What is our understanding of “refugee education”? How does education help refugees prepare for an intellectual and better life? What is missing in refugee education?
This recent publication by Maurice Crul and LERRN Partner Maha Shuayb in Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees highlights three significant points regarding refugee education. First, it discusses refugee education’s isolation from non-refugees that is partially due to an increasing “reification” of refugees. Second, it highlights the gaps between refugee education and the larger education field, resulting from political and state policies. Third, the publication sheds light on obstacles to the advancement of refugee education and the short-term thinking and conceptualization of refugee education due to the dominance of a humanitarian and relief paradigm that has resulted in a lack of a long-term vision of education provisions for refugees. It also draws attention to the need for research on refugee education that addresses the schism between research in the Global North conducted in the Global South.