Refugee Education: Aligning Access, Learning & Opportunity

Wadad reflected on her approach to life, developed while living as a Syrian refugee in Beirut, Lebanon.1 “I really love to sit alone,” she said. “To think of many things, about the future, about what will happen. At the same time, I tell myself: maybe there’s no tomorrow. I live the details of each day and try to make the best of it. I try to live day by day, but I also strive a lot for the future, a lot.”

In 2019, when she described her approach, Wadad was a seventeen-year-old student in grade 9 in a public school in Lebanon. She had arrived in Beirut when she was thirteen, having fled a suburb of Damascus, Syria, where she grew up. Her school there was “just normal,” and she described living in “an area where there wasn’t a lot of things happening.” One day, a bomb fell in the school compound, and everything changed. Wadad said she knew “that we couldn’t stay there [in Syria],” but she also expected she would return to her school the following semester. “The plan,” she said, “was for us to go back [to Syria].” 

Five years later, Wadad found herself constantly embedded in the dissonance between her reality of long-term displacement in Lebanon and the plan she had five years before, which is the one she still has now: to return to her home in Syria. Wadad now prefers not to think about the geography of her future, explaining she has come to realize how powerless it makes her feel to dwell on what she cannot control. She explained with some resignation, “It doesn’t make a difference where [my future] happens, but I prefer a place where I’m most comfortable in my job, my family . . . a place where I have people I love, not a place where I’m alone.” What Wadad has not given up, and is adamant that she will never give up, is a focus on this future. Yet maintaining this focus has been a constant challenge for Wadad and her Syrian classmates. They have found much of their education instead centered on what Wadad described as the “details of each day,” of just getting by in the present.2

Wadad is one of now more than 43.4 million people globally who live as refugees, half of whom are children.3 A refugee is someone who has fled across a border with a well-founded fear of persecution. Those counted in these numbers—and often more visible—are those to whom host governments give legal status after deciding on the legitimacy of persecution claims. Millions more live as asylum-seekers, often spending years in limbo without legal status, and others are counted in categories created to fit domestic and global political purposes, including Palestinians outside the five-country mandate of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and “other people in need of international protection,” which includes all displaced Venezuelans. In addition, 68.3 million are internally displaced within their countries of citizenship.

The number of refugees, those displaced outside their country of citizenship, is growing; in the past decade, the number of refugees has tripled.4 The number of refugees globally is the equivalent of all the residents in Canada or California or Tokyo. Yet most refugees do not live in these places. Confined by policies and walls erected by high-income countries, 69 percent of refugees live in countries that neighbor their conflict-affected home countries, and 75 percent live in low- and middle-income countries.5 These sites of exile have fewer resources for social services and already-overstretched education systems. In 2017, when Wadad was fifteen years old, 25 percent of the population in Lebanon were refugees compared to less than 0.1 percent in the United States.6 In 2019, the United States admitted only 1,198 refugees from Afghanistan, while almost 1.5 million Afghan refugees continued to live in Pakistan, many for more than twenty years.7 This long-term displacement is a central dimension of refugee education. 

Refugees today live in exile between ten and twenty-five years on average, three times as long as in the early 1990s.8 This length of displacement means exile is the one and only chance most refugee children have for education. Abroon, who lived in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, thought he would quickly return to Somalia after he fled home with his family as a young child. But twenty-one years later, he was still in Kenya.9 Raphael, an NGO staff member in Kakuma camp, also in Kenya, said: “We can’t keep talking about emergency . . . if people have been here for twenty years. . . . So when you design things that are emergency in approach and in context, then you are not addressing my needs as I grow up.”10 The expectation of short-term displacement is met by the reality of long-term displacement for individual refugees, like Abroon, and for agency staff, like Raphael, who make education policies. 

Not all refugee children have access to school, as Wadad and Abroon did. Globally, only 68 percent of school-aged refugees are enrolled at primary levels and 37 percent at secondary levels.11 Even when they do have access to schools, they often have little access to school learning. In Kakuma camp in Kenya, we find that literacy among children in early primary school is among the lowest in the world.12 In classrooms, refugee children are often excluded through use of languages they do not understand, curricula that does not represent them or actively discriminates against them, and fraught relationships with teachers and peers.13 Their opportunities are also frequently truncated. In almost all countries where refugees live, they are noncitizens and likely will never be citizens. Lack of citizenship curtails their access to school and to post-schooling opportunities, with limited rights to work, access capital, and maintain long-term legal status.14 Overall, refugee children are less likely to go to school. They are less likely to finish school. They are less likely to learn in school. And they are less likely to feel like they can contribute to their communities.15

We cannot succeed in the global quest for educational equity if we do not address the needs of refugees. So what would it take to ensure that all refugee young people have access to learning that enables them to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures? Each day, in classrooms around the world, teachers of refugees act in response to this question. One of these teachers is Ahmed, a Syrian refugee who teaches Syrian refugee students in Beirut.16

Ahmed is a grade 9 civics teacher. His approach involved beginning with what students knew and experienced, and extending that in two directions: supporting them as they navigated their lives in the present in Lebanon and, in more limited ways, helping them envision and work toward the ways they want things to be in the future. In one class, Ahmed was helping students learn a map of the Middle East. He knew his students would be tested on this material in their imminent high-stakes Brevet examination—which they were required to pass in order to continue into grade 10—and he was explicit and intent on their need to learn this so that they might succeed. Ahmed invited the students to locate any place they knew on the blank map he had drawn on the board. One girl approached and labeled Syria on the map. Others followed, labeling countries and bodies of water. One student held back, uncertain she wanted to go to the board. Ahmed encouraged her, and the faces of peers, eager and open, also gently prompted her. She did get up and go to the board, making it so that everyone in the class had participated. “Bravo,” said Ahmed when she completed the task. To the class he said, “She was saying she did not know anything. She turned out to know everything.”

Students were no strangers to being treated as if they were clueless and unaware of their experiences of everyday exclusions as refugees in Lebanon, and Ahmed often talked in metaphors that were about immediate classroom moments and also addressed larger themes in his students’ educational experiences. As the class focused on the details of making the map on the board, Ahmed zoomed out to the larger purposes of the exercise, reminding students to think about “identifying one location with respect to another location.” While talking about the physical contours of borders, states, and compass directions, this concrete task resonated with much more expansive ways of how he thought about supporting students in their learning as they constantly navigate multiple locations and their relationships to them.

Ahmed was clear that this navigation involved a good deal of compromise in his teaching, an intentional balancing act. As a Syrian refugee himself, he wanted his students to learn about the daily constraints they faced within Lebanon’s exclusionary social, economic, and political structures. Yet, as their teacher, he also had to teach the lessons prescribed by the Lebanese curriculum, which the students needed to follow to pass the Brevet exam. Ahmed needed to navigate tensions between the kinds of learning he—as their civics teacher and as a Syrian refugee—wanted students to do about membership and participation; the lessons prescribed by the Lebanese curriculum they followed; and the daily social, political, and economic constraints on their roles as civic actors. He described the challenges of teaching the Lebanese history curriculum, for example: “All the students here know only Lebanese history and not Syrian history. . . . We have a common history but it is told from the point of view of Lebanon.” Despite being a school of Syrian teachers and Syrian students, the Lebanese curriculum they followed and the students’ success on the Brevet exam was their immediate gateway to future education. Ahmed was pragmatic and steadfast in his teaching about this: “At the end of the day, it is a school textbook, and the goal of it is for the students to get good grades. Nothing else. . . . The history is false. But we have to study it to get good grades.” In other moments, Ahmed tried to make materials relevant to students, by bringing in lived experiences from outside the textbook, to create space for students to explore disconnects between the formal school curriculum and their experiences outside school. When teaching Lebanese laws, for example, Ahmed explained, “I make it clear that this is a law that exists but is unfortunately not applied. As simple as that.”

In his teaching, Ahmed tried to mend misalignments among access to school in Lebanon, learning in the Lebanese national education system that could be both certified and meaningful, and opportunities for livelihoods and participation in the present and future. Access, learning, and opportunity in global education research and practice are usually conceptualized in a sequential and linear way: with access to school comes learning and with learning comes opportunity. For most refugee students—as for most marginalized students globally—this model simply does not hold. In the settings where their mobility and their social, economic, and political rights have massive restrictions, access to school does not translate into learning and learning does not translate into opportunities. Creating the kinds of education that do enable all refugees to access learning that allows them to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures requires us to understand these misalignments and work to better align them through policy and practice.

Misalignments among access, learning, and opportunity are rooted across the ecosystem, from macro-level geopolitical arrangements to micro-level interactions in classrooms. Yet they are also rooted in policy and practice that ignore the connections across these ecosystems, in particular, the structural causes of forced migration such as environmental destruction, economic exploitation and devastation, and discrimination and racism.17 Three questions are central in understanding these misalignments and how we might connect the ecosystems to work toward alignment: Who is allowed to be where and for how long? Who is responsible for refugee education? And who can feel a sense of belonging?

Who is allowed to be where and for how long?18 The confinement of refugees to neighboring host countries and low- and middle-income countries is not an accident of geography. Migration policies make it challenging to obtain legal status in a high-income country, except for the 1 percent of refugees globally who have access to resettlement.19 For those who do arrive, often via dangerous routes, asylum processes are highly opaque, hard to navigate, and discriminatory. It is, as anthropologist Catherine Lowe Besteman has argued, “differential access to mobility on the basis of origin.”20 Ukrainians, for example, have been able to access residency permits and establish claims to asylum in Europe, a radical departure from policies applied to other refugees, including Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans who often remain stranded at borders and denied entry to European countries.21 

Several high-income countries have explicitly engaged in outsourcing refugee hosting to reduce entry of refugees to their own countries, what some call “transactional forced migration.”22 The 2015 EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan stipulated that all Syrians arriving in Greece would be sent back to Turkey; in return, the European Union would pay Turkey EUR 6 billion to support refugee assistance, guarantee visa-free travel in Europe for Turkish citizens, and agree to re-engage negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership.23 The 2022 U.K.-Rwanda Agreement included involuntary deportation of asylum-seekers from the United Kingdom to Rwanda. Political scientists Fiona B. Adamson and Kelly M. Greenhill argue that this kind of deal is not unique, that “the exchange of cash and the promise of additional side-payments for a distant country’s acceptance of ‘unwanted’ populations bears a striking resemblance to earlier schemes that aimed to resolve thorny political problems by proposing to transfer populations to far-flung locations.”24

These confinements and limitations on refugees’ movement effectively constrain the kinds of access refugees have to education. In most cases, refugees live in places where access to school is not universal, and the quality of education is unequal because some students and schools do not receive sufficient resources. In Kenya, refugees live in districts with some of the highest levels of poverty and the lowest levels of access to school.25 An NGO staff member in Egypt explained that “there is no benefit” to including Syrian refugees in a system already struggling to implement quality education.26 In South Sudan, a UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) staff member explained that schools are “barely functional” and act in “haphazard” ways while trying to include refugees.27 In Lebanon, where Wadad is in school, Lebanese citizens choose private schools whenever they have the option, not the public schools refugees have access to.28 Like in most countries, poor children, including refugees, have access to poor schools.29

Restrictions on and the unpredictability of who is allowed to move where—and who is allowed to stay where—shape misalignments between refugee children’s access to school and their learning and opportunities. Khawla, one of Ahmed’s students in Beirut, had a specific goal of being a surgeon who provides free medical care to people in need.30 After researching the requirements for this training in Lebanon, Khawla wrote out a detailed series of steps covering the next twelve years of her life that would allow her to accomplish this goal. But each step was accompanied by a set of factors over which she had no control. Would refugees be allowed to continue to go to school in Lebanon? Would she be allowed to work in Lebanon if she did become a surgeon?31 She had top grades, the kind that, according to the logics of exam systems, would facilitate her further study and enable her to reach medical school. But what Khawla heard from her teachers when she began primary school in Lebanon shook her trust in whether these opportunities would be open to her. She explained that she began to think, “Maybe they’re right, maybe we are coming to Lebanon, it’s not our country, we can’t study here, we can’t work here, we can’t stay here. Maybe they’re right. We are occupying their country.” Khawla and other refugee young people know they are at the mercy of cyclical and conflicting logics: educational policies that allowed them to study, but social and economic policies and politics that did not allow them to participate.

A second and related question informs understanding of the misalignments among access, learning, and opportunity: who is responsible for refugee education? Globally, responsibility for education is presumed to lie with governments, even if, in some cases, governments are unable or unwilling to take on this responsibility. Responsibility is financial in terms of paying for education, and substantive in terms of what and how children learn, which is evident in decisions about curriculum, school structures, and teacher training, typically made by governments (at varying levels, depending on the context). This responsibility that governments take on is usually connected, in belief or in fact, to presumed returns that will benefit the state.32 These returns can take many and boundless forms: economic, social, political, civic, and in terms of happiness and well-being. 

In refugee education, assumptions about who is responsible for provision of and decision-making about education are called into question, with implications for alignment among access, learning, and opportunity.33 Until a decade ago, most refugees had access to schooling only in separate schools reserved for them, isolated from national education systems, with the intention of providing temporary schooling with short-term goals.34 The geography of refugees enabled this through their containment in refugee camps. At the time, global NGOs and UN agencies took responsibility for refugee education, acting much like a “pseudo-state” within the refugee camps.35 

In 2012, a radical shift in global UNHCR policy changed how refugees accessed education, with implications for responsibility. This new approach included refugees in national education systems, which was meant to provide the kind of educational stability and quality that was needed in long-term displacement. However, in a fourteen-country study, Elizabeth Adelman, Michelle J. Bellino, Vidur Chopra, and I found multiple models of inclusion of refugees in national education systems. These models ranged from no inclusion, where refugees have no legal status and no right to education, such as in Malaysia and Bangladesh; to geographic and temporal segregation, where refugees had access to host country curriculum, certification, and teachers, but in separate places, as in camps in Kenya; or at separate times of the day, as in second shifts in Lebanon. In a small number of places, typically in cities like Kampala and Cairo, refugees and nationals attended school together. We found these models reflected different purposes of education for refugees, particularly whether policymakers imagined those futures to be in the host country, in the home country, or somewhere else entirely.36

These different models also reflect divergent conceptions of how responsible the host state is, or seeks to be, for refugee education. The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees advocated “responsibility sharing” to support new approaches to inclusion of refugees in national systems, as in education, meaning that high-income countries would contribute to the costs of social services for refugees no matter where they live.37 Many donors have not met these funding commitments, forcing already overstretched hosting countries to examine the extent to which they can, or should, support refugee education.38 An NGO staff member in Rwanda described how “the big responsibility is on the government.”39 Approaches to refugee inclusion exhibit varying degrees of what responsibility entails, in terms of access to school, learning, and/or opportunities. Without a shared global responsibility, refugee education in most places has involved minimal realization of the right to education through access to school, but—lacking the necessary additional resources and commitments—limited quality of learning or long-term opportunities.

Inclusion has marked a major opportunity for addressing certain core dimensions of refugees’ educational marginalization: namely, their access to school. Yet what remains are persistent dilemmas connected to learning and opportunity that closely mirror the experiences of other marginalized children globally, such as alienation from curriculum, exclusion and discrimination in relationships with teachers and peers, and misalignments between the promises of getting educated and limited opportunities for equitable social, civic, economic, and political participation. To align access, learning, and opportunity, we must address the third central question: who can feel a sense of belonging?

When a refugee must flee, the goal is almost never to leave home. The reality, as poet Warsan Shire writes, is that “you only leave home / when home won’t let you stay.”40 We must identify and work on the underlying causes of conflict that force people to flee and on the collective and transnational action needed to make home places one can stay, as related to, among others, environmental destruction, economic exploitation and devastation, and discrimination and racism. At the same time, when people do flee, they must create new lives; this is also collective and transnational work. One of the key places this process happens is in schools, and teachers and students together must figure out how to answer this question of who can feel a sense of belonging.

One day in 2019, two of Wadad’s classmates arrived at school for the afternoon shift to find a poster they had made ripped up and torn to pieces on the floor.41 The students, Munir and Mira, tried to talk to their teacher about what had happened. By way of explanation, the teacher said that the Lebanese students in the morning shift felt like Munir, Mira, and their friends were “intruders on the school.” Then the principal told the class that maybe the Lebanese students did this to the poster because, after all, it is “their school first.” Upset as he was, Munir was resigned in some ways to this second-class status. As Mira said, it did make some sense: “They’re Lebanese and their school is Lebanese. For sure, for sure, for sure, there’s no country that favors others over their own citizens, right? In Syria, we also have our own school and it’s not theirs.” Munir explained how this felt to him like a trade-off: “It’s like they’re giving [the school] to us so we can learn,” but “not to be established.” While he felt this way, he most often found these conversations closed for discussion, with his teachers saying in response things like, “Don’t interfere with politics. We’re here to study not to talk about these issues.”

In a short, animated film created from our research (see a still in Figure 2), Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, Carmen Geha, and I show Munir and Mira’s experiences of exclusion, of trade-offs, and of being silenced, all making them feel that they do not belong. We also show the ways in which teachers often feel powerless in the face of these situations: beholden to the curriculum and examination systems of the state, living within political environments of xenophobia, and often working without pay for months at a time. At the same time, we learn from students about how their teachers do help them begin to realign their access to school in a second shift—which makes them feel “behind” and intentionally kept separate—with learning and opportunities that are meaningful in the present and for the future. 

Teachers support a sense of belonging through their work to help align students’ access to school with both learning and opportunity. They do this through ways of teaching and ways of building relationships, what we call pedagogies of belonging, rooted in predictability, adaptability, and future-building.42 Predictability includes “the safety created through knowing, understanding, and trusting.”43 For young people who have experienced massive disruption, often without notice, as Wadad did when she suddenly had to flee her home, the knowledge that some elements of their lives remain the same each day is comforting. This need for predictability is greater still for young people who fear they could lose their legal status or right to education at any time and once again be forced to flee. In Jordan, for example, Hiba Salem and I learned from students how much they value the predictability of knowing they will find their teacher in the classroom each day, that their teacher will listen to them, and that their teacher will make sure they learn in ways that will support them to succeed in the education systems they find themselves in.44 Students describe the predictability of academic learning also as key: they need these skills to persist in school and to create the kinds of livelihoods they envision for their futures.

Adaptability involves teaching and learning to meet both short-term and long-term goals, especially as conditions and needs shift. As Ahmed did for his Syrian students in Beirut, teachers of refugees across contexts adapt curricula they must teach as mandated by the governments that employ them, that students must learn to pass high-stakes exams and to proceed in their education. This adaptation is often a process of making the curriculum more relevant for students, linking their access to the curriculum to meaningful learning. At times, these are large adaptations, as in shifting the language of instruction from English to Arabic, as Ahmed did at his school.45 At times, the shifts are smaller, such as acknowledgment of the dissonance between what is taught and what the students have experienced. In one civics lesson, a teacher was emphasizing, as the curriculum does, that students should “become part of society, to have greater importance and not just be on the margins.” One student valued the way this teacher at the same time acknowledged the limited role Syrian young people have as agents of change in Lebanon; the teacher went on to say, “In the end, nothing of what’s in this lesson exists. We wish it does. . . . It’s true you’re learning things that don’t exist but you might be the reason they exist in the future. You might do things related to politics . . . and you can change and do the things you studied about.”46

Future-building “involves imagining, and planning for, multiple possible futures—here, there, and/or somewhere else entirely.”47 Refugee students are constantly faced with, and planning for, this unknowable future.48 Students value that what they do every day in school is not only about the access to school, to being there each day, but to the learning and opportunities that they hope and expect will follow from that commitment. Given that refugee young people cannot anticipate where their futures will be, this kind of learning requires building capacities to apply what they learn across place and time, and not having to choose between the present and the future. They should not have to decide between, on one hand, the kinds of learning that are deemed worthy within the education they have access to at the present in one specific geography and, on the other hand, the opportunities they then might trade away for a different future.

The time is right for a collective and multilevel approach to refugee education that addresses the misalignments among access, learning, and opportunity. This requires more expansive and interconnected responses to the three questions of who is allowed to be where and for how long; who is responsible for refugee education; and who belongs. The daily work of figuring out how to ensure that all refugee young people feel a sense of belonging falls to teachers and students in schools. Yet we—in governments at all levels, in financial institutions, in universities, in civil society organizations, as parents, as school leaders, as activists, as engaged members of our local and global communities—have roles to play. We can learn from these teachers and students about what they do and how, as in some of the examples presented in this essay; we can expand opportunities for teachers and students to learn from each other about these practices and how they might be adapted across contexts; and we can support, institutionally and systemically, professional development of teachers around these practices, including attention to their financial and social well-being.49

Yet teachers and students cannot and should not do this work alone. Every day they experience the consequences of the structural causes of forced migration: the environmental destruction, the economic exploitation and devastation, and the discrimination and racism that compel people to move in search of new homes and continue to surround them as they try to build new lives. To ensure that all students have access to learning and belonging that enables them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures requires us to address these causes and their consequences, including new visions of who is responsible for refugee education and who is allowed to be where and for how long. High-income countries, like the United States, often fuel environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and racism linked to the conflicts that refugees flee. They—we—need to shoulder more of the responsibility for refugee education, both financially in the regions where most refugees live and through migration policies not based on containment but on more equitable opportunities for mobility. It is in the interests of all of us to act now to create access to learning that does enable refugee young people to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures—these are the futures in which all of us will share.

author's note

This essay represents collaborative research and thinking that have spanned time and place. My thanks to the students and teachers who participated, including Wadad, Ahmed, Abroon, Khawla, Munir, Mira, and hundreds of others; my hope is always that you recognize your experiences and what you wanted to say to larger audiences. My thanks to research collaborators in this work, whose inspiration and generosity are the foundation of how I conceive of collaboration: Elizabeth Adelman, Michelle J. Bellino, Shelby Carvalho, Vidur Chopra, Negin Dahya, Bibi-Zuhra Faizi, Carmen Geha, Cindy Horst, Hania Mariën, Celia Reddick, Hiba Salem, and Joumana Talhouk. For wise and discerning suggestions, my thanks to three anonymous reviewers, my fellow authors in this issue of Dædalus, and James A. Banks. 

Endnotes

• 1All names of research participants are pseudonyms.
• 2Wadad was a participant in a study across three schools that asked Syrian students about their experiences with education in Lebanon. This study was collaborative with Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha. I have also written about Wadad’s experiences in Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Pedagogies of Belonging: Lessons from Refugee Education for Times of Uncertainty,” in The COVID Generation, Children and Youth in and After the Pandemic (Workshop Proceedings 28 February–1 March 2022), ed. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco (Editrice Vaticana, 2023).
• 3UNHCR, Global Trends Report 2023 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2023), 6.
• 4Ibid., 15.
• 5Ibid., 2.
• 6U.S. Census Bureau, “U.S. and World Population Clock” (accessed October 12, 2018); UNHCR, “Population Statistics, Time Series, United States of America 2017” (accessed October 12, 2018); and UNHCR, “Population Statistics, Time Series, Lebanon 2017” (accessed October 12, 2018).
• 7United States Department of Homeland Security, Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2021 (United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2021), 11, 24.
• 8Xavier Devictor and Quy-Toan Do, “How Many Years Have Refugees Been in Exile?” Population and Development Review 43 (2) (2017): 355–369; and James Milner and Gil Loescher, Responding to Protracted Refugee Situations: Lessons From a Decade of Discussion (Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 2011).
• 9Abroon was a participant in a study of Somali students’ pathways to educational success in Kenya. See Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Negin Dahya, and Elizabeth Adelman, “Pathways to Educational Success Among Refugees: Connecting Local and Global Resources,” American Educational Research Journal 54 (6) (2017): 1011–1047.
• 10Raphael was a participant in a fourteen-country study of inclusion of refugees in national education systems. See Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Elizabeth Adelman, Michelle J. Bellino, and Vidur Chopra, “The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy and Practice of Including Refugees in National Education Systems,” Sociology of Education 92 (4) (2019): 346–366.
• 11Olga Sarrado, Cirenia Chavez Villegas, Kristy Siegfried, et al., All Inclusive: The Campaign for Refugee Education (UNHCR, 2022); and Kendra Dupuy, Júlia Palik, and Gudrun Østby, “No Right to Read: National Regulatory Restrictions on Refugee Rights to Formal Education in Low- and Middle-Income Host Countries,” International Journal of Educational Development 88 (2022).
• 12Benjamin Piper, Vidur Chopra, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, et al., “Are Refugees Learning? Early Grade Literacy Outcomes in a Refugee Camp in Kenya,” Journal on Education in Emergencies 5 (2) (2020); and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Benjamin Piper, Celia Reddick, et al., “Navigating the Present and the Future: Language Choice in Refugee Education” (unpublished).
• 13Celia Reddick, “Who Can Participate, Where, and How? Connections Between Language-in-Education and Social Justice in Policies of Refugee Inclusion,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (4) (2023): 668–693; Celia Reddick and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Refugee Education and Medium of Instruction: Tensions in Theory, Policy and Practice,” in Language Issues in Comparative Education, ed. Carolyn Benson and Kimmo Kosonen (Sense Publishers, 2021); Celia Reddick and Vidur Chopra, “Language Considerations in Refugee Education: Languages for Opportunity, Connection, and Roots,” Language and Education 37 (2) (2023): 244–261; Maha Shuayb, “The Art of Inclusive Exclusions: Educating the Palestinian Refugee Students in Lebanon,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 33 (2) (2014): 22–37; Maurice Crul, Frans Lelie, Özge Biner, et al., “How the Different Policies and School Systems Affect the Inclusion of Syrian Refugee Children in Sweden, Germany, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey,” Comparative Migration Studies 7 (1) (2019); Michelle Bellino, Rahul Oka, Marcela Ortiz-Guerrero, et al., “Many a Slip between the Cup and the Lip: Navigating Noncitizenship and Life beyond School in Kakuma Refugee Camp,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (4) (2023): 756–781; Vidur Chopra, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha, “Bridging the Gap Between Imagined and Plausible Futures: What Syrian Refugee Students Wish Their Teachers Knew,” AERA Open 10 (1) (2024): 1–16; Linda Morrice and Hiba Salem, “Quality and Social Justice in Refugee Education: Syrian Refugee Students’ Experiences of Integration into National Education Systems in Jordan,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49 (15) (2023): 3856–3876; and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students are Changing the Future of Education (Harvard University Press, 2022).
• 14Roger Zetter and Héloïse Ruaudel, Refugees’ Right to Work and Access to Labor Markets—An Assessment (Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, 2016); and Thomas Ginn, Reva Resstack, Helen Dempster, et al., 2022 Global Refugee Work Rights Report (Center for Global Development, Asylum Access, Refugees International, 2022).
• 15These four sentences are adapted from Dryden-Peterson, Right Where We Belong, 2.
• 16Ahmed was a participant in a study across three schools that asked Syrian students about their experiences with education in Lebanon. See Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, and Carmen Geha, “Creating Educational Borderlands: Civic Learning in a Syrian School in Lebanon,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (4) (2023). The three paragraphs about Ahmed here are taken verbatim from this article (see pages 785–786), according to the Oxford journal author guidelines.
• 17I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer’s suggestion to make this point explicit.
• 18See Dryden-Peterson, “Sanctuary,” in Right Where We Belong, 23–49.
• 19UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement 2022.
• 20Catherine Lowe Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2020), 18.
• 21Lara Jakes, “For Ukraine’s Refugees, Europe Opens Doors That Were Shut to Others,” The New York Times, February 26, 2022.
• 22Fiona B. Adamson and Kelly M. Greenhill, “Deal-Making, Diplomacy and Transactional Forced Migration,” International Affairs 99 (2) (2023): 707–725.
• 23European Commission, “EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan,” October 15, 2015.
• 24Adamson and Greenhill, “Deal-Making, Diplomacy and Transactional Forced Migration,” 715.
• 25Tabitha Wambui Mwangi, “Exploring Kenya’s Inequality Pulling Apart or Pooling Together?” (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and Society for International Development, 2013).
• 26Interview by Elizabeth Adelman, August 20, 2014, Cairo, Egypt. This interview was conducted for a collaborative project.
• 27Interview by Chris Del Vecchio, April 16, 2014, by Skype. Interview conducted under my supervision in the context of a for-credit class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• 28Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, “Statistical Bulletin for the Academic Year” (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2016); and Lebanon Ministry of Education and Higher Education, “Race Lebanon: Presentation to Education Partners Meeting” (Lebanon Ministry of Education and Higher Education, 2017).
• 29See also Timothy P. Williams, “The Political Economy of Primary Education: Lessons from Rwanda,” World Development 96 (2017): 550–561.
• 30Khawla was a participant in a study across three schools that asked Syrian students about their experiences of education in Lebanon. This study was collaborative with Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha. I have also written about Kawla’s experiences in Dryden-Peterson, Right Where We Belong. Several sentences about Khawla here are taken verbatim from this book (see pages 106–107), according to the Harvard University Press author guidelines.
• 31In Lebanon, refugees have been restricted from practicing certain professions.
• 32Ben W. Ansell, From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Stephen Kosack, The Education of Nations: How the Political Organization of the Poor, Not Democracy, Led Governments to Invest in Mass Education (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• 33See also Shelby Carvalho and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Political Economy of Refugees: How Responsibility Shapes the Politics of Education,” World Development 173 (2024).
• 34For more on the history of refugee education, see Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Refugee Education: The Crossroads of Globalization,” Educational Researcher 45 (9) (2016).
• 35Tony Waters and Kim Leblanc, “Refugees and Education: Mass Public Schooling without a Nation-State,” Comparative Education Review 49 (2) (2005).
• 36For more on this study, see Dryden-Peterson, Adelman, Bellino, and Chopra, “The Purposes of Refugee Education.”
• 37United Nations, The Global Compact on Refugees (United Nations, 2018).
• 38Shelby Carvalho and Alebachew Kemisso Haybano, “‘Refugee Education Is Our Responsibility’: How Governance Shapes the Politics of Bridging the Humanitarian-Development Divide,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (4) (2023): 604–628; and Global Education Monitoring Report Team, Migration, Displacement and Education: Building Bridges Not Walls (UNESCO, 2018).
• 39Interview by Vidur Chopra, July 18, 2014, Kigeme, Rwanda. This interview was conducted for a collaborative project.
• 40Warsan Shire, “Home,” Amnesty International Ireland (accessed October 2, 2024).
• 41Munir and Mira were participants in a study across three schools that asked Syrian students about their experiences of education in Lebanon. This study was collaborative with Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha. I have also written about Munir and Mira’s experiences in Dryden-Peterson, Right Where We Belong. Several sentences and some of the participants’ quotes are taken verbatim from this book (see pages 112–113, 127), according to the Harvard University Press author guidelines. An animated film that graphically shows this experience is available at https://www.reach.gse.harvard.edu/resources/we-see-you-what-syrian-refugee-students-wish-their-teachers-knew. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International deed.
• 42See also Chopra, Dryden-Peterson, Talhouk, and Geha, “Bridging the Gap Between Imagined and Plausible Futures”; Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Hania Mariën, eds., Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict and Migration (Refugee REACH, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2023); and Dryden-Peterson, “Pedagogies of Belonging.”
• 43Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Pedagogies of Uncertainty as Pedagogies of Belonging,” Comparative Education Review 65 (2) (2021): 356–374.
• 44Hiba Salem and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Protection in Refugee Education: Teachers’ Socio-Political Practices in Classrooms in Jordan,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 54 (1) (2023): 75–95. See also portraits of two teachers, Ms. Susan and Mr. Faisal, in Dryden-Peterson and Mariën, Pedagogies of Belonging.
• 45Chopra, Talhouk, Dryden-Peterson, and Geha, “Creating Educational Borderlands.”
• 46This data is from a collaborative study with Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha.
• 47Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Toward Cognitive and Temporal Mobility: Language Considerations in Refugee Education,” Modern Language Journal 105 (2) (2021): 590–595.
• 48Dryden-Peterson, Right Where We Belong; and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, “Refugee Education: Education for an Unknowable Future,” Curriculum Inquiry 47 (1) (2017): 14–24.
• 49Mary Mendenhall and Danielle Falk, “National Inclusion Policy Openings/Barriers for Refugee Teachers: Critical Reflections from Kenya,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (4) (2023): 649–667; Elizabeth Adelman, “When the Personal Becomes the Professional: Exploring the Lived Experiences of Syrian Refugee Educators,” Journal on Education in Emergencies 5 (1) (2019): 94–122; and Salem and Dryden-Peterson, “Protection in Refugee Education.”