Refugee Youth in Global Context

A record number of over 65 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced—both internally and externally—with an estimated third being refugees, or persons with a well-founded fear of returning to their home countries because of violence or persecution. At least 15 million, or 52% of refugees, are school-age youth under the age of 18. During the first decade of the 21st century, the number of school-age refugees worldwide was relatively stable, but it has grown, on average, by 600,000 children and adolescents annually since 2011 (UNHCR, 2016). These staggering statistics are particularly sobering when considering that a refugee child could spend his or her entire childhood and youth in protracted refugee situations where refugees can neither return to their home countries nor be resettled to third states, and thus live in “permanent temporariness” (Bailey, Wright, Mountz, & Miyares, 2002). In this indefinite condition, basic rights such as healthcare, freedom of movement, and education remain precarious. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2016) has therefore emphasized that thinking beyond a refugee’s basic survival is of the utmost importance in a socioeconomic context where the education of people in exile tends to be the first item cut when having to meet basic needs such as sustenance, shelter, and medical assistance. As a result, instead of viewing education as an essential element in humanitarian responses to crises (Sinclair, 2001), only half of refugee children have access to elementary education and a quarter to secondary studies, and higher education remains a distant dream for the overwhelming majority.

A contextual emphasis on these numbers offers insight into the unprecedented scope of the global situation and the daunting undertaking to ensure quality education to all refugee children and youth. Indeed, the UNHCR estimated that because of the growth rate among school-age refugees in the second decade of the 21st century, an average of 12,000 additional classrooms and 20,000 additional teachers would be needed each year. The scope of teaching refugee children and youth goes far beyond the parameters of formal schooling and certainly beyond schooling in Western resettlement countries, which tend to be the prevalent locales for undertaking scholarly examinations of teacher education and training. Although the focus of this article is on the implications of refugee resettlement experiences for the ways in which we prepare teachers in formal teacher education and certification programs in high-income nations, we do so with the recognition that dedicated individuals and organizations work tirelessly to offer various forms of education and prepare teachers and volunteers to work with refugee youth at multiple stages of their displacement experience outside of contexts where sustained, formal teacher education can take place. In fact, although European countries’ intake of refugees has received much Western media attention in recent years, “the vast majority of the world’s refugees—86 per cent—are hosted in developing regions, with more than a quarter in the world’s least developed countries” (UNHCR, 2016). In fact, 56% of the world’s 21 million refugees are being hosted by just 10 countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Only a comparatively small number of the world’s refugees are ultimately resettled in economically advanced nations, moving to states that have agreed to admit them with the intent of granting them permanent residency, legal protection, and access to rights that mirror those of citizens. The United States admitted approximately 70,000 refugees in the 2016 fiscal year, and that number ranges from 60,000 to 80,000 annually. Although the numbers are comparatively small when placed in the global context, these resettled refugees’ experiences and needs remain of utmost importance to how social institutions such as schools and university teacher education programs adapt to respond and contribute to the youth’s fruitful integration into their new society. For the history of these global trends, this article draws mainly on literature originating in or focusing on the United States, with the understanding that its implications for practice are valuable in other contexts as well. The article begins with an overview of refugee children and youth’s needs in the process of resettlement as they transition to schools and their structures. We do so in order to ground our subsequent focus on the ways in which teacher educators have responded and continue to examine ways to prepare teachers who will work with refugee-status youth. In “The Needs of Refugee Youth: A Contextual Overview,” we anchor the brief overview of the needs of refugee youth with three grounding principles for teacher educators aiming to understand the vast scope of refugee students’ adaptive experience. In “Teacher Education Responses to Refugee Students,” we similarly offer three mirroring tasks that can inform the work of teacher educators as they continue to guide teachers who work in increasingly diverse contexts that specifically include refugee students.

The Needs of Refugee Youth: A Contextual Overview

The turn of the 21st century has witnessed a rise in studies concerning the needs of resettled refugee youth in particular, as newcomers whose needs may overlap with those of immigrants but whose specific challenges must be intently and separately addressed (Matthews, 2008). Although many studies over the last three decades have continued the predominant focus on medical and mental health issues, there has also been an increased interest in refugee youth’s interaction with schools in the context of reception, especially because positive educational experiences provide such youth with a semblance of normalcy and offer hope in tumultuous times of transition (Sinclair, 2001). Thorough scholarly reviews of studies conducted in multiple Western resettlement countries have delineated the major findings of such studies, both in terms of mental health focus and educational needs (e.g., Fazel, Reed, Panter-Brick, & Stein, 2012; Lustig et al., 2004; McBrien, 2005), including teacher-oriented concise reviews (e.g., Strekalova & Hoot, 2008). Their careful work will not be replicated here, but such reviews serve to inform teacher educators’ approaches to pre-service and in-service education. The cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of work with refugee youth and the importance of addressing their needs contextually are partly reflected in the overlaps that exist between reviews that focus on mental health and those aimed at assessing educational needs. For example, psychosocial adjustment and language acquisition are shown to be affected by experiences of trauma (McBrien, 2005); schools’ capabilities to meet students’ emotional and psychosocial needs are repeatedly emphasized along with interest in developing school-based refugee mental health services to reduce stigma and increase treatment access (Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007); service providers such as schools are reminded by psychologists that good overall functioning in refugee youth can coexist with mental health symptoms and may mask them (Fazel et al., 2012), just as high academic achievement was found to mask mental health challenges like anxiety and depression in newcomer youth in general (Qin, 2008).

An in-depth overview of the complex, multidisciplinary literature on refugee needs lies beyond the scope of this article. Instead, it draws attention to three interconnected, and at times overlapping, anchoring principles as an organizing matrix for teachers and teacher educators considering the vast scope of challenges among refugee youth: (a) remaining vigilant against oversimplification; (b) maintaining a healthy skepticism in the face of narratives that mainly focus on resettlement as a form of celebratory triumph; and (c) examining refugee youth’s needs not only from an individual perspective of personal characteristics and individual challenges but also structurally. These organizing principles are meant to problematize and counter popular narratives that tend to inform quotidian conversations around refugee experiences and resettlement policies. Such discourses might thus easily inform teacher candidates simply through exposure to pervasive conversations and media representations that are now an integral part of life in Western resettlement countries. Although these are not discursive patterns that migration scholars would initiate, endorse, or espouse, it is essential that the work of advocacy and inclusion for refugee youth in the field of teacher education would consider and counter popular misconceptions that might undermine powerful, justice-oriented work. It is in this context that the article suggests these three principles as anchor points in the work of teacher education for refugee youth.

First, a complex understanding of refugee youth experiences equips against oversimplification of refugees’ identity as dehistoricized and dehumanized victims (Malkki, 1996; Rutter, 2006). Instead, it acknowledges that there are intersectional elements that require attention to individual experiences and transitions, while also foregrounding dimensions that are shared across refugees’ lives (Colson, 2003). Jill Rutter’s (2006) examination of refugee youth’s experiences and refugee-oriented policies in the United Kingdom, for example, highlighted that more than three-quarters of the studies she examined were disciplinarily psychological and focused on trauma. Indeed, close attention to the trauma many of these youth have experienced is essential to responding well to their needs, as major reviews of the psychological literature with refugee youth have revealed that exposure to violence was a central risk factor in their adaptation (Lustig et al., 2004; Fazel et al., 2012). At the same time, there has been much debate over which factors are most predictive of adverse outcomes. Although exposure to military conflict has received much attention, daily forms of ongoing suffering occur during or after militarized violence in the chronology of displacement that are caused by social, economic, and political factors that lead to a perpetual sense of uncertainty about the future, stressful family environments, physical ailments and malnutrition, and loss of social networks (Panter-Brick, Eggerman, Gonzalez, & Safdar, 2009). Moreover, although post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a destabilizing factor for some displaced youth and they need appropriate support (Ajdukovic, 1998; Ghazali, 2004), Jill Rutter (2006) and Julie Matthews (2008) have argued that positioning refugee youth primarily as traumatized individuals, through medical and psychological lenses, may also be employed in resettlement countries to overemphasize the personal at the expense of the structural and the pre-settlement experience at the expense of those taking place post-settlement. Both tendencies can become problematic in that they can shift focus away from major obstacles faced by refugees in the receiving states, and they reduce complex issues of adaptation to an individualized problem that is literally embodied in the refugee; has taken place elsewhere; and is thus beyond the reach or responsibility of the receiving context.

Second, a thorough understanding of refugee resettlement guards against positioning refugees’ arrival in the new, peaceful countries as a narrowly defined, albeit joyful, “end point” in a long and traumatic resettlement experience. The dramatic media images of refugees escaping destruction and violence form a powerful background for the receiving communities’ perception of the experience, and resettlement is often understandably cloaked in a victorious veneer. Nevertheless, focusing mainly on the rightful celebration of the escape from “elsewhere” tends to obscure the difficulties that begin “here,” only after arrival, as refugees face the new society’s institutions and demands. After resettlement, refugee youth and families may, in fact, experience what literary and environmental scholar Rob Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence”—“a violence occur[ing] gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction . . . dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (p. 2). Whereas environmental work employing the framework of slow violence refers to the importance and the difficulty of representing in political agendas gradual, eroding challenges such as climate change or biodiversity shifts, the framework is informative in thinking of the experiences of refugees’ post-resettlement. Such a framework cautions against the tendency to focus on “arresting stories, images and symbols” (p. 3) of refugees’ trauma and resettlement at the expense of “the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (p. 3). “Slow violence” and the forms it may take for refugees is equally important in the effects it has on children and youth, yet it is often invisible when the focus of receiving communities tends to be on the tragic, at times sensationalized, violence that has been escaped rather than on the daily aftermath (Bonet, 2016). McWilliams and Bonet (2015) suggest that refugee students and their families are forced out of the countries in which they are living to resettlement public schools that often press them to subscribe to a “cruel optimism” about their lives while they continuously live on “continuums of precarity” rather than in positively resolved situations.

Ongoing struggles after resettlement cover a wide spectrum. Precarious psychosocial adaptation is brought on by the very process of displacement and relocation, and some studies show these youth do not seem to improve over time in the same way as youth who have been exposed to similar traumas but have not been displaced (Fazel et al., 2012). The effects of losing family members and navigating new family structures takes a toll, as the extended family members of many youths, such as cousins or aunts, may be resettled in different countries or continue to remain indefinitely in refugee camps. A particularly trying type of separation is experienced by unaccompanied minors whose circumstances are particularly demanding and who are considered to be particularly vulnerable both in the process of transition and after gaining refugee status (Groark, Sclare, & Raval, 2011; Huemer et al., 2009). There are then daunting tasks of adaption to linguistic, cultural, and social difference even when acculturation does take place more quickly for youth compared to their parents. Governmental assistance is only initial and minimal, so financial hardship is common, as is underemployment, even for family members who are highly educated (Krahn et al., 2000). These differential outcomes for refugees, especially those of color, have been associated with the “political economy of labor migration” that manifests interpersonal and structural racism and combats neoclassical claims that the job market is “blind to ethnicity” (Colic‐Peisker & Tilbury, 2007, p. 59). School-specific challenges can abound as well among youth. Despite the fact that relationships and a sense of peer support are shown to be central to adaptation and academic success, and protective against anxiety and depression (Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007; Kovacev, 2004; Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, & Martin, 2009), the social isolation of refugee youth in schools can be caused by language barriers, a sense of lacking competence in the inner workings of the new school system (Anderson, 2004; Carrasquillo & Rodriguez, 2002), and deficit frameworks employed by the institution to understand these youth (Rana et al., 2011; Roy & Roxas, 2011), as well as by suboptimal welcoming structures or leadership involvement in some schools (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). Experiences in these educational contexts tend to be gendered (Young & Chan, 2014), with girls exhibiting more internalizing behaviors than boys, which often leads to harsher repercussions for boys whose externalization of stress can be perceived as behavior problems (Fazel et al., 2012). There are also educational consequences to the gaps in schooling experienced by some youth—more girls than boys—during the relocation process; and there is a subsequent lack of exposure to particular learning skills (Anderson, 2004) as well as content-specific issues because disciplines require particular background training and disciplinary-specific writing in academic English that goes beyond the conversational skill more easily acquired (Carrasquillo & Rodriguez, 2002; Verplaetse & Migliacci, 2008). As result, many refugee youth have higher rates of school dropout—in fact, the dropout rate for immigrant and refugee students has not been affected by the progress made in student retention over the last few decades and has remained twice as high as that of students born in the United States (Child Trends Databank, 2015).

As this vast array of factors coalesce into important structural barriers to accessing the new society’s institutions, including schools, the situation points to the third anchoring principle for considering the needs of refugee youth: future teachers need to be attuned to both individual and structural challenges, and prepared to recognize the structural dynamics that frame their work with students, both in and out of classrooms. Individual-level factors in schools, such as ability to complete homework and overall engagement (Bang, 2012), remain important to refugee students’ success, as are family-level factors such as parents’ ability to support their students academically in the middle of their own economic and acculturation struggles (Georgis, Gokiert, Ford, & Ali, 2014; Kanu, 2008). At the same time, the structural dynamics in the context of reception matter tremendously for integration and adaptation—scholarly research with this issue has taken multiple disciplinary perspectives, drawing from sociology, psychology, and education. As a sociological concept, “context of reception” (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006) was introduced by migration scholars to underline the economic, policy, and social elements that interact to impact newcomer groups—both immigrants and refugees—differently in their long-term adaptation and integration. Variations in the opportunity structure involving settlement location, types of work and education accessibility, and forms of social capital available to newcomer groups, as well as types of welcoming mechanisms, are all important in adaptation and lead to vastly different outcomes.

For example, refugees arriving currently in the United States and Europe are predominantly people of color, or many are Muslim. In fact, in 2016, the United States admitted the highest number of Muslim refugees of any year since data on self-reported religious affiliations became publicly available in 2002 (Pew Center, 2016). As the general public remains reluctant, if not openly hostile, to the presence of refugees and particular ethno-religious facets such as being Muslim, transition difficulties of current refugees are augmented when Muslim identities are often equated with undesirable and dangerous characteristics (Abu El-Haj, 2015) or when the resettlement locales express misguided fascination with such aspects as the purported inferior role of girls and women in Islam (Buck & Silver, 2012). In addition, marginalization that emerges from the compounded effects of race, religion, and class has been well documented in longitudinal studies (e.g., Abdi, 2015), as over-policing of refugee communities challenges well-being and adaptation. At the same time, despite challenges such as othering and discrimination, refugee youth also find creative ways to respond and thus problematize the perception of Muslim refugee students as passive victims of forces that structure their lives (Oikonomidoy, 2007). Subsequent sociological work on the importance of the receiving context, specifically focused on refugees (e.g., McWilliams & Bonet, 2015), has fine-tuned elements of the context of reception, examining the dynamics of receiving communities through neighborhood effects, from the structure of agencies involved in resettlement to the socioeconomic condition and ideological orientations present in particular locales and host communities.

Additional disciplinary and theoretical perspectives such as community psychology have also expanded beyond the individual levels of analysis, to advocate for what ecological frameworks and community-level focus can contribute to understanding refugee adaptation (Birman, Trickett, & Vinokurov, 2002; Scott Smith, 2008; Trickett et al., 2000). Adaptation and acculturation ultimately occur in context and in two-way relationships between newcomers and host communities (Reed et al., 2012), with refugees’ perception of how they are received in the community being highly relevant to adaptation (Sujoldzic, Peternel, Kulenovic, & Terzic, 2006). In fact, refugees’ perception of discrimination was in some studies the best predictor of depression and PTSD (e.g., Ellis, MacDonald, Lincoln, & Cabral, 2008).

Scholarly work in education also referred to such ecological models to show the connection between the person and the surrounding embedded layers of influence (Moinolnolki & Han, 2017) and to further highlight ways in which schools function as central sites of reception for newcomer refugee youth, or as “complex mediation systems” (de Wal Pastoor, 2015) that can mitigate the vicissitudes of resettlement or exacerbate them. These elements include the negative consequences of high-poverty schools in areas where many refugees are resettled; their isolation in tracked programs that often lead to school experiences secluded from US-born students (Kiang & Supple, 2016); the availability of well-qualified and certified teachers and access to high-quality curriculum (Golden et al., 2014); the ways school leadership is involved and schools are structured (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008), curricular contexts with the potential to include or exclude (Goodwin, 2010a; He, Phillion, Chan, & Xu, 2008); the potential for multicultural and culturally responsive education to generate in schools positive “counter-contexts” (Fruja Amthor & Roxas, 2016); the role of counselors (Goh et al., 2007); and the role of teachers as “agents of reception” for newcomers to these sites (Dabach, 2011). Preparing teachers, then, becomes central in structural attempts to respond positively to the presence of refugee youth in new contexts of reception.

It is these attempts that the article turns to next, with the important caveat that just as caution is necessary against obscuring the structural elements of refugee youth adaptation, so too teacher educators may need to guard against inadvertently positioning teachers as solely responsible for the positive reception, adaptation, and success of refugee students. Indeed, teacher education programs work tirelessly to invest in future teachers as change agents who are “transformative intellectuals” (Giroux, 1988) and work toward social justice. They do so, however, with an understanding of the embedded nature of teachers’ work, as they navigate and balance vastly diverse work environments and resources, diverse ideological contexts, and uneven access to support structures.

Teacher Education Responses to Refugee Students

Conclusion

The work of teachers with refugee youth is complex and complicated by many factors. including unresolved trauma, interrupted patterns of schooling, and an ambivalent context of reception by public schools in countries of reception for refugee youth. However, research suggests that public schools can make an impact in their work with refugee youth through intentional commitment to learning more about the refugee youth and their families; a holistic approach to education and student well-being; strong leadership; and an approach that stresses inclusion and the provision of resources, time, and attention to the learning and social-emotional needs of refugee students (Block et al., 2014; Gabriel, Roxas, & Becker, 2017; Rutter, 2006). Moreover, attention should continue to be given as to how teachers and school communities more generally can begin to establish and develop school-based strategies to support refugee students as they build new routes to future academic and professional success, routes that “transcend cultural, structural, and spatial boundaries” (Oikonomidoy, 2014). Much of the knowledge we have about working with newcomer youth originates in studies focused mostly on immigrants, and more work is needed to examine the specific dynamics emerging from refugee resettlement processes—including group-specific facets—and their consequences for schooling and academic achievement (Moinolnolki & Han, 2017). It is also rare that we gain detailed insight into effective approaches through actual program descriptions and analysis (Block at al., 2014), and more of these study types would enhance the field of teacher education for the benefit of some of its most vulnerable students: refugee youth.