When wars and civil unrest cause people to leave their countries, newspaper headlines draw our attention to these situations through words like “crisis” (O’Rourke, 2014). When the frequency and intensity of headlines reduce, the situation of displaced people making their home in new, sometimes temporary, countries remains. Three of these new countries are Canada, Germany and the United States of America (hereafter the USA) (Ostrand, 2015). As three members of the G7, a group of seven countries touted as world leaders, the collective reaction of their politicians at the macro level of immigration policies is noted. 

Yet, little is known about the impact those macro-level immigration policies have as they filter down through the meso level of the provinces (Canada); Länder (Germany) and states (the USA) which manage the institution of education. It is at the micro level of the post-secondary pre-service teacher education programs where future teachers are prepared for work with refugee children in K-12 classrooms (Clark-Kasimu, 2015; McCall & Vang, 2012). The sudden nature of refugees’ arrivals and the traumatic circumstances that caused these people to leave their home country pose challenges for the institution of education. How the institutions of education in each of these countries are structured at this meso level and how pre-service teachers are taught about refugee education reveal the similarities and differences in refugee education in each country.

This study examines how refugee education in Canada, Germany, and the USA is conceptualized and enacted. We focus on three specific cases, one in each of the province of Alberta, Canada; the city-state Hamburg, Germany, and the state of Vermont, USA respectively. We reveal how important elements including geography, history, and the current political climate influence refugee education. In each case, we detail one specific study to provide a picture of how pre-service teacher education is responding to refugee education. Through an emerging comparative institutional analysis (Powell, 2020), we demonstrate the promise this new methodology in educational research (see Saito & Pham, 2019) holds and what can be learned from this comparison of these three countries.

The main aim of this symposium is to provide perspectives from three different countries by examining how pre-service teachers in one university in each country are prepared for teaching refugee students. The first contribution focuses on how one Canadian university integrates the teaching of refugee students into courses designed to prepare pre-service teachers in the areas of literacy, diversity, and inclusion. The second contribution illustrates how a larger institutional project in Germany on the improvement of content-based language teaching can serve to provide pre-service teachers with basic knowledge for working with multilingual learners, including refugee students. The third contribution, from the USA, considers how service-learning can enhance pre-service teacher learning about diverse students, including refugees. Each contribution will consider the challenges that also emerge, some of which are common to all three perspectives, but some of which are uniquely resulting from the local country’s historical, political, and social situation. These cases make up the first step in our comparative institutional analysis.

This work is important as real and lasting change in how teachers work with refugee students starts, in part, through the meaningful preparation of pre-service teachers to work with these students. The elements of each contribution - integration, content-based teaching, and service-learning - provide insight into creative and locally-relevant solutions to a global social issue. 

Clark-Kasimu, N. (2015). Serving refugee students and unaccompanied minors: More than just learning English. Voices in Urban Education, 41, 20–25. McCall, A. L., & Vang, B. (2012). Preparing preservice teachers to meet the needs of Hmong refugee students. Multicultural Perspectives, 14(1), 32–37. http://doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2012.646847 O’Rourke, J. (2014). Education for Syrian refugees: The failure of second-generation human rights during extraordinary crises. Albany Law Review, 78(2), 711–738. Ostrand, N. (2015). The Syrian refugee crisis: A comparison of responses by Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Journal on Migration and Human Security, 3(3), 255–279. http://doi.org/10.14240/jmhs.v3i3.51 Powell, J. J. W. (2020). Comparative education in an age of competition and collaboration. Comparative Education, 56(1), 57–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2019.1701248 Saito, E., & Pham, T. (2019). A comparative institutional analysis on strategies that graduates use to show they are ‘employable’: A critical discussion on the cases of Australia, Japan, and Vietnam. Higher Education Research and Development, 38(2), 369–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1529024