Will Brehm  2:08
Sarah Dryden-Peterson, welcome back to FreshEd.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  2:10
Thanks so much, Will. It’s always great to talk with you.

Will Brehm  2:13
Congratulations on this book. I mean, it’s really quite a feat. It’s like this product of 15 years of research, maybe even more, since you’ve sort of been thinking about issues of who can move where for many years, I think, since you were probably a teenager. And it includes something like 600 interviews across 23 countries. You’ve worked in the biggest international institutions thinking about refugee education. You’ve even helped develop some of the policies around refugee education that we know about. You’ve published countless articles and book chapters. You’ve been on this show -this is the fifth time- usually about refugee education to some extent. So, you have this long storied history, researching refugee education. So, I guess, the question that I want to start with is, why did you decide that now was the time to write this book?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  3:05
It really did feel like it was a decision that now was the right time to write a book. And I think, I really was feeling like our field of refugee education was entering a kind of a stage where connections across time, between places, among ideas, was really going to be essential for us to deepen learning, and also the possibilities for acting on some of the challenges that we saw facing refugee young people globally. And I think I was really feeling this in a few ways. I definitely was feeling the need for work that was not bounded by the same kind of country borders that often cause conflict in the first place. So, I wanted my work to really reflect this essential idea that refugees are living transnational lives. And that movement across places -both real movement and aspirational movement- is really key to understanding their educational experiences. And a book, I felt, would allow me to traverse these kinds of spaces. I think I was also really hungry for work that addressed the gaps between what I find to be pretty sequential and linear models that dominate thinking in global education policy and practice. This idea that with access comes learning, with learning comes opportunity. But particularly when we look at refugee education, we see that those who are most left out of access are displaced and conflict affected young people. We know that refugees have some of the lowest learning outcomes in the world. And we also know that the opportunities that might follow are tied to structures and to power. And so, I really wanted an opportunity to be able to look at how access, learning, and opportunity are linked together. That felt like a really big question that needed a book. And I think there was one additional reason and I think it was that I was really hoping that a book could open opportunities to develop concepts or frameworks that could push the field of refugee education in productive new directions related to linking access learning and opportunity, but also, because what I was seeing and really wanted to explore was how education can link together histories and identities that young people bring to school. Experiences that they have daily in school. And the kind of future building that they hope education allows them to engage in. Not separately past, present, future, but this linkage among the three. And I felt like that really needed a book to be able to do.

Will Brehm  5:30
It’s quite amazing, because as you are traversing this huge geography of your research field, let’s say these 23 different countries, etc., probably more. And like you said that it’s not this linear conception of access, learning, opportunity. Refugee students sort of really break a lot of that linearity. And they do live those transnational lives, as you said. And it seems like the way you wrote the book is purposely weaving together, sort of, the global and the local. You know, taking pieces of different theories from across the world, and across times, and sort of pulling them together to try and make sense of different aspects of the sort of life of students and teachers who are refugees or working in refugee education. And it’s really quite an incredible tapestry in the sense that you weave together across the book. And what I find so interesting, having read the book now, is that the one constant in a way across the whole book is you, right? You are the one that -you might not want to center yourself like this, but in a way, you are the common thread keeping this tapestry together. And so, I guess, thinking about these multiple decades of thinking about this topic, all these different countries, all these interviews, it made me start wondering if you changed over this process. So, like, over the process of researching this book and putting this book together, have you changed as a person?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  6:58
I think one of the aspects of my work that I have become so keenly aware of over time, and I think has been a process of realization, is the kind of privilege that I have to move across spaces. Whether that’s among schools in a particular city, or across country borders, or between a high-level roundtable in Geneva, and an intentionally under the radar community-based school. And I think as I’ve thought about how to act with reciprocity, I’ve come to realize that actually, what teachers and students and parents are usually asking of me most is to tell them about places that they don’t have access to. And so, I think methodologically, as I was thinking about how to bring this kind of book together, I wanted to position myself as that kind of guide. Kind of answering the questions that I heard teachers asking me about other schools in different places. The questions that I heard students asking me about what happens at the high-level meeting in Geneva. The questions that I heard families asking about what teachers are doing in different schools and different kinds of schools. But just as you’re saying, I think one of the elements that I really struggled with and worked hard to try to figure out was how to be this guide. One I knew a reader would need across these times and spaces to trust and to kind of go along on this journey but without the story. And I was also constantly aware that I was changing.

And so, when I would look back at data from 20 years ago, I could see a different kind of lens that I might bring as the current day me. And I think that in the methods texts we use in our classrooms, or the methods section of papers we write, we often talk about positionality as if that’s fixed in time. As if this is who I am and this could belong in a paper from 2002 or from 2022. But one really stark moment of realization for me in this, how I was changing as a researcher, came when I was doing a study in Cape Town in the same school 20 years apart. So, I found myself sitting in exactly the same classroom as I had sat in 20 years earlier. And I looked down and I was actually wearing the same shoes that I had been wearing then. I am one of these people who will hold on to clothes for a very long time, especially ones that I love. But I could feel myself sitting there as a different person. And particularly as a parent, I had a daughter at that time who was the same age as the students in the class. And I know that the lens I had 20 years ago, sitting in that classroom, didn’t include this idea of what would I be looking for as a parent? What kinds of opportunities would I be seeking? What kinds of relationships with peers? And I couldn’t have imagined that 20 years earlier when I was fresh out of an undergraduate degree.

Will Brehm  7:43
As a reader, I sort of experienced many different emotions reading the book. On the one hand, you feel hopeful sometimes about some of the stories you tell. Other times you just get absolutely angry at the systems in place and how people just seem totally trapped. At other times I felt so sad, and you know, it’s quite an emotional journey that many people go through and being a refugee, you have to confront many different obstacles in life and how you can have generations of people living in the same sort of refugee camp. I mean, it’s really quite emotionally fraught in many ways. There was a moment where I actually laughed out loud. It was this short little piece that you started writing about this story about how you were in a Ugandan refugee camp and someone mistook you for being an arms dealer. And I kept thinking, like, oh, my gosh, Sara Dryden-Peterson as the arms dealer. And I started laughing out loud. And it might be a little inappropriate but how did that come about? How did you become misunderstood as being an arms dealer in a Ugandan refugee camp?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  9:39
You know, I love the image, like you’re saying, of a book that is so filled with trauma and sadness and anger in many ways but also, these moments where -I mean, as a parent, the best moments for me is when I look over, because I see one of our daughters laughing out loud at something they’re reading, they’re so into it in that way. And I mean, as you’ve said, in my own mind, also, I’m about as far from a possible arms dealer as anyone I could kind of possibly imagine. But this one particular night, I was outside a clinic in a refugee camp in Uganda. And I was checking on a student in one of the classes I’ve been working in who had fallen ill. And a man approached me and pretty quietly, but also pretty bluntly, basically just asked me if I would be interested in trading firearms for some of the diamonds that he had. And I could tell that when I looked confused, he felt the need to explain this connection that he saw between me and this kind of transaction. And he said, since you’re Canadian, I thought you might be interested. This was a man who was living in Uganda as a refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo. And he was making these geopolitical links between me and arms dealing in ways that I had, at that point, been privileged never to see. And through conversation, he explained that his life had been wrapped up in conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and connected to illegal mining by Canadian companies to firearms that came to him through these kinds of mining operations. And he helped me to see that his life amid conflict was deeply entwined with the way that I lived in peace, and the reasons for which I could live in peace in Toronto.

And I wanted to tell this story because I found it to be an important way to think about the ways in which we are all interconnected. And this is a big theme of the book. And in particular, the kinds of responsibilities that come with those interconnections. I found that often, interconnections can be more visible in other spheres. I think over the course of the pandemic, we’ve come to see access to vaccines, to testing, to treatment in one part of the world can really matter. In other parts of the world -or we see it in our warming planet. The fossil fuels that I use today directly impact billion other people for 300 generations. And I think that we must see the ways in which our economies and our political power work and greatly influence the lives of kids, the lives of families and their experiences of war. And I think that we must recognize these things because without it, the kind of radical change that is necessary to make sure that all kids have access to high quality education and opportunities can’t happen. That we need to recognize that and far away in Toronto, or in Boston, where I sit today, we need to live our lives knowing that.

Will Brehm  11:49
I mean, in a similar vein related to this idea of we’re all interconnected, in the book, you make this argument that we’re all impacted by the inability of refugees to locate spaces of sanctuary. And thinking about the end of the Afghan war and all of the Afghans who were fleeing the country, and all of the refugees today that are fleeing Ukraine, looking for spaces of sanctuary, how is it that even those who are not Afghans and Ukraines in this particular example, how is it that we’re all impacted by this inability to locate spaces of sanctuary for refugees?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  13:56
While I don’t write about these current cases in the book, I do think that taking a look at now is really instructive on this kind of question. And in particular, as you point out, over the past month we’ve seen more than 4 million people flee from Ukraine -flee Russia’s invasion of their country. And I think what we see is that this massive movement of people has impacted many other people in Europe who did not move and who did not think that their lives could be affected by conflict in this way. And I think what we see is that in the kind of opening borders and opening homes that we’ve seen, people who didn’t move and didn’t really think about how their lives could be affected, also have seen how much their lives could be affected and how much they might gain in some ways from their lives being affected. And I don’t say this lightly, but I think that the kind of opportunity for action, to be a part of alleviating suffering, to be supportive and providing shelter, to open space for kids to go to school. The kinds of directives that we’ve now seen that enable Ukrainian’s access to residency permits and facilitated pathways to asylum in Europe. And these individual actions of care are such radical departures from the kinds of policies that have been applied to other refugees and the experiences of other refugees. So, we see Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, remaining stranded at borders and denied entry to European countries and other countries. And often pushed to repeatedly put their lives in danger with racism and xenophobia daily affecting their lives.

So, I think my hope is that in what Ukrainian refugees are devastatingly experiencing right now, that what we see in terms of the sanctuary that we could also see what might be possible and how we are all affected. That this kind of welcoming stance for Ukrainians not be unprecedented but instead precedent setting. And I think this is true for education in particular, as well. We see a very different kind of educational response for Ukrainians unfolding in Europe right now than in other parts of the world and for other groups in Europe. And some of the elements that I hope become precedent setting are around open borders, immediate access to residency permits but also the ability for refugee teachers to be able to teach in national schools. Or the ability to open home language instruction through engaging diaspora and engaging community-based teachers. And I think in some ways, this expansion of access to sanctuary -which in many ways in the book I talk about as a kind of thought experiment- is actually taking place right now. And I think we have a lot to learn from what might be possible in other places as we see this expanded opportunity for sanctuary to take place right now.

Will Brehm  16:45
Why do you think these new possibilities are happening with the Ukrainian crisis? And why didn’t they happen before with other refugee crises since refugee crises are not new in any sense.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  16:56
I think that there are many different reasons. There are a few worth pointing to and looking at. I mean, I think that we cannot ignore the kind of racism and xenophobia that shapes migration policies. The reasons for which borders are closed to some individuals and some groups of people and open to others and what that means for white refugees to be fleeing into Europe. We see a different situation take hold. So, I think that that’s like above everything else, we need to think about the ways in which our policies are differentially applied to different people. I also think we see something similar, which is important to point to as well, which is that in almost all cases, it is neighboring countries to the conflict-affected country that hosts the vast majority of refugees and that, despite some of the immense barriers, often at a very local level, have the most welcoming and open kinds of spaces for refugees. And I think that comes back to this idea of all of a sudden, my life is directly affected by people who I see around me all the time. By people who I imagine could have been me, or in the case of longtime work I did in Uganda and with South Sudanese refugees or refugees from Democratic Republic of Congo, who in fact had this shared experience of being refugees on either side of borders over a decade. And I think that looking at these very local examples of what welcoming can look like, of what it means for a school head in Uganda to say, and this was 20 years ago to say, “I’m not supposed to let refugees attend this school but they’re here. And of course, these kids are going to come to school. And of course, we’re going to create the best possible education that we can because that’s not only good for the children who have moved but that’s good for the children who are already here in creating a stronger community”. And my hope is that some of these very local examples of solidarity can move up into political kinds of decisions that would resource and sustain institutions that can also reflect these goals.

Will Brehm  19:03
It’s quite interesting to think about some of those larger global policies and national policies that are governing the way we think about refugees and the way in which states allow or don’t allow refugees and what rights they provide to refugees. And in your book, you provide basically four different phases more or less of how to think about this. And you know, it sort of shifts over time and different places might look different ways across time but these different periods are what you call: liberation, standardization, localization and nationalization. Could you tell us a little bit about each of those and how they might be different when it comes to thinking about refugee education?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  19:40
When I began my work in this field, what I really found was that the prevailing view among global and national organizations and in the early research was that education for refugees was a kind of holding ground. Really designed to create a more stable present but to defer any kind of thought about the future. And so, refugees had access to education only in separate schools isolated from national education systems and by design to provide temporary schooling with short-term goals. And I was struck by how little this approach really aligned with both the long-term nature of displacement, 10 to 20 years, and the kinds of education that I was observing refugee communities to create for their children in terms of building connections to national education systems and to long term goals. And really, the identification of these four phases came out of that observation because I wanted to understand how we arrived at this place. So, this phase of liberation is really what we see after World War Two. That was a time of independence struggles across Africa, across Asia, and refugee education explicitly designed to reflect imagined post-independence futures of colonized countries. And so, we saw Zimbabwean, then Rhodesian, refugees in Botswana, for example, explicitly organizing schools to prepare leaders of a future independent Zimbabwe. So, this transnational focus, and also this focus on liberation.

What we saw after 1985 was a real shift towards what I call standardization. Real governance of refugee education by global institutions. And this was really facilitated by refugee camps. And so, the kind of advent of refugee camps on a large scale meant that refugees had to attend schools separate from nationals. And the presumed future by global actors who funded the schools, who ran the schools, was really a swift return to the country of origin. That wasn’t the reality but that was the presumed future. So, education was temporary. But because that wasn’t the reality, because displacement was protracted, what we really saw happening locally was that teachers and schools were adapting their local practices to be long-term. And so, teachers and students resisting against the kind of standardization approaches that didn’t reflect their realities. And were really misaligned with the kinds of purposes of refugee education that students and parents had. So, for example, responding to these realities, we saw teachers in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya begin to teach the Kenyan curriculum in English and to advocate for students to take Kenyan national exams. And then this brings us to the fourth era, the nationalization era, which is where we are right now. The 2012 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Education Strategy really made more formal these kinds of ad hoc practices and included an approach of including refugees in national education systems. And so, this is really where we are right now, whereby policy, at least, in most refugee hosting countries, refugees have access to national education systems.

Will Brehm  22:55
It’s interesting across all these different phases, maybe particularly the latter ones, since 1985, the nation state becomes so important in this story and to think about refugee education. And it’s almost like the state constrains what’s possible. And one of the ways they do this is through law. Another point where I was quite angry in the book is when you were talking about the difference between prima facie and refugee status determination (RSD), and these are legal terms that nation states have used. Can you explain what these are and how they sort of treat refugees differently?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  23:33
Obviously, these vary from country to country but basically two different ways of gaining access to refugee status. And so, one is prima facie, and one is refugee status determination. And in general, countries that neighbor conflict-affected countries use prima facia or which means, kind of, at first glance approach where everyone from that country is presumed to be a refugee. And there’s no looking at each individual’s experience in order to determine whether or not they meet a legal definition of a refugee. Distant host countries typically use refugee status determination processes that are designed at an individual level to establish who meets the criteria of being a refugee. And as you’ve said, this exertion of power by the state is immense. It’s basically a state being able to determine whose claim to asylum is worthy or justified. And I talk in the book about this idea of refugee status expiring, which I think is contrary to what many people in the United States and in some countries in Europe really conceive of legally. If someone has been granted refugee status, not is applying for asylum or applying for refugee status but being granted that status then that’s permanent. It’s a kind of pathway to all kinds of opportunities including citizenship. But in most host countries, and particularly where refugee status is applied at a group level in that way, refugee status can expire. And so, when the conditions in a home country are such that the criteria of persecution are no longer met, then there’s no longer need, according to legal definition for refugee status. And so, this constant limbo of never knowing when any of your rights to remain in that place, to continue going to school, to continue pursuing opportunities, to continue interacting with friends who have become a community, never knowing when that might expire really influences the way that young people are able to imagine their futures and proceed through their education.

Will Brehm  25:36
One of the main arguments you make in your book, among others, is the real need to focus in on what is called “positive peace”. And you sort of say a lot of the work in refugee education and just refugees in general has, in a sense, looked at and tried to overcome negative peace. So, in this respect, you know, what is negative and positive peace? And how might we think about refugee education achieving this idea of positive peace?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  26:05
I find these ideas really compelling. And I draw on ideas of Johan Galtung who draws on earlier work of Martin Luther King Jr. in really thinking about different kinds of peace. Basically, negative peace as the absence of direct violence and positive peace as the absence of structural violence. So, this idea of positive peace is not just the absence of direct violence but the conditions that enable people to access equal opportunities. And in terms of refugee education, what I see is that it has been framed with the goal of negative peace. And I think we saw this historically in the time periods that I framed where refugee education was a kind of temporary holding ground to keep people safe until return was possible. But I think we also see it in more recent models of including refugees in national education systems that are designed to support access to school but without the necessary attention to conditions for learning, for belonging, and for opportunity.

Will Brehm  27:07
What was so enticing about your book, and sort of rather radical in a way, was this idea that the way we think about refugee education today actually is going to impact the way we think about education in general. It’s not that we should take ideas from education and then apply it to refugee education. It’s like in refugee education, there’s things that are happening, there’s big problems, there are issues that we need to work through. And these ideas are going to change the way we think philosophically, theoretically, and practically about education. And that was so enticing in a way, and sort of opened this door to all sorts of new possibilities. So, what are you thinking there? How do you see some of these new ideas that refugee education is pointing to, in general, for education?

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  27:51
This was the reason in some ways that the title of the prologue is “Our Futures”, and very intentionally trying to think about this inclusive view of education and our thinking on refugee education as including us all. And I think the titles of three chapters of the book really represent the ideas that I see teachers and students acting on in exciting ways that I hope shape the future of education. One is learning. And I think that this comes back to this idea of, how do we connect access to learning to opportunity. And we know that half of refugee children don’t have access to education. And even for those who do access school, opportunities for learning are often limited. And even with a shift to focus on learning, and not just the temporary kind of structures that keep young people busy and create a routine but also learning from teachers and students just how essential is the connection element of learning. And what I mean by this is, I think, opening the kind of what we often see as rigid boundaries on what is learned in school, and what is appropriate for school, and what is part of a formal curriculum -to be able to connect that learning to histories and to identities in home countries, to colonial, to economic, to political causes of conflict- that by necessity has to include asking questions, and explaining, and relying on each other to do that kind of learning. And I really saw teachers who were able to build relationships with their students more readily able to both see this need and then to engage together with their students on figuring out how to do that learning well. And this is the title of another chapter “Belonging”. And I think this is also one of these connection elements of the experience of being in school. And what we see is that some basic elements of that are just essential. So, students describe not being made to feel like they were entering a space that wasn’t theirs. Being listened to. Some of these I hope are non-negotiables for the future of education.

And even within inclusion of refugees in national education systems, and the kind of limited ways that nationals and refugees have to interact with each other because of physical separation or separation in shifts, that physical organization sends a message of non-belonging just as in many other countries. The geographic segregation of schools for people of different socio-economic means, for different racial groups, for different ethnic groups, for different languages sends these messages of non-belonging to the collective. And I think, excitingly, what we see as teachers often being the only nationals in a host country that refugee students interact with and these relationships becoming practice in how to know each other, how to build connections. And recognizing though the kind of vulnerability that that involves both for teachers who are often feeling a kind of risk of being a civil servant in a place where they are not fully following the official policy in terms of what can be taught, and refugee young people who feel this constant sense that they don’t know how warm the welcome is, and for how long. And I think the third idea, again, the title of a chapter is “Purpose”. And I think in a nutshell, what I learned across places and across time is that amid many important mid-level purposes, there was always one overarching purpose, which was about future building. And I think that even in situations of emergency and crisis, we have this inclination to focus on the short term -that kind of just getting by. But the focus on the future becomes a way to find meaning, to find hope, especially in situations, like, for refugees where the future seems so ungraspable. So, teachers and students who keep this future building front and center, who don’t defer it, who don’t wait for it to happen but constantly connect to the aspirations for creating new opportunities, I think they’re doing the real work of building this field and creating new possibilities for the future of education in general.

Will Brehm  31:59
Sarah Dryden-Peterson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd again. It’s always a pleasure to talk. It’s such a hopeful way to end in a way -to think about how refugee education can point to these new futures for all of us.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson  32:11
Thanks, Will. It’s so great to be in conversation always.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Guest Publications/Projects

How Refugee Teachers and Students are Changing the Future of Education

Education for Refugee and Displaced Children

Refugee Education and Medium of Instruction: Tensions in Theory, Policy, and Practice

Policy and Practice of Including Refugees in National Education Systems

Diaspora Working to Transform Education in Fragility and Conflict

Refugee education in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp

Mentioned Resources

2012 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Education Strategy

UNHCR Prima Facie Recognition of Refugee Status

Procedural Standards for Refugee Status Determination under UNHCR’s Mandate

John Galtung – Positive and Negative Peace

“When Peace Becomes Obnoxious” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Recommended

Refugee Education Statistics: Issues and Recommendations

UNHCR Education Report 2021: The Challenges Facing Refugee Education

Refugee Resettlement and Complementary Pathways

Strategies, Policies and Directions for Refugee Education

What Drives Attitudes towards Refugees?  

The Scope of Exclusionary Public Response to the European Refugee Crisis

Barriers to Providing Basic Education to Rohingya Children in the Kutupalong Refugee Camp

How to Tame an Imaginary Border: Critical Transgression in Immigrant and Refugee Education

Research on Refugees’ Pathways to Higher Education since 2010

Supporting Refugee Distance Education 

Education in Crisis: Educators Working with Refugees and Migrant Students and Families

Refugee Education: Integration Models and Practices in OECD Countries

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com