“I really love to sit alone. To think of many things, about the future, about what will happen. At the same time, I tell myself: maybe there’s no tomorrow. I live the details of each day and try to make the best of it. I try to live day by day, but I also strive a lot for the future, a lot”.
– Wadad, Beirut, Lebanon, 2019
In 2019, Wadad[1] was a student in Grade 9 in a public school in Lebanon. At that time almost 18, she had arrived in Beirut when she was 13, having fled a suburb of Damascus, Syria where she grew up. Her school there was “just normal”, and she described living in “an area where there wasn’t a lot of things happening”. One day, a bomb fell in the school compound, and everything changed. Wadad said she knew “that we couldn’t stay there [in Syria]” but she also expected she would return to her school in the following semester. “The plan”, she said, “was for us to go back [to Syria]”.
Five years later, Wadad finds herself constantly embedded in the dissonance between her reality of long-term displacement in Lebanon and the plan she had five years ago, which is the one she still has now: to return to her home in Syria. Wadad now prefers not to think about the geography of her future, explaining she has come to realize how powerless it makes her feel to dwell on what she cannot control. She explained with some resignation, “It doesn’t make a difference where [my future] happens, but I prefer a place where I’m most comfortable in my job, my family… A place where I have people I love, not a place where I’m alone”. What Wadad has not given up, and is adamant that she will never give up, is a focus on this future. Yet maintaining it was a constant challenge for Wadad and her Syrian classmates. They found much of their education instead centered on what Wadad described as the “details of each day”, of getting by in the present.[2]
Wadad’s experience of disconnects between present and future echoes refugee education across time and place. Once displaced, refugees now typically live without permanent homes for between 10 and 20 years (Devictor 2019; Devictor and Do 2017). Yet despite this long-term displacement, the dominant narrative was until recently that refugee education was temporary, a “holding ground”, designed to create stability in the present but not to create futures (Dryden-Peterson 2016, 2022). Short-term planning, stop-gap measures, and promises of imminent ‘return to normalcy’ were unfortunately the same approaches that dominated most educational planning and practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. We see in refugee education, as we have seen around the world during the pandemic, that this kind of emergency education does not meet the purposes communities have for education during times of uncertainty, particularly as related to what Wadad has learned she will not give up: a focus on the future.
In this essay, I examine lessons from the field of refugee education for times of uncertainty, including current and future pandemics. For many young people, especially those who experience marginalization and including refugees, uncertainty in education is not new. Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has made more visible for more people how uncertainty shapes education (Vavrus 2021). Importantly, rather than conceiving of uncertainty as only a negative state to circumvent, educators, students, and families have been forced to reckon with the idea that uncertainty is increasingly unavoidable and that we must find ways to learn from and within it. Expanding on conceptualizations of the resonance of lessons from refugee education from early in the Covid-19 pandemic (Dryden-Peterson 2021a, 2021b) and drawing on newer empirical findings (Salem and Dryden-Peterson 2022; Dryden-Peterson et al. Under Review; Dryden-Peterson 2022), I outline three elements of “pedagogies of belonging”: pedagogies of predictability, adaptability, and future-building.[3]
Pedagogies are practices of teaching. They embody envisioned purposes of education and the theories and values behind these purposes (Alexander 2001; Schweisfurth, Thomas, and Smail 2020). Belonging is integrally tied to ideas of “home”, including stability and feelings of being oneself, not only in private spaces but also public ones (e.g., Antonsich 2010; Yuval-Davis 2006; Hovil 2016; Bloemraad 2018), including schools. In our research with refugees, we find that belonging is also integrally tied to being able to link together one’s past, one’s present, and one’s future and to capacities to contribute as an individual and as a member of a collective (Chopra and Dryden-Peterson 2020; Dryden-Peterson 2022).
This essay explores, in turn, pedagogies of predictability, adaptability, and future-building, all dependent on relationships and oriented toward belonging. Our research finds that refugee young people describe these pedagogies as important to them as they seek to learn in the present and build their futures. These lessons from refugee education are relevant for the continued educational, economic, and political uncertainty so many students face in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and for anticipated future uncertainties related to pandemics, conflict, and climate change.
Pedagogies of Predictability
Pedagogies of predictability, as I have described elsewhere, include “the safety created through knowing, understanding, and trusting” (Dryden-Peterson 2021a). These pedagogies are particularly important in contexts of uncertainty, where much is, by definition, unpredictable. This lack of predictability can relate to both the “day by day” elements of education and the future-oriented elements of education, as Wadad described them, and is both pragmatic and existential. Pragmatically, knowing that school begins and ends at the same time each day and counting on the same person to be your teacher each day supports young people to build a sense of routine. These small elements of routine can help to create some stability. For example, in my long-term research in Uganda, refugee students described the volatility they felt in not knowing if their refugee status might be taken away at a moment’s notice, echoing Wadad’s sentiment that “maybe there’s no tomorrow”. What countered this constant fear was the knowledge that each day, at least in the meantime, could hold the predictability of going to school and finding the same teachers (Dryden-Peterson 2006, 2022). In research in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic, one recently arrived refugee student described how knowing that a teacher would pop up on his computer screen at the same time each day helped him to create some kind of order from what otherwise felt like endless chaos at home.[4]
Syrian students in Lebanon identified pedagogies of predictability as essential not only for routines and this sense of stability, but also for learning that could support them in their long-term educational goals. Students identified predictability in how lessons would take place and what would be learned each day as a way to ensure they would finish the curriculum, especially in the year of a high-stakes exam. Their anxieties around lack of predictability were particularly accentuated when teachers’ pedagogies came in the way of doing so. For example, Mira, one of Wadad’s classmates, found too much time being wasted during her English classes, especially in what she observed to be the teacher’s futile attempts to discipline the class by changing the seating plan frequently. “Not a month goes by without her switching our seats”, Mira said. “She makes a poster with our new seating… She wasted two lessons just over the seating”. For Mira, this was precious time where she found she “loses English”. Mira worried about this experience in English class limiting her opportunities for passing the high-stakes Brevet exam that stood as a gatekeeper into further education and thus the future she imagined.
Pedagogies of Adaptability
Pedagogies of adaptability involve “capacities to analyze, renegotiate, pivot, and transform” teaching and learning to meet both short-term and long-term goals, especially as conditions and needs shift. Predictability and adaptability can be at odds with each other, and essential to pedagogies of adaptability is transparency about why the adaptation is needed and co-construction of these adaptations. The same school in Uganda where students deeply valued the predictability of coming to the same place each day faced a situation where the leader of the church where the school was located asked them to relocate. In this situation, the teachers synthesized pedagogies of predictability and adaptability. Even as they moved the school, the teachers looked for a space in the same area where children would follow similar, and known, routes to school; they maintained the same teachers; and they supported students to understand that the school was the people who made it up, not just the building (Dryden-Peterson 2006, 2022).
Pedagogies of adaptability also play a role in ensuring focus on the future and not only the present. The school Wadad and Mira attended in Beirut, Lebanon felt limited to them by its narrow focus on the Lebanese curriculum, predictable though that was. Through useful to their present goal of passing the Brevet exam, they often found this curriculum lacking in relevance to their lives outside of school and to the futures they planned, which they imagined would be outside of Lebanon. Teachers who were part of our research at another school nearby, on the other hand, embraced pedagogies of adaptability and predictability simultaneously. They wanted to be sure their students did pass the high-stakes Brevet, and so followed the Lebanese curriculum closely. At the same time, to meet the needs of their students for whom English was a new language, they translated the English textbooks into Arabic. They also created ways to, as the Principal explained, ensure that students “have not forgotten about their Syrian origins”, by including elements of Syrian culture and history, and adding a religion class (Chopra et al. Under Review).
In research in Jordan (Salem and Dryden-Peterson 2022), we observed how pedagogies of adaptability enabled teachers to get unstuck from the ways they were accustomed to teaching and to re-imagine new forms of teaching and learning with their Syrian students.[5] Jordanian teachers learned how to enact what we call “socio-political protection” in their teaching. Jordanian teachers learned from their Syrian students about the harms they experienced in their education, including limited access to the curriculum through missed schooling and language, lack of relevance of the curriculum to their lives and future goals, and limited opportunities to practice or use what they learned in terms of social, economic, civic, and political participation in Jordan. Through relationships with their students, teachers also learned to question the structures that created these harms and, in small and incremental ways, adapt their teaching practices with goals of shifting them. For example, as one teacher recognized that his students “just wanted to be connected to their homes as much as possible”, he allowed them to use their phones in some periods of the school day to communicate with and receive news from home. Another teacher advocated for a change in school hours so that her female students could continue coming to school and not walk home in the dark. In synthesizing research across nine discrete studies and in 23 country contexts (Dryden-Peterson 2022), these pedagogies of adaptability, centered in relationships, emerged as central to refugee students’ feelings of learning, belonging, and being successful in their education, particularly as they supported students to make sense of and navigate the inequities they experienced inside and outside of school.
Pedagogies of Future-Building
Future-building, as I have described it elsewhere, “involves imagining, and planning for, multiple possible futures – here, there, and/or somewhere else entirely”. This process is not linear, nor “seeking some sedentary and arrived-at geographic, spatial, or social state”. Core to future-building is “cognitive mobility” – “the ways in which young people can apply what they learn in school across place and time” (Dryden-Peterson 2021b).
The concept of cognitive mobility relies less on education as bounded by geography and historical moment and more on education as enabler of opportunity across place and time. For many types of uncertainty, this kind of mobility is essential as it counteracts other forms of mobility that are restricted. In refugee education, futures have generally been categorized in three ways, all of them geographic: return to the country of origin, integration in the country of exile, or resettlement to a third country (Betts and Collier 2017; UNHCR 2021). Yet what we see in research with refugee students across contexts is that they largely reject these geographic futures, given how dependent those futures are on migration policies that they have experienced to be both restrictive and unpredictable. We have learned from them a different way to conceptualize futures in terms of opportunities (Dryden-Peterson 2022; Dryden-Peterson et al. Under Review). This means education that cultivates capacities to apply what one learns across place and time. It is education that does not set up the false choice of having to choose between the present and the future, between the kinds of learning that are deemed worthy within the education refugee young people experience at the present in one specific geography and moment in time and the opportunities this narrow education then might trade away for a future that evolves differently (vis-a-vis language, see Dryden-Peterson 2021b).
Drawing on students’ cognitive mobility and seeking ways to further cultivate it were tools some educators drew on during the Covid-19 pandemic when modalities of education shifted from in-person schooling to remote learning. In best-case scenarios, this involved educators supporting students to connect their previous experiences in schools to new ways of learning from a distance and to how this new learning connected to future learning and goals, even those futures that remained unknowable in that moment (see, for example, Reich and Mehta 2021). Often, though, students did not find space to connect their past learning to their present situations, nor to envision the future, instead stuck in the crisis of the present. Students found themselves trying to learn in ways that both they and their teachers knew were ineffective, holding on to the ideas that someday soon all would return to “normal”. This approach promised a near-term resumption of predictability, yet this promise remained elusive. Instead of leveraging opportunities for cognitive mobility, this approach focuses on stasis.
Peter, a refugee student who arrived in the United States in 2019, described how he experienced school during the pandemic as completely devoid of the relationships that had been central to his learning in a new place: “Things have been so different since we went remote. Since we started learning online stuff. At first, before we went remote, I used to interact every single day in class with my fellow students, the teacher stuff like that. But I will be honest, it’s really, really hard to interact with people mostly like when you login on Zoom, all the screens are black. It’s hard to talk to someone that you are not seeing actually… I don’t interact with people every single day”. Yet for months and months, all this student would see on his screen was one image of his teacher and rows of blank, black boxes of his peers. “Are you all still with us”, his teacher would say in class. “Maybe give us a thumbs up so I know you are still there behind the black box”. In many cases, rather than focus on new ways to build relationships, these teachers and students treated the situation as a holding ground, just like in refugee education, until their lives could return to normal (Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019; Dryden-Peterson 2022).
Pedagogies for future-building do not assume a return to normal over the near-term and open space for reimagining long-term futures. They require supporting students to connect their pasts, their presents, and their futures. We find that students attribute major roles to teachers in supporting these connections, through pedagogies of adaptability and through refusing to be stuck in present crises. Peter found some teachers encouraging students to maintain links to their past learning and activities but telling stories about their own ways of doing this. One teacher told students about the books she was reading in the evenings, even when she had to push herself to continue this hobby during the challenges of Covid-19 for her family. Peter’s classmates, Teddy, described how another teacher used this moment to re-tool herself with a new skill, how to file her own taxes. Teddy explained, “she told us, she had always filed her taxes through like some other taxing agency, I guess, or whatever they’re called. And then this year she decided, ‘I'm a math teacher, I should know how to file my own taxes’, so she would always keep this updated on how that was going”. Through the process, Teddy and his classmates began to think about filing their own taxes, a small window into the futures they still sought to imagine and prepare for, even while learning from home.
Some teachers are also more explicit about the connections between their pedagogies and future-building. In Lebanon, we document how one teacher in a government school adapted the rigid curriculum to explicitly engage her students in thinking about the current status quo and what they wish to be different in the future. Completing the lesson, the teacher asked students to think about the meaning of the civics lesson beyond the classroom. She prompted them to think about how through engagement in civic activities they “might be able to change other people’s perspectives”. She also acknowledged how challenging this was, particularly for her refugee students who had neither rights nor power in their context of exile in Lebanon. One student, Amal, recalled how this teacher explained this dissonance: “In the end, nothing of what’s in this lesson exists. We wish it does…. It’s true you’re learning things that don’t exist but you might be the reason they exist in the future. You might do things related to politics and things like that and you can change and do the things you studied about, things related to law” (Chopra et al. Under Review).
“Navigational capacities” (Swartz 2021) can support young people in learning how to bridge this distance between what exists in the present and this type of newly reimagined future, even in the context of ongoing uncertainties. In a study with child soldiers in Guinea-Bissau, Vigh (2006) demonstrates the need for teaching young people not only that they need to navigate – or adapt – to new situations in order to create new futures but also how to navigate. Adelman (2019) finds that teachers who themselves are refugees share with students their own experiences and decision-making as examples of possible ways of navigating current situations, especially ones of exclusion, in ways that continue to hold future-building front of mind. In these ways, they support students like Wadad to “live day by day” but also to “strive a lot for the future, a lot”.
Implications for Current and Future Uncertainties
Refugee education has typically been framed as temporary, an approach that characterizes much emergency response across all sectors despite the now well-understood long-term nature of conflict, displacement, and uncertainty. Education during the Covid-19 pandemic in most parts of the world has followed similar patterns, designed to keep people safe until a return to ‘normalcy’ would become possible. Return has been elusive, and this short-term thinking has sacrificed learning, belonging, and opportunity for millions of children. In refugee education, we see that young people thrive in uncertainty when their teachers do not anticipate a return to normal, but instead prepare young people to adapt to new and ever-shifting situations and to build newly imagined futures. Lessons from refugee education point us towards a set of three pedagogies of belonging – predictability, adaptability, and future-building – that can inform education in the ongoing uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic and of future pandemics and disruptions to come. Essential to all three of these pedagogies are relationships among teachers and students that explicitly support understanding and navigating current situations of uncertainty to create futures in which opportunities are more equitable. More research is needed on how teachers learn these pedagogies and the institutional and policy conditions that enable them, with implications for our millions of students globally who experience uncertainty and disruption and whose education must support them now and into these futures.
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[1] All names are pseudonyms.
[2] Wadad was a participant in a multi-school study of Syrian students’ experiences of education in Lebanon. This study was collaborative with Vidur Chopra, Joumana Talhouk, and Carmen Geha.
[3] With thanks to the 84 students and teaching team members, based in 21 countries, of the Fall 2020 course “Education in Uncertainty” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for deepening my thinking on these questions.
[4] This study was collaborative with Esther Elonga.
[5] This study was collaborative with Hiba Salem.