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We examine the ways in which young Syrian refugees perceive and navigate the symbolic boundaries of belonging when displaced in Lebanon. Using portraiture, we identify three dimensions of belonging for refugees -- safety, dignity, and relationships -- and we explore the role of education in cultivating each one. We find that educational spaces, such as formal school and informal volunteering experiences, are places where refugee young people are at times able to blur bright boundaries of belonging. We also find that this belonging is tenuous and serves to reinforce boundaries of citizenship, rights, and everyday practices that exclude refugee young people. Our findings emphasize the need for the field of refugee education to address the question of how schools can actively resist and counter state-established bright boundaries of belonging to instead serve as spaces that blur and redefine those boundaries.

This article explores the understood purposes of refugee education at global, national, and school levels. To do so, we focus on a radical shift in global policy to integrate refugees into national education systems and the processes of vernacularization accompanying its widespread implementation. We use a comparative case study approach; our dataset comprises global policy documents and original interviews (n = 147) and observations in 14 refugee-hosting nation-states. We analyze how the purposes of refugee education are understood and acted upon by actors occupying diverse positions across these nation-states and over time. We demonstrate that the articulated purposes of refugee education are oriented toward possible futures for refugees, and they presuppose refugees' access to quality education, social belonging, and economic opportunities. Yet we find that across nation-states of exile, refugees' access to these resources is tenuous. Our findings suggest reconceptualizing refugee education to reflect how refugees are simultaneously embedded within multiple national contexts and to address the exclusions they face within each one. This study of refugee education has implications for understanding the purposes of education in other ever-more-common contexts of uncertainty, including the rapid economic and social changes brought about by migration, globalization, and technology. Empirically, understanding the purposes of refugee education is critical in a time of unprecedented forced migration.

Limitations on membership and participation in host societies sharply constrain refugee young people's civic development. Especially when refugees attend national schools, they find themselves submerged in civic learning that does not include them or represent their experiences and realities. To explore possibilities for civic learning among refugees, we examine the education created by a Syrian community inside the structures of a Lebanese private school in Beirut. We conceive of this school as a 'borderlands' and find that it supports civic membership and participation in three ways: through adaptations to the Lebanese structures, curricula, and languages of schooling; through pedagogies focused on pragmatism; and through opening limited spaces for students to practice civic skills. We argue that the borderlands space created by this school holds lessons for both refugee and national teachers and school systems seeking to foster civic learning among refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of refugees who have fled across international borders due to conflict and persecution is at the highest level in recorded history. The vast majority of these refugees find exile in low-income countries neighboring their countries of origin. The refugee children who are resettled to North America, Europe, and Australia arrive with previous educational experiences in these countries of first asylum. This article examines these pre-resettlement educational experiences of refugee children, which to date have constituted a "black box" in their post-resettlement education. Analysis is of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, key informant interviews in 14 countries of first asylum, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in four countries. The article argues that contemporary conditions of conflict usefully inform conceptual understanding of refugee education globally, including the types of schools that refugees access in countries of first asylum and their rates of access. It further identifies three empirical themes that are common to the educational experiences of refugees in countries of first asylum: language barriers, teacher-centered pedagogy, and discrimination in school settings. The article examines the theoretical and practical relevance of these pre-resettlement educational experiences for post-resettlement education of refugee children.

We examine the ways in which young Syrian refugees perceive and navigate the symbolic boundaries of belonging when displaced in Lebanon. Using portraiture, we identify three dimensions of belonging for refugees – safety, dignity, and relationships – and we explore the role of education in cultivating each one. We find that educational spaces, such as formal school and informal volunteering experiences, are places where refugee young people are at times able to blur bright boundaries of belonging. We also find that this belonging is tenuous and serves to reinforce boundaries of citizenship, rights, and everyday practices that exclude refugee young people. Our findings emphasize the need for the field of refugee education to address the question of how schools can actively resist and counter state-established bright boundaries of belonging to instead serve as spaces that blur and redefine those boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]