In this paper, we examine the experiences of refugee student teachers in Malaysia and explore their subjective professional and personal development throughout an International Post-Graduate Teaching Certificate (PGCEi) that was designed specifically for them by the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Much has been written about inclusive refugee students’ education (Veck and Wharton, 2021) and lack of provision for refugee education (Proyer, et al 2021; McIntyre et al 2023), however, the experience of refugee teachers has been scarcely explored in the field of inclusive education (Özçürümez, et al 2023).

This presentation is based on a research study that runs alongside the PGCEi teaching programme called “Teachers for Education Equity”. One of the unique features of the PGCEi programme is that it is designed to be in dialogue with research throughout. Additionally, and more broadly, the PGCEi programme is a unique learning experience for all parties involved, well beyond the strictly conceived teacher training and professional development aspect. It offers ample and ongoing opportunities for learning from and with the trainee teachers and opens up novel possibilities for following teachers' professional and self-making journeys. It also creates a space for reflecting on and critically reconsidering foundational elements of pedagogical practices and professional identities in the Global South, which are often taken for granted. The research programme running alongside the PGCEi course consists of three strands, and the paper draws on one strand of research ‘Achieving Equity through Inclusive Learning Communities’. This is an ongoing, qualitative, longitudinal project, conducted over a three-year period and focusing particularly on teachers who have a refugee background themselves and who also teach at refugee schools or Learning Centres as these are called in the local Malaysian contexts.

We use post-structural approaches, in particular the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2020) to follow the entanglement of subjective professional and personal experiences and processes of becoming of 20 refugee teachers on the PGCEI Programme. Engaging with social topological aspects of their geographical displacement in connection with global and local dynamics, we explore the assemblage of neoliberal practices, community work, emotions and affects, teachers’ work and life experiences and how this shapes their professional and personal trajectories. In capturing their narratives (Phoenix, 2013), we use decolonial thinking (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2011, Cusicanqui, 2010) to shift away from Western-centric perspectives on teaching and learning, considering trainee teachers as ‘experts by experience’, with the purpose to validate new and local forms of being a teacher (DeLissovoy, 2010).

The paper aims to i) give visibility to the processes of becoming of refugee teachers at the intersection of multiple minority traits throughout the PGCEi programme; ii) give insights into the cross-fertilisation of Western and Eurocentric analytical tools and decolonial thinking to explore refugee teachers’ teaching and learning experiences of the Programme; iii) present modalities in which education can be rethought through the making of equitable educational communities in Malaysia.

The ECER conference, with its European perspective and spirit, can provide a critical platform to address and expand these lines of discussion both by enabling the encountering of scholars and researchers from the Global North and South and by opening a generative space for discussion on the legacies of European colonialism on the current forced migratory movements and their relation to education and displaced lives of teachers, students, and whole educational communities.

The paper presents insights generated throughout the first eighteen months of the research. Research carried out over this period, focused on a documentary analysis, including international documents and reports, national policy and grey literature related to the present educational landscape in Malaysia and the state of refugees in policy. The (ongoing) empirical research focuses on understanding the contexts where trainee teachers work and to capture their journeys as they move out of the programme. We carried out semi-structured interviews with headteachers of the Learning Centres to understand the local contexts, the histories and conditions in the schools and the local communities in which teachers find themselves in. Semi-structured individual interviews were carried out upon the completion of the first year of the course, to gain further and detailed insights on teachers' experiences and reflections. Here we present the analysis of short reflective narratives which were collected in writing at two points during the first year of the course, the first at the beginning of the course and the second towards the end of the first year. While assemblage theory and socio-topological approach to the programme and teachers’ refugee background enabled an analysis of how global dynamics entangle with local experiences, narrative analysis elicited teachers’ processes of becoming through the attention to the ‘small stories’, allowing ‘insights into the dilemmas and troubled subject positions speakers negotiate as they tell their stories and so into their understandings of current consensus about what it is acceptable to say and do in their local and national cultures’ (Phoenix, 2013, 2). In this way, the entanglement of the three lines criss-crossing the assemblage and teachers’ individual narratives brings to the fore intersectional experiences and produce a synthesis of personal and contextual approaches (Phoenix, 2013). Lastly, decolonial thinking informed our methods, reflexivity processes and positionality (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). We recognise the potential implications for neo-colonial processes in the development, and teaching, of a PGCEi developed in a country (the United Kingdom) that was Malaysia former coloniser. However, based on decolonial principles, processes for identifying, validating and taking on board local knowledge and teachers’ personal experiences were built both into the programme and the research. To this end, research runs alongside it creating channels for communication and feedback between the teachers/participants and the teaching team, opening a space for reflection on researchers’ positionality and the power relations implicated in the Western perspectives that could frame the analysis.

In this presentation, we first offer an overview of both programme and research. We will then describe the context of Malaysia and the theoretical approach underpinning the research. We will present the research project and its relation with the PGCEi Programme, to thus move to the analysis of teachers’ subjective narratives, following their subjective journeys and processes of becoming. At the end, we provide a discussion on how these can inform and envisage different modalities of being and doing in education - that the honour rich and difficult teachers’ life experiences, - that challenge Eurocentric and Western exportation of education programmes and teaching and learning practices, - and that provide alternative modalities to make educational communities equitable and inclusive through the work of refugee teachers. By deploying decolonial thinking and post-structuralist lens, this study explores teachers’ subjective and professional experiences and process of learning throughout the Programme and the relations this process has with the potential implications for inclusion and equity in their educational communities. The presentation answers and aims to contribute to this year’s ECER theme ‘Charting the Way Forward: Education, Research, Potentials and Perspectives’ in a four-fold way: i) Generating compelling evidence of the positive impact of inclusive teaching; ii) Making a transformational contribution to educational equity and inclusion in Malaysia; iii) Creating a model for effective training and development of teachers working with underserved and refugee communities globally, iv) Providing a space for reflection for European countries, scholars, and professionals, in particular but not solely, the ones that come and work in former colonising countries, on the matrix of power and oppression that still defines some of the ways in which education and subjective experiences are done and shaped in the Global South.

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