How educators navigate language ideology and pedagogy in refugee education

ABSTRACT

There are over 30 million people living as refugees today, nearly half of whom are under 18. For most young people fleeing conflict and persecution, their only option is to pursue education in already-stretched national school systems in host countries neighboring those they have left, often in unfamiliar languages. Despite the pressing issue of refugee education globally, there is little research about the educational inclusion of refugees in the Global South, not least related to language. This study begins to address this gap. Through a comparative case study, I draw on school-wide and classroom observations and interviews with educators across three schools in Kampala, Uganda to understand how educators navigate the linguistic inclusion of refugees at school. I find that, in the absence of guidance or training, school leaders draw on their ideological beliefs about multilingualism and migration to determine how to approach linguistic diversity at school. In turn, classroom teachers navigate constrained implementation spaces, balancing policies that require a dominant language as the language of instruction with multilingual realities in classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee education
• language ideology
• language-in-education
• Uganda
• educators
• implementation space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All research participant and school names are pseudonyms.

2 Katogo is a word for mixture, used in Luganda, which HT Thomas grew up speaking.

3 All class administrators are licensed and able to teach a subject/grade at the schools they lead, although they did so infrequently over the period of my data collection.

4 One challenge that all three schools faced was frequent teacher absenteeism, often because of attending a training during the school day, family illness, and weather constraints. Given this, many teachers filled in for each other across subjects and grades, a practice I record in my classroom observation notes when relevant.

5 CRE = Christian Religious Education.

6 St. Nepomuscene’s school schedule was much more fluid than the schedules at the other two schools. As a result, teachers were frequently absent because of training and other obligations, the school day was often interrupted for prayers at the local Catholic church, and test practice dominated the last weeks of the school year. Because of this, it was more difficult to complete both interviews and classroom observations with all teachers at this school than it was at the other two schools.

7 Runyoro is spoken in western Uganda; Luganda is spoken in central Uganda; Lusoga is spoken in eastern Uganda; Samia is spoken at the border of Uganda and Kenya; Swahili is spoken throughout East Africa, but Claudine’s father worked in Kenya, which is how she learned this language.

8 This school was run by the Catholic church during British colonial rule; it is now government-run but receives support from the Catholic church.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education, Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship at Harvard University, and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

Notes on contributors

Celia Reddick

Celia Reddick is an Assistant Professor of Education and International Development at Florida State University. There, she leads a research program focusing on education in contexts of conflict and displacement. She holds an M.Sci. in TESOL from Lehman College, an M.Ed. in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.