Graduate School of Education

The on-going war in Syria is a humanitarian crisis. Since conflict began in 2011, more than 1.2 million Syrians have crossed into Lebanon. Almost half of these refugees are school-aged children. Education is an essential component of any humanitarian response, serving to provide children physical, emotional, and cognitive protection. Teachers have a central role for ensuring these benefits become a reality in classrooms.

Foundational documents from the field of education in conflict outline expectations for teachers working in crisis. Teachers must deliver academic content, foster social cohesion, and support children’s emotional recovery. While the expectations are clearly articulated at a policy level, how teachers understand these obligations has rarely been researched.

This dissertation investigates the role of teachers within refugee education from three different perspectives, each framed within the context of Lebanon. The first paper explores how proposed global and national-level strategies for integrating refugee students into public schools compare with experiences of integration from the perspective of teachers and school leaders. National frameworks guiding refugee education policy in Lebanon aligned closely to global strategies related to access, quality, and integration. However, in practice, the strategies enacted focused primarily on providing refugee students access to education, leaving other goals aside. The second paper considers how teachers understand their educational, social, and emotional obligations towards refugee children in their classrooms and whether these understandings vary between host-country teachers and refugee teachers. Teachers often decided which obligations to meet, given their skills, priorities, and comfort level. Personal background, professional experiences, and relevant local circumstances were important factors influencing how teachers of refugees executed their ascribed obligations, factors not reflected in global frameworks. The final paper focuses on the experience of Syrian teachers living as refugees in Lebanon and how their personal and professional identities intersect. While global frameworks depict refugee educators as having the power to prepare a new generation of Syrian students, these educators felt powerless to transcend the social, economic, and political barriers constructed around them in Lebanon. Educators welcomed the opportunity to reclaim a professional identity, yet their work often left them with a sense of frustration and loss.

This study identifies pathways to educational success among refugees. Data are from an original online survey of Somali diaspora and in-depth qualitative interviews with Somali refugee students educated in the Dadaab refugee camps of Kenya. This research builds on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, to consider both the locally- and globally-situated nature of resources across refugees’ ecosystems. Analysis examines the nature and content of studentidentified supports and their perceived influence on access and persistence in school, as well as the mediating role of technology. The findings suggest consideration of both locally-situated relationships and globally-situated relationships, as critical educational supports. Implications include leveraging naturally occurring virtual relationships to support educational success of refugees and other young people who are physically isolated from access to needed supports in their local region.

This article explores the understood purposes of refugee education at global, national, and school levels. To do so, we focus on a radical shift in global policy to integrate refugees into national education systems and the processes of vernacularization accompanying its widespread implementation. We use a comparative case study approach; our dataset comprises global policy documents and original interviews ( n = 147) and observations in 14 refugee-hosting nation-states. We analyze how the purposes of refugee education are understood and acted upon by actors occupying diverse positions across these nation-states and over time. We demonstrate that the articulated purposes of refugee education are oriented toward possible futures for refugees, and they presuppose refugees' access to quality education, social belonging, and economic opportunities. Yet we find that across nation-states of exile, refugees' access to these resources is tenuous. Our findings suggest reconceptualizing refugee education to reflect how refugees are simultaneously embedded within multiple national contexts and to address the exclusions they face within each one. This study of refugee education has implications for understanding the purposes of education in other ever-more-common contexts of uncertainty, including the rapid economic and social changes brought about by migration, globalization, and technology. Empirically, understanding the purposes of refugee education is critical in a time of unprecedented forced migration.