Will Brehm  1:05
Chris Henderson, welcome to FreshEd.

Chris Henderson  1:10
Thanks so much, Will. It is great to be here.

Will Brehm  1:13
So I want to start with some background. Who are the Rohingya, and how did nearly one million of them end up in camps in Bangladesh?

Chris Henderson  1:20
The Rohingya — the easiest way to put it — are a persecuted ethnic minority living in the western part of Myanmar in what is known as Rakhine State, or formerly known as Arakan. Where they’re located is on the eastern side of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and that mountain range forms the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Based on archaeological and ethnolinguistic evidence, we know the Rohingya have been in this area for over a thousand years. It’s really compelling evidence that they are indigenous to this land.

But they’re a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist state. And so we have the Buddhist Arakan population who, over a number of decades, have become increasingly nationalist and, as is the case with a lot of authority in Myanmar, increasingly xenophobic as well. And so the Rohingya have become this minority that represents an “other” to this idea of a pure Buddhist state that the Arakan and other mainstream ethnicities are striving for.

So decades of injustice and violence have been carried out against the Rohingya. This was really exacerbated in 1982 when the Myanmar government revoked the Rohingya’s citizenship, which is kind of the beginning of their statelessness. From 1982, you’ve had slow trickles of the Rohingya population across the Bangladesh border into the Cox’s Bazar area where they’ve sought refuge and protection.

But it wasn’t until 2017 when the Rohingya resistance group, the Arakan Salvation Army, staged an attack on Myanmar police posts. This attack catalyzed widespread violence against the Rohingya population that was supported by the Myanmar Tatmadaw military. This was really a mass campaign of ethnic cleansing. Médecins Sans Frontières estimates that between August and December of 2017, more than 25,000 Rohingya lost their lives. Because of that, over 900,000 people in a very short space of time crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh completely unannounced. That’s kind of the beginning of our current refugee crisis in Bangladesh.

The last point to make would be that now we have 1.1 million Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar. They live in 36 barbed-wired and tightly surveilled camps. And in the words of a Rohingya friend and colleague of mine, this constitutes an open-air jail.

Will Brehm  3:10
Wow. And who is running these camps — slash jails? Is it the Bangladesh government? Is the UN involved?

Chris Henderson  3:17
There’s a Bangladesh government body called the RRRC, and they kind of partner with UN agencies to run these camps, as well as a large host of international NGOs and local implementing partner organizations.

Will Brehm  3:29
And when did you first visit these camps?

Chris Henderson  3:32
I had been involved with a number of Rohingya issues through work with the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies since about 2019. But I didn’t actually visit the camps until 2022. It required a number of hoops to go through and permissions to get, to be able to go in there and start doing some exploratory research.

Will Brehm  3:50
What was it like to go? What were your first experiences and reactions?

Chris Henderson  3:54
What’s really interesting about the Rohingya camps is you kind of toggle between seeing it as apocalyptic and a horrific situation for the Rohingya in particular. But at the same time, you look at the coordination of the UN agencies with the Bangladesh government — the interconnected school systems with health clinics, with legal centers and the like — and none of it is ideal. It’s all a terrible state of affairs.

I found myself in quite an emotionally complex place seeing something so traumatic, and just the sheer number of people — masses and masses of people. For example, if you’re in Camp 16, you cannot visit relatives in Camp 15. Mobility between the camps is restricted as well. So you’re seeing this jail-like environment. But at the same time, I would argue you’re seeing some of the best of international cooperation and support, even though we would critique that cooperation and support at the same time. It’s on a very shoestring budget. It’s quite remarkable what is still being achieved.

Will Brehm  4:48
And so you were able to go into multiple camps and actually start doing exploratory research. How is education organized? What does education even look like in some of these camps?

Chris Henderson  5:00
Some of the initial exploratory research was really about finding out what teachers would want me to focus on. My initial interest in teachers was that I’d read a few literature reviews and white papers on education in the Cox’s Bazar camps and found that teachers were really this missing piece. No one was talking to the teachers, let alone talking about teachers. So first it was meeting teachers, sitting down, having a very relaxed conversation. What matters to you? If I have permission to come and work here longer term, what kind of stories, what kind of insights would you want me to tell the world, so to speak?

My initial impression was one of surprise. And I am reluctant to admit that based on a lot of the literature — both in scholarly and more grey literature spaces — there was a lot of deficit theorizing of the Rohingya. This is a persecuted population, a population that has been marginalized, without agency, denied access to education and employment and so forth. I was blown away by some of the teachers I first met, who were really able to conceptualize the complexity of their displacement, what that meant for their right to education and their children’s right to education as well. I think I was surprised by how sophisticated their aspirations for education were, and the lengths they went to in order to make quality learning happen, despite very little access to resources or support.

Will Brehm  6:05
And who were these teachers? Were they former teachers from when they lived in Myanmar who continued teaching in Cox’s Bazar? Like, who ended up becoming a teacher in these camps?

Chris Henderson  6:15
This is part of the remarkable story, I think. We have about seven and a half thousand Rohingya refugee teachers, and because they were so marginalized in Myanmar, many of them were denied access to formal or state-level employment. So very, very few of them have ever been teachers before. For many, this is their first time teaching in any kind of professional capacity, which in a way almost heightens their commitment, because they see this as an opportunity that had been previously denied to them. But it comes with its own complexities and its own tensions.

Many of these teachers may have finished high school in Myanmar or had been preparing to do some form of higher education, although their access to higher education was pretty tenuous. So many of them had some higher level of literacy and some educational background, but had had no tertiary or professional training at all.

Will Brehm  7:02
And what are they teaching? Is there a curriculum that they’re following?

Chris Henderson  7:06
Again, this is really interesting, and I think symbolic of their aspirations. Initially, at the height of the emergency — if you imagine close to a million people arriving on Bangladesh’s doorstep — UN agencies and Bangladesh authorities quickly had to put together some semblance of non-formal learning. The first curriculum used was called the Learning Competency Framework Approach, and that was really focused on supporting young Rohingya to recover and make sense of their experiences. So it was very focused on psychosocial health and well-being, on social and emotional learning, and foundational learning like literacy and numeracy.

But that curriculum, whilst it served that short-term humanitarian purpose, quickly became a subject of discontent among the Rohingya, because for them, this was not a formal curriculum. They weren’t getting any broad, subject-based vocational or academic learning from it. And so they advocated quite hard — and this might seem somewhat contradictory — to be able to learn the Myanmar curriculum, because they had this deep desire to be repatriated to Myanmar once the situation was somewhat resolved.

Their logic was: if we can learn the Myanmar curriculum in Bangladesh, not only will that help us better adjust and resettle into Myanmar, but it also helps make a symbolic gesture to the government of Myanmar — look at us, we have studied the Myanmar curriculum, we’ve completed it, we’ve done it in the Burmese language too, which is not the Rohingya’s language. Very few of them actually speak Burmese. But it was both a symbolic gesture and an instrumental way of preparing for their resettlement.

Will Brehm  8:25
Instrumental in the sense of potentially getting a qualification that’s recognized in Myanmar. It’s fascinating that citizenship was taken away from them in 1982, as you said, but yet, although sort of forcibly made stateless, it sounds like a lot of the teachers, students, and parents still feel a part of that state.

Chris Henderson  8:42
Yes. And I think, again, compared to other refugee-hosting contexts or other forcibly displaced populations, given the trauma or the severity of the violence they’ve been through, sometimes there’s this very mixed desire to return back home. Home holds a very symbolic and sacred place in their minds, but that’s too much of a risk, or the past is too difficult to confront. But for the Rohingya, despite being survivors of genocide, there is this deep, deep desire to return to Myanmar, because that is their indigenous land. That is where their history lies.

For them, the Myanmar curriculum — as absurd as it might seem on the surface, that you would want to participate in a state curriculum that celebrates the military that has committed atrocities against you, and do it in a language that was weaponized for your dispossession in Myanmar — yes, they want that, because it will help them make this claim of return and their right to citizenship.

And just a quick point that adds to the complexity: neither Bangladesh nor Myanmar are actually accrediting the Myanmar curriculum as it’s being delivered in these camps. So the Rohingya are putting in this massive amount of effort and emotional commitment into this curriculum with no guarantee that it will ever be recognized. It’s a big gamble.

Will Brehm  9:50
Does the Bangladesh government want them to follow the Bangladeshi curriculum? There’s a strange relationship between what’s going on in Cox’s Bazar and what type of education is being provided and the host country.

Chris Henderson  10:01
This gets into the whole politics of displacement. Initially, for the first three to four years, Bangladesh’s position was that there was to be no formal curriculum within the camps at all. Teachers were not even allowed to be called teachers — they were “volunteer facilitators.” They tried to disassociate any formality or any sense of officialness from education in the camps because they wanted to disincentivize the Rohingya from settling in Bangladesh.

So to your question: we’re not going to offer the Bangladesh curriculum. We’re not even going to allow the Bangla language to be used in these camps, because that could incentivize the Rohingya to try and settle. Instead, we’re going to advocate for the Myanmar curriculum — almost provide a push to get them looking back towards Myanmar. So you’ve got this dually motivated position, from the Bangladesh government and from the Rohingya population, both calling for the Myanmar curriculum, but for very different reasons.

Will Brehm  10:53
And then the Myanmar government doesn’t want the Rohingya to learn the Myanmar curriculum either.

Chris Henderson  10:58
Right. And this is another interesting element — you’ve got the UN negotiating with the Myanmar government to get access to their resources, and Myanmar has kind of allowed for that, but with this very opaque endpoint. What does it mean that you have 400,000 Rohingya children learning the Myanmar curriculum, but the Myanmar government is actually never going to let them return?

Will Brehm  11:18
Wow. It’s so complex — this weird interstitial space that exists physically for 1.1 million people. Quite incredible. So you ended up working with a lot of teachers and trying to understand what motivated them. One of the things that was fascinating in your article was around salary. Some of the teachers do get paid in these camps, but it didn’t seem like money was actually driving the motivation. Is that right?

Chris Henderson  11:40
Yes. And this is kind of contrary to a lot of studies in refugee education and on refugee teachers. My colleague Mary Mendenhall has done a lot of recent research on the importance of compensation and the effects that poor compensation has on teacher mental health and well-being. What’s interesting in my study is the extent to which the Rohingya downplayed the importance of salary.

Part of me wonders whether the intrinsic factors motivating them to teach — such as creating a sense of belonging, providing protection and safety for children, and this political agenda of repatriation to Myanmar and making a claim to citizenship through the curriculum — were simply more powerful than salary. For the Rohingya, these factors were symbolic, but also more than just academic learning. This was almost existential. Education is our survival. Education is our claim to our future.

It was interesting how discussions around salary almost seemed to undermine the importance of these other factors. I’m not sure whether it was because the salary is so low, or because framing teaching as a “job” and talking about pay diminishes the more duty-oriented focus of their work. But what’s really interesting is that recently there have been quite profound humanitarian aid cuts. A lot of teachers have lost their positions or their work has been made far more uncertain. And if my WhatsApp messages from Rohingya friends and colleagues are anything to go by, salary is now a very important factor. That is the core element of concern.

Will Brehm  12:55
Do you think that when you were there in person, before all the aid cuts — and I understand the aid is what funds these teachers’ stipends — do you think your presence as an outsider doing this type of research influenced the way teachers spoke to you? My understanding is you were one of the first social science researchers in these spaces. Do you think that motivated the teachers to speak in a certain way, to downplay the salary issue and really foreground this idea of reclaiming citizenship and this existential crisis?

Chris Henderson  13:25
Yeah, absolutely. Just to give some brief context: getting access to these teachers was very, very difficult. There were multiple hurdles in terms of permissions and authorizations. And even when I was able to sit down with teachers, I often had a UN chaperone, a security chaperone, overseeing what was happening. So these conversations were held in that environment, which I think influenced the way people talked about their work, their mental health and well-being, their satisfaction and so on.

But also, because I was one of the first to have this level of permission to do more scholarly research in these camps, for a lot of these teachers it was their first and maybe only time they’d get to share some of these sentiments. So you almost got this rushed effort to portray the best version of themselves. And I think we would all do the same. To borrow from Sarah Dryden-Peterson — if our vulnerability was profound, if our future was uncertain and constantly having to be imagined and reimagined depending on the politics, I would try and put the best version of myself forward because that would provide some security and dignity where there is so little.

Will Brehm  14:22
With the teachers you interviewed, were there any differences by gender? Did you see men and women teachers having different senses of motivation?

Chris Henderson  14:30
Yes. And again, this was somewhat unexpected. I was very cautious not to fall into tropes or generalizations, but some really interesting evidence evolved out of different conversations with men and women.

When looking at what motivates teachers in a context like this, a really predominant factor — both in stable and in low-income settings — is this idea of self-efficacy. Do I believe that the effort I’m making is producing a reward or producing an effect? What was really interesting is that a lot of the Rohingya women I worked with had been denied access to further education in Myanmar. Many had not even accessed secondary education because of the cultural norms of their communities. Many of them, after puberty or adolescence, were not permitted to leave the home — what’s called purdah. And so for them to access a vocation that carries status, respect, and influence — teaching was actually quite an emancipatory experience. This kind of echoes what Kirk and Winthrop and Bradley have found in Afghanistan and Ethiopia and Syria. Teaching, for these women, was this profoundly emancipatory experience for those who previously may not have had that opportunity.

So you get this quite profound paradox where in their confinement in Cox’s Bazar, living in these barbed-wired camps, these women teachers are finding more freedom and liberation than they would have had back in Myanmar. And many of the women told me: we don’t want to go back, at least not yet, because here we have identity and status as teachers. Back there, we won’t be able to do that.

And their sense of self-efficacy was a daily experience. Every day they could see the difference they were making through their relationships, through the nurture and care they were able to provide. That was their motivation to keep turning up day after day, despite the multiple difficulties they were experiencing in their lives.

The men, however, were a lot less likely to talk about their daily sense of self-efficacy or satisfaction in their work. Their conversations quickly shifted to a broader, more political agenda-oriented purpose for teaching. They had this kind of suspended sense of self-efficacy — we’re not going to experience the fruits of our labor now. But one day, when we repatriate to Myanmar and our children can call themselves Myanmar citizens, understand the language, and be prepared to participate in an economy we feel we have a right to participate in — that’s when we’ll feel this was all worth it.

Will Brehm  16:20
So very different time scales in terms of what they’re imagining they’re working towards.

Chris Henderson  16:25
Absolutely. And then you had this interesting dynamic around teacher agency — how much voice, autonomy, and direction do I have in my life as a teacher, and to what extent does that allow me to experience self-efficacy or not?
Again, what was really interesting is that the Rohingya women reported a higher level of agency, because for them to have control of the classroom and of a curriculum as a professional was quite a powerful experience. But for many of the men who wanted to have much greater say over how refugee education works in these camps, they felt a much lower sense of agency. They felt they were at the bottom of what Ritesh Shah describes as a racialized hierarchy of control — as refugee teachers, we are at the bottom of the ladder. The Bangladeshi implementing partners and civil society organizations are above us. But ultimately it is the UN and the Bangladesh government that dictate how we should work. So agency was playing this very different role in how satisfied people were with their work.

Will Brehm  17:20
What did a typical classroom look like in these camps? Where was this teacher agency being enacted?

Chris Henderson  17:26
I have to admit — again, contrary to a lot of the deficit theorizing that exists around these teachers as being uneducated, undereducated, without proper pedagogical capabilities — some of the teaching I actually observed was quite remarkable.
I always use this one teacher as an example. He was teaching math. He was using the Rohingya language, which has no written script, to explain mathematical concepts. The instructions were written in Burmese on the board. He was then explaining what they were doing pedagogically to me in English. He was then working with his Bangladeshi host community co-teacher using the Chittagong language. And he was doing all of this at once with a child-centered approach. So he was effectively using five languages, plus child-centered learning, plus mathematics — and doing it seamlessly. It was like this beautifully choreographed performance.

But he didn’t have a belief that he was an effective teacher, because he didn’t have the mentors and coaches around him to affirm that for him.

The point I really want to make is: this is a horrific context and an awful situation for the Rohingya, but because education is such a valued and almost sacred part of their lives, there’s a real sense of care and pride in these learning spaces. Even though these spaces have been built and implemented by the likes of UNICEF and other Bangladeshi NGO partners, you feel that these teachers have really helped create these spaces as their own. You’ve got really colorful teaching and learning aids on the walls. All the classrooms I’ve been into have always been very tidy — desks in tidy rows, seats well-organized. The children come in and they are much better behaved than I would see in schools in my own context in New Zealand, because education is such a valued part of their lives.

Will Brehm  18:55
It sounds like there’s a lot of pride in these spaces.

Chris Henderson  18:58
Very much so. And that’s not to say these spaces are perfect or that they work as well as they should. But I think we need to look at what has been achieved against the odds, rather than only critiquing the inadequacy of the system.

Will Brehm  19:10
That example you gave of the teacher working in five different languages seamlessly — it seems like it would be such a good example of translanguaging.

Chris Henderson  19:18
Exactly the term I’ve used in my research, yes. And Kirk and Winthrop talk about this idea of refugee teachers being “alternatively qualified.” They have skills and capabilities that we wouldn’t recognize through a formal competency framework. But this is the way they’ve had to navigate their lives, and they’re able to translate that daily experience — whether it’s in a market, in a displacement camp, or elsewhere — into the classroom, and do it in ways that teachers in our own countries would not be able to.

Will Brehm  19:45
Dare I say that if there’s any deficit here, it’s in the qualification frameworks themselves.

Chris Henderson  19:50
Very much so. And they don’t recognize the different means and ends of refugee education. As much as there might be a desire for formal assessments and qualifications and teacher professional development frameworks — to borrow again from Sarah Dryden-Peterson — these teachers are teaching for the world as it is and for the world as they want it to be. To do that in a context of forced displacement and effective detention requires a very different pedagogical skill set. I’d argue a lot of teachers develop this through necessity and through their own self-learning and experience rather than through any formal qualification framework.

Will Brehm  20:22
I want to end by coming back to something you said earlier — that what’s going on in Cox’s Bazar is, in some senses, the best of all these different international organizations working together in a really, really hard context. Can you say a little bit more about that? Why is this such a remarkable feat, even if imperfect?

Chris Henderson  20:38
I think this question at this point in time is particularly loaded, because there is a diminishing amount of trust in the international system and in the value of international cooperation. And by all means, we should be advocating for the localization of these approaches — for Rohingya teachers and other civil society leaders to have much more agency and self-determination in how these responses are managed.

I’d also like to add that a number of my colleagues within the UN or within INGOs would likely disagree that this is an example of success, because they’re the ones — not me — who live the daily reality, the political complexities, the professional traumas of having to make the system work.

But if we remember the barbed-wire fences, the 36 camps, the total lack of mobility for this population — and the fact that we’ve still got learning centers that are safe, that are reasonably well-resourced, that children and teachers alike have pride in and come to daily, and that these centers are connected with child protection referral services and women’s health centers — I think this is an achievement. It’s an example of where there is still a place, and should always be a place, for international cooperation in contexts of forced displacement and sudden-onset emergencies.

But that doesn’t mean we discount the value of localization, or the need for self-determination among forcibly displaced populations. I think we need to continue investing in these types of interventions that can provide solutions at scale. The camps at Cox’s Bazar — as much as they are an absolute assault on the senses and our sensibilities in terms of what is humane and right, and we are now nine years into this crisis with no end in sight — on a shoestring budget and with diminishing funds, these agencies continue to deliver some semblance of quality education against the odds.

Will Brehm  22:05
Well, Chris Henderson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It’s a really fascinating conversation, and thanks for educating me on all of these different dynamics.

Chris Henderson  22:14
It’s been my pleasure, Will. It’s been great to be here.

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