Posts tagged Curriculum
“They’ll be the more beautiful hope”: Pedagogies of Belonging in Refugee Education

Research | Refugee students often live in contexts where the inclusion and peace they build within classrooms is met with exclusion and violence in other spaces of their lives, both inside and outside the school. To address this dissonance, teachers of refugees engage in a constant balancing act: teaching their students both for the world that exists and for a world that they wish existed. In research with teachers and students across contexts of conflict and refuge, we observe specific constructive elements of these approaches to teaching and learning, which we call pedagogies of belonging. These pedagogies of belonging are rooted in predictability, adaptability, and future-building, and guided by relationship-building. In considering how more teachers might learn from them and incorporate them into their practices, I examine how teachers in one school in Lebanon who do use these pedagogies have come to do so.

Utilizing Jurgen Habermas’s notion of system and lifeworld and theories of practice, this article explores how teachers in South African, Finnish and Australian schools work towards the double purpose of education. Our focus is on the teachers’ visions of what they are doing, and how these practices are impacted by the larger contexts in which students live. The findings show that teachers understand that refugee students will face barriers in their national systems and aim, through their pedagogical practices, to bridge students’ lifeworlds and educational system demands.

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Refugee education for living well in a world worth living in

Research | Like all education, refugee education has a double purpose of formation of individuals and formation of societies. This can be seen as the double purpose of education: helping students live a good life in a world worth living in. This includes a view about how people should live in the world, and the kind of world we should try to establish.

Utilizing Jurgen Habermas’s notion of system and lifeworld and theories of practice, this article explores how teachers in South African, Finnish and Australian schools work towards the double purpose of education. Our focus is on the teachers’ visions of what they are doing, and how these practices are impacted by the larger contexts in which students live. The findings show that teachers understand that refugee students will face barriers in their national systems and aim, through their pedagogical practices, to bridge students’ lifeworlds and educational system demands.

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The Power Rainbow: a tool to support 3rd–5th graders in analyzing systems of power

The Power Rainbow is a pedagogical tool and framework to support children in power analysis — the ability to make sense of power and how it shapes our lives and societies. It is a graphic representation of nested systems of power, and concretizes the abstract concept of systemic power through shape, color, and text. The Power Rainbow scaffolds the type of structural thinking necessary to research and take action towards more just futures. The tool was originally developed to support children in Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), but it can also be used in critical pedagogy more broadly, such as to support action projects in schools, in workshops with children and caregivers, and in understanding our own lives. 

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Protection in Refugee Education: Teachers’ Socio-Political Practices in Classrooms in Jordan

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.

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