How educators navigate language ideology and pedagogy in refugee education

Abstract

ABSTRACT There are over 30 million people living as refugees today, nearly half of whom are under 18. For most young people fleeing conflict and persecution, their only option is to pursue education in already-stretched national school systems in host countries neighboring those they have left, often in unfamiliar languages. Despite the pressing issue of refugee education globally, there is little research about the educational inclusion of refugees in the Global South, not least related to language. This study begins to address this gap. Through a comparative case study, I draw on school-wide and classroom observations and interviews with educators across three schools in Kampala, Uganda to understand how educators navigate the linguistic inclusion of refugees at school. I find that, in the absence of guidance or training, school leaders draw on their ideological beliefs about multilingualism and migration to determine how to approach linguistic diversity at school. In turn, classroom teachers navigate constrained implementation spaces, balancing policies that require a dominant language as the language of instruction with multilingual realities in classrooms.