Session Information
14 ONLINE 23 A, Researching Refugees Schooling
Paper Session
MeetingID: 875 0561 5640 Code: 2rH7j8
Contribution
In recent decades, global education has often been framed in terms of standardised testing, including PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, whereby 15-year-old students are tested for their “ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges” (OECD, 2021). Images on the OECD’s (2021) webpages show youth engaged with books, library resources and technology and located in conventional classrooms. However, globally accepted assessment measures like PISA, along with the promotional images that are used on the OECD’s website, indicate contexts that are not the everyday experiences of some youth, such as the adolescent girls who participated in this research.
This paper explores one form of education available to adolescent girls who, as a result of political conflict, left their home country of Syria and were residing in refugee camps in the Kurdistan Region of Northern Iraq. Life and education for these adolescent girls had been disrupted. Living in tents in a refugee camp, the girls were growing up in an uncertain environment and their education was generally piecemeal.
Regular school education was on offer in the refugee camps. However, the young people also had the opportunity to attend a peer education program (UNFPA, 2005) conducted in the youth space in the camp. This program focused on life and survival skills, addressing topics such as personal safety, mental wellbeing, including anger management and coping with emotions, violence, puberty, sexual reproductive health, early marriage, and addiction. This type of education is both place-based and place-conscious, even though life in refugee camps, almost by definition, is meant to be temporary. The program provides essential skills for the adolescent girls to help them live and survive in the refugee camp context.
The study reported here investigated the peer education program and this paper will address the following research question:
- What does the peer education program in the refugee camps in Northern Iraq offer adolescent girls?
- How does this education meet the needs of the girls themselves and their families and community in the local context of the refugee camp?
- How do these local specificities fit with global aims for education?
- How might this research inform educators who work with refugee youth in humanitarian contexts and in nations that receive refugees?
The research project was conducted in two refugee camps in Northern Iraq, using a case study format. The participants in the study were 48 adolescent girls who attended the peer education program and five peer educators who conducted the program. Data were collected by the first author during week-long visits to the refugee camps. She observed the peer education program in operation and conducted semi-structured interviews with the adolescent girls and peer educators.
The study was framed by a Freirean understanding of education, particularly Freire’s (1993) arguments for a pedagogy of the oppressed. The conceptual framework draws on Freire’s concepts of paradigm, pedagogy and praxis, considered in the broader field relating to the characteristics of a place-based education (Bates et al., 2019; Gola & Rocca, 2021; Hasanzadeh et al., 2018).
Data analysis offers insights into the peer education program, how it operated and its perceived effects on the adolescent girls and the realities of their lives in refugee camps. These insights are considered in relation to global aims and opportunities advocated by the OECD (n.d.a, n.d.b) and the United Nations (n.d.), with the discussion addressing the potential of peer education as an education approach for vulnerable populations, regardless of location. With 27 million children not in school globally because of conflict (UNICEF, 2017), this paper addresses an educational issue of international significance.
Method
The research was conducted in two refugee camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Because the peer education program operated as a short intensive program, usually of one week’s duration, reflecting the often transient nature of refugees’ lives in the camps, data collection was conducted within the time constraints of each iteration of the program. The first author visited each camp for one week. There were two groups of research participants: the adolescent girls attending one iteration of the peer education program in each camp (48 in total) and the peer educators conducting the program (five in total). Data were collected through two ethnographic techniques: observations of the program as it was conducted and semi-structured interviews with the two groups of research participants (Barbour & Schostak, 2005). All data were collected by the first author. Data collection was facilitated by the fact that she could speak both Kurdish and Arabic, the languages used during the program. Her observation notes and reflections were written in English. The project was framed by a conceptual framework developed from Freire (1993). Data analysis involved categorising the data according to three Freirean concepts – paradigm, pedagogy and praxis – to respectively examine the peer education program’s purpose and the issues addressed (the what, as well as the who, when and where), the nature of the pedagogy that was used (the how), and the outcomes as perceived by the program participants. The three concepts were also considered in terms of place-based education and how the program was tailored to the specific characteristics of the environment where the girls were living.
Expected Outcomes
Although the full data analysis has not been completed, the initial findings for this study are showing the perceived effectiveness of the peer education program in providing the adolescent girls with life skills relating to their lives in the camp, including difficult decisions they had to make, their safety, relationships, and anger management. From this first data analysis, it is apparent that the program worked to build life skills through the use of a range of problem-solving strategies. Group work and dialogue were incorporated into the pedagogy of the program, with the aim of producing transformative outcomes. Indeed, the adolescent girls reported that they had changed in numerous ways as a result of the program. We recognise, however, that the short-term nature of the program and the short-term window for collecting data mean that such findings do not give any indication about longer term effects. Further data analysis will be completed relating to place-based education. However, initial signs are that the program is context-specific and is aimed at developing life skills for the current circumstances of the adolescent girls. The type of education on offer to the adolescent girls is very different from the type of education on offer to adolescent girls in other parts of the world. At this stage, before we have completed the full data analysis, we think that our discussion will focus on the value of educational programs like the one investigated, for the short term and the longer term, and the tensions with global expectations for “reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges” (OECD, 2021).
References
Barbour, R. S., & Schostak, J. (2005). Interviewing and focus groups. In B. Somekh & C. Lewin (Eds.), Research methods in the social sciences (pp. 41–48). Sage. Bates, K., Teudt, M., & Collier, J. (2019). Mapping points for a place-based pedagogy of practice. Curriculum Perspectives, 39, 91–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-019-00071-7 Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin. Gola, G., & Rocca, L. (2021). Place-based education: An educational approach inside local place. Global Education Review, 8(2–3), 81–91. Hasanzadeh, K., Laatikainen, T., & Kyttä, M. (2018). A place-based model of local activity spaces: Individual place exposure and characteristics. Journal of Geographical Systems, 20, 227–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-017-0264-z OECD. (2021). PISA: Programme for international student assessment. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ OECD. (n.d.a). OECD Future of education and skills 2030. https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/ OECD. (n.d.b). Transformative competencies for 2030. https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/transformative-competencies/in_brief_Transformative_Competencies.pdf UNFPA. (2005). Youth peer education toolkit: Stands for peer education programmes http://petri-sofia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Standards- for-Peer-Education-Programmes.pdf UNICEF. (2017). 27 million children are out of school in conflict zones. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/27-million-children-out-school- conflict-zones United Nations. (n.d.). Quality education: Why it matters. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/4_Why-It-Matters-2020.pdf
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