Socially just refugee education: global challenges and promising practices.

The session reflects on two decades of policy and practice in refugee education across international contexts. With the global population of forcibly displaced people escalating, often in direct response to socio-political-environmental violence, and discourses of neo-conservative hostility towards migrancy proliferating, this symposium invites urgent exploration of a humane, socially just educational response. 1. Socially just refugee education: past, present and future challenges. The increasing number of refugees, coupled with the protracted nature of refugee situations, underline the critical importance of providing quality education for refugees, including access to tertiary and higher education. Since 2010 education this has been a “core component” of the UNHCR’s mandate (UNHCR 2012). This paper maps changes in the purposes of refugee education and some of the key socio-political challenges, in particular it focuses on the goal increasing tertiary education enrolment from the current 5% to 15% by 2030 (UNHCR 2019). I argue that many of the struggles that refugees face result from the same structural barriers and systematic exclusions in national education systems, wherever they are located (Morrice 2021). 2. Higher Education and Forced Displacement: Dynamics in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Brazil has witnessed a dramatic surge in asylum applications in the last decade. In response, a growing number of universities have implemented initiatives to support forcibly displaced individuals. This paper examines the individual and contextual factors influencing the successful access and navigation of higher education by forcibly displaced persons, mainly from Venezuela and Haiti, in Brazil. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with forcibly displaced students in distinct regions of Brazil. Employing a Latin American Decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Segato, 2022), the research critically examines how historical and contemporary processes of colonisation in Brazil and other LAC countries continue to shape access and inclusion for both displaced individuals and marginalised nationals. 3. The journeys of Syrian refugee youth in the face of harm in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The experiences of Syrian children and youth in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey since 2011 raise important questions about policies and practices in the field of refugee education, and the impact of unjust conditions on outlooks in post-conflict societies. Through storytelling methods, the journeys and reflections of Syrian youth reveal the varying forms of multigenerational (Enriquez 2015) and multi-layered harm that they experienced, in which policies targeted at refugee adults spill over impacting their well-being and education as children. The presentation discusses the ways which Syrian young people have managed their agency and hope in liminality, while also reflecting on the implications of educational injustice on Syria and the future of its people across the region. 4. ‘Waiting for school’: developing cross-sector support for newly arrived children in their transition to school. In the UK, approximately 50,000 people seeking asylum are living in a ‘de-facto detention’ system in hotels, in conditions that are harmful to physical and mental health (Refugee Action, 2023). Families face overcrowding, fear, and a lack of play facilities and nutritious food. Children in hotels experience more systemic and institutional barriers in accessing a school place, impacting on teachers’ capacity to support them once starting school (Gladwell & Chetwynd, 2018). The ’Waiting for School’ project explored in/formal refugee education taking place in hotels and schools, working with teachers, family workers, artists, and teacher educators to address gaps in cross-sector practice. Concepts of hybridity and liminality support thinking through embodiment as an essential, yet negated, form of refugee education in UK policy: working against the spatial confinements of a single hotel room, and the lethargy of impermanence and waiting. 5. Response-able practice/tioners: teachers’ learning to work with refugee families as entangled becomings . The 1898 Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees access to full-time education for all children seeking refuge. In the UK this often can mean over 20,000 children per year seeking school access. Scant work has been done to understand UK teachers work with families and communities with refugee experiences (Kendall and Puttick, 2020). In this paper we ’plug-in’ ideas from post-qualitative theory to conversations with teachers about their everyday experiences in three projects over a six-year period, 2018-2023. We pay attention to the messy, implicated, intra-relatedness that emerges. Our purpose in this paper is not to describe, thematize or code teachers practice but to map complexity towards imaginaries of professional learning that promote connection and knowledge-in-the-making as ethical, ‘response-able’ (Barad, 2007) post/rhizo-professional alternatives to linear forms of professional learning. References: Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe half-way. Duke University Press: Durham and London Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2020). Literacy-as-event: Accounting for relationality in literacy research. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 41(1), 45-56. Enriquez, L. E. (2015). Multigenerational Punishment: Shared Experiences of Undocumented Immigration Status Within Mixed-Status Families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 77(4), 939–953. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12196 Gladwell, C., & Chetwynd, G. (2018). Education for refugee and asylum seeking children: access and equality in England, Scotland and Wales. UNICEF pdf report. Horst, C., & Grabska, K. (2015). Flight and Exile—Uncertainty in the Context of Conflict-Induced Displacement. Social Analysis, 59(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590101 Kendall A., Puttick, M. (2020) ‘Reading ourselves against the grain: starting points for parental engagement with newly arrived and refugee families’ Volume 2, Issue 1, PRACTICE: contemporary issues in practitioner education Mignolo, W. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity?: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press. Morrice, L. (2021) The promise of refugee lifelong education: A critical review of the field. International Review of Education 67, 851–869. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09927-5 OECD (2021) Education GPS - Brazil - Overview of the education system (EAG 2021). Retrieved 10 October 2021. Segato, R. (2022). The Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays (R. McGlazer, Trans.; 1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.sussex.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9781003164999 UNHCR (2012). Education strategy 2012–2016. Geneva: UNHCR. Retrieved 1 December 2020. UNHCR (2019). Refugee education 2030: A strategy for refugee inclusion. Geneva: UNHCR. Retrieved 1 December 2020 from https://www.unhcr.org/5d651da88d7.pdf.