Resources for K-12 Educators

Exploring Safety, Community and Learning is a K-5 curriculum inspired by Zuhra Faizi's educator resource, Cultivating Trust: How Educators Can Build Relationships with their Afghan Refugee Students. We provide children’s books to spark activities and discussions surrounding key topics raised by Zuhra in this resource. While inspired by Zuhra’s research with Afghan youth, the curriculum is intended to be used with children from any community.

Research | This article examines why and how teachers of refugees enact protection by engaging with local forms of harm facing their refugee students. Through portraits of two classrooms in Jordan, we describe the relationships that form between Jordanian teachers and Syrian students, and the protection practices teachers develop in response. We propose a more comprehensive conceptualization of protection in refugee education that layers socio-political protection on legal and rights-based protection commonly embedded in humanitarian activities.

Resource | Refugee Stories: Education: Obstacles and Aspirations draws on findings from a doctoral research on young refugees’ educational experiences in England. The study investigated how young refugee people and their families have encountered the education system while considering the implications of living as refugees in England. Young refugee people’s right to education is enshrined in British law; however, the UK has no specific educational policy for them.Invisibilizing practices add to the silence around their experiences and needs. Refugee Stories tells young refugees’ and families’ stories to amplify their voices and shine a light on the social and material conditions they experience.

Video | What would it take to ensure that all refugee young people have access to learning that enables them to feel a sense of belonging? Refugee REACH founder and director Sarah Dryden-Peterson joined Steve Paikin on TVO’s The Agenda to discuss her book “Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education,” and to explore this question.

Resource | Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict & Migration is a book is about educators, and for educators, and the practices they have developed to create welcoming communities in settings of migration. Each page of the book is a “microportrait” of one educator who we have come to know by spending time in their classroom and school. We learn from educators how they build welcoming communities, how they create space for dissent, for dialogue, for trust, for new identities, for future-building, and how they envision and build newly imagined communities.

Resource | This new resource is for educators who seek to know about their Afghan students’ experiences to better support them. The resource highlights three central elements that can cultivate trust: Safe classrooms, Community connections, and Quality learning. It ends with suggested questions for educators to facilitate conversations about each of the three elements of trust with students, families, and community leaders.

Video | New animation and research by the Refugee REACH team examines pedagogies of care and belonging in refugee contexts. Research included 8 months of observations in public and private schools in Lebanon and over 100 hours of interviews with Syrian Grade 9 students, their teachers, and families.

Video | New animation and research by the Refugee REACH team examines pedagogies of care and belonging in refugee contexts. Research included 8 months of observations in public and private schools in Lebanon and over 100 hours of interviews with Syrian Grade 9 students, their teachers, and families.

Video | ‘Coffee & Chat’ with Refugee REACH director Sarah Dryden-Peterson focusing on refugee education in Europe and North America, hosted by the SIRIUS Policy Network.

Insight | Student leaders and educators in Refugee REACH director Sarah Dryden-Peterson's new module at HGSE, Education in Uncertainty, share how they were able to connect their studies to practice and respond to emerging needs of their local communities and build supports during Covid-19.

Insight | HGSE faculty, including Refugee REACH’s own Sarah Dryden-Peterson, share the ways in which technology helped them explore hands-on learning experience, foster community, and continue the conversation outside the classroom during Covid-19.

Multimedia | This is the story of Sandra, a woman from El Salvador whose life and education was affected by civil war, and now devotes herself to developing a program for recently arrived immigrant teens in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Digital gallery | A curated website that displays artwork created by Rohingya individuals living in Cox’s Bazar, in an effort to bring light to the voices of the Rohingya people.