By Fernando M. Reimers, Professor of the Practice of International Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I write these notes on the flight back from Stockholm to Boston, having just participated in the Education International Refugee Education Conference (21-22 November 2016).
A hands on conference, designed to provide shared knowledge, to engage in dialogue and to construct together actionable steps to advance the education of refugees, this gathering modeled the potential within reach of creating collective intelligence, by making explicit and visible what teachers, union leaders and other practitioners lready know, and together designing solutions based on that knowledge.
This format led to valuable products, some of which I will summarize below, but also modeled for participants the ways in which unions and their partners can engage their membership in active and participatory processes of design thinking that help develop actionable plans and implementation strategies, moving the profession from understanding the challenge, to hope and clear action that can direct what to do on Monday morning.
Given the global nature of the Unions federated in Education International, the group that convened at the conference has the potential to become an improvement network, committing to the simultaneous implementation of the actions identified at the conference, with appropriate processes to evaluate their results so that these actions lead to rapid improvement cycles that expand the evidence base of which of these practices work best, in what context, for which children and at what cost.
The teaching profession sees with great moral clarity the need to step up and lead in advancing the education rights of refugees. Ideally in collaboration and with the support of governments, but ready to nudge and defy governments when this becomes necessary.
Teachers and those leading their unions have the means to mobilize and make visible abundant professional knowledge about what are the relevant questions that need to be addressed in educating refugees, and to propose ways forward in addressing them. We can’t excuse inaction in lack of knowledge about what to do.
In six workshops, the participants in the conference addressed some of the core questions and dilemmas in educating refugees. Those led to specific actionable steps which can now inform the development of specific national strategies and action plans. I summarize here the actions generated by two of those workshops, which I had the pleasure to facilitate.
The workshop supporting teachers addressed four interrelated topics:
a) How to address teacher shortages
The solutions proposed by this working group include short term measures to provide immediate relief to the unexpected demand for teachers, and long term measures that can help stabilize a system with adequate supply of teachers. These options consider essentially the situation of refugees who have already transitioned to host countries, and for whom the purpose of education is to support their integration into that society. The needs in settings which are transitional are likely to differ, and they were addressed by the next group in this workshop.
In the short term, the following options are proposed:
b) How to support teaching in refugee centers
This group focused on teaching in refugee centers and identified two key challenges, inadequate teaching facilities and shortages of adequately qualified teachers. This group developed the following recommendations:
c) How to provide effective professional development and support to teachers working with refugees
This group identified the following core competencies which teachers educating refugee students should attain:
The group proposed the following as actions that could help teachers gain those competencies:
d) How to provide refugees who are teachers work opportunities.
The working group sees this option as a valuable asset based approach to address the shortage of teachers. Two barriers, however, need to be overcome: refugee teachers need to obtain the necessary qualifications to be accredited to teach in the host country, and they need to develop the language proficiency to be able to teach in that country. The goal of engaging refugee teachers should be to support them in a developmental trajectory that leads them to meet these two conditions. The following six actions can be deployed along that trajectory:
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The workshop confronting the professional challenge addressed four interrelated topics. The first two pertain specifically to supporting refugee students, while the last two refer to the education of all students, refugees and non-refugees alike:
a) Supporting the development of host country language and values
In what way language development will be supported will depend on the policy framework and goals of the country. At a minimum, refugee children will be supported to gain the language of instruction of the host country. It would be desirable if they could also be supported to gain and maintain proficiency in their mother tongue, as this would expand the linguistic assets of the host country. Supportive actions for effective language development would include using teaching assistants with mother tongue for provisional support or maintenance.
Teachers need also to engage in frequent and effective dialogue with parents that can help them appreciate and communicate respect of the home culture and values, while helping the family navigate and access the codes of participation and power in the host country.
b) Personalization of instruction, using adaptive technologies
Personalization is a cornerstone of good education for all children, the most effective way to recognize that learners are individuals with unique interest, backgrounds and strengths. Given the heterogenous experiences and backgrounds of refugee children, personalization is especially needed to teach them.
The group proposed three recommendations to achieve this:
c) Educating the whole child
In a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, education systems must help students develop a wide range of capabilities, not only cognitive, but also social and emotional. To achieve this, the curriculum needs to first explicitly name the competencies in these various domains that it aims to develop, and then map backwards the pedagogical sequences and instructional activities that will provide effective opportunities to develop those competencies. The following four activities were proposed to help students develop such curriculum and effective pedagogies:
d) Advancing global citizenship Education
How refugee children integrate into host societies is contingent not only in what skills and competencies they themselves gain, but in how other members of the society think of them. Helping all students understand the common humanity they have with students from varied cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds, including refugees, is a goal of a cosmopolitan education in the 21st century. The group working on this topic formulated three recommendations: