreign Relations, 2015). While this massive conflict seems to escape the world’s attention, the human rights activities of a small group could not escape the attention of the authorities. Bauma was imprisoned and tortured, only to escape when a fire spread through the prison and the guards fled to protect themselves. The International Committee of the Red Cross then helped him to find exile in Uganda.
Before conflict erupted, Bauma had pursued his teaching diplom...
