Participatory approaches for strengthening teacher professional development in refugee settings: successes and limitations

ABSTRACT

This article presents critical reflections on a teacher professional development initiative in Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya. Drawing on critical development studies, it examines the successes and limitations of efforts to facilitate a community-based participatory process that aims to respond to local refugee teachers’ needs while simultaneously developing training materials as a global good. It points to the influences of global-local dynamics, including the practical constraints of distance and time, and the role of partnerships that help or hinder these approaches. It embraces the often excluded personal and professional dimensions that intersect with our work. It further wrestles with the opportunities and limitations of these approaches to address larger structural constraints in which teacher professional development initiatives are embedded and offers considerations for future engagements.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory approaches
• refugee teachers
• teacher professional development
• Kenya

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the special issue guest editor Dr. Michelle Bellino, two anonymous reviewers, and Professor Lesley Bartlett for their valuable feedback, which helped me refine the overall argument of this paper. I would also like to express my appreciation to Professors Michael Samuel and Yusuf Sayed for asking tough questions about the Teachers for Teachers project during a writing workshop in Cape Town, which inspired me to work on this particular piece of writing.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Currently called the INEE Teachers in Crisis Contexts Working Group.

2 This training is available at: https://inee.org/resources/teachers-crisis-contexts-training-primary-school-teachers.

3 This training is available at: https://inee.org/resources/teachers-crisis-contexts-peer-coaching-pack.

4 The insights that emerged from mobile mentoring lie beyond the scope of this article (for more information, please see Mendenhall et al. 2018).

5 The open-source training pack available on the INEE website still has the Teacher’s Role and Well-being module placed first, the argument being that the ‘users’ of the materials can ultimately decide on the best sequence based on the needs of the teachers they are working with.

6 Thank you to one of the reviewers for raising the point about the risks of over-individualising the failures and/or shortfalls of projects of this nature without acknowledging the larger structural constraints that are also at play. While I still feel that we had a responsibility to engage more robustly in the case of Teachers for Teachers, I recognize that different projects, studies, and contexts may face constraints that prevent them from taking on this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Teachers College, Columbia University; IDEO.org; and the European Commission.