Prelims

Half Title Page

Strategies, Policies and Directions for Refugee Education

Series Page

Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning

Series Editor: Patrick Blessinger

Recent Volumes:

Title Page

Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning Volume 13

Strategies, Policies, and Directions for Refugee Education

Edited By

Enakshi Sengupta

The American University of Kurdistan, Iraq

Patrick Blessinger

St John’s University, USA

International HETL Association, USA

Created in partnership with the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association

https://www.hetl.org/

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-798-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-797-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-937-5 (Epub)

ISSN: 2055-3641 (Series)

Contents

List of Contributors

Foreword

Education in all its forms has a genuinely transformational quality; it transforms individuals, and it transforms the societies in which those individuals live and work. As someone who has spent their working life in universities, I need no convincing of the genuinely transformational power of education. I have seen how education enables individuals to excel and to realize their full potential, how it enables them make a positive impact on the lives of others and how sustained investment in education enhances economic, social, and psychological wellbeing. And of course this is one of the reasons why we see education as a fundamental human right – basic principles of fairness and equity suggest that we should be providing everyone with the opportunity to succeed and to realize their potential.

We live at a time when the numbers of people who have been forced to flee their homes (whether through war, crisis, or persecution) are unprecedented. The UNHCR suggests that there are over 65 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, over 20 million of these are refuges (half of whom are children), and a further 10 million are stateless people. Nowhere are the restrictions on access to the opportunities that education offers more clear evidence than in the refugee community – and yet these are also the very communities which have so much to gain. Education can provide them with protection, security, and the skills they need for the future and with the knowledge and understanding that they need to engage and integrate. In its latest education report, the UNHCR suggests in 2016 that over 3.5 million refugee children did not attend school. Their figures suggest that at primary level, some 91% of children worldwide had access to education, but for refugee children, this figure was only 61%. At secondary level, 84% of children globally accessed education compared with 23% of refugee children. At tertiary level the figures are 1% of refugee youth and 36% of global youth. A failure to provide opportunity to these young people denies them the right to realize their potential and it also denies us all the opportunity to benefit from what they may have to offer.

But, for so many of us, this problem is all too often simply not visible. The very nature of marginalized communities is that the mainstream will be unaware of or may even deny the existence of their manifold problems. And that is why the current volume of essays has such an important role to play. The contributors explore the experience of cross-border refugees, internal refugees, and those refugees who are further marginalized by the virtue of gender or disability. It is perhaps unsurprising that Syria features prominently as a source country in the discussion of cross-border refugees. Important parallels emerge from the experiences of refugees from Myanmar. These perspectives are complemented with studies on a range of host countries as diverse as Australia, Malawi, and Belgium. Internal displacement considers the experience particularly of Nigeria but also South Sudan and Kurdistan. There is a welcome mix of country-specific studies and thematic work with the latter addressing issues as diverse as disability, home schooling, qualification recognition, and career development. The provision of education for refugee communities worldwide will remain a major and pressing challenge; our ability to address this challenge depends on rigorous empirical research, and our ability to learn from the experiences across a diversity of contexts. This book provides an invaluable contribution in our search for viable and sustainable solutions.

Professor Christine Ennew OBE

Provost, University of Warwick

Series Editor’s Introduction