Refugee Narrative Pedagogy

Abstract

Given the prevalence of refugee narratives in popular and educational cultures, this chapter makes a case for a Cultural Refugee Studies Pedagogy (CRSP) specific to refugee narratives. The chapter reimagines the interplay of refugee narratives and pedagogy in three configurations: refugee narratives as public pedagogy, a pedagogy for teaching refugee narratives in formal education, and critical making (or research creation) as narrative pedagogy. The pedagogical approach proposed throughout reads refugee narratives as multimodal sites of intervention linked to the global refugee regime, national politics, educational policies, local communities, and artistic processes and traditions. The final section describes the film Borderstory as a successful example of how critical pedagogy can shift the relationship between learners and refugee narratives.