By ,  Cyrine Saab, Maha Shuayb

We are thrilled to share a new research study report published by our partner Center for Lebanese Studies (CLS).

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the knowledge production landscape in the field of refugee education, critically exploring how it continues to be shaped by colonial legacies and dominated by global north (GN) perspectives. Analysing the
English language and Arabic language academic literature on refugee education, the study investigates the power dynamics, economic interests, and ideological influences that sustain the divide between the global north and global south (GS) in this body of research. The findings reveal that the field of refugee education, despite its growth and diversification over the past two decades, remains profoundly unequal in terms of authorship, geographic focus, and the overall epistemological and ontological frameworks that underpin it.

Read the full report .

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What is our understanding of “refugee education”? How does education help refugees prepare for an intellectual and better life? What is missing in refugee education?

This recent publication by and LERRN Partner Maha Shuayb in highlights three significant points regarding refugee education. First, it discusses refugee education’s isolation from non-refugees that is partially due to an increasing “reification” of refugees. Second, it highlights the gaps between refugee education and the larger education field, resulting from political and state policies. Third, the publication sheds light on obstacles to the advancement of refugee education and the short-term thinking and conceptualization of refugee education due to the dominance of a humanitarian and relief paradigm that has resulted in a lack of a long-term vision of education provisions for refugees. It also draws attention to the need for research on refugee education that addresses the schism between research in the Global North conducted in the Global South.

The post Reflection on the Education of Refugee Children: Beyond Reification and Emergency appeared first on LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network.

Dr. Maha Shuayb, Director of the and Lead Investigator of LERRN’s Lebanon Working Group, has published a very timely article in that raises critical questions relating to refugee education.

Refugee education has been a growing global priority in recent years. It was one of the core themes at the where a geographically diverse group of 52 leaders and senior officials, including 32 heads of state or government, pledged to enhance refugees’ access to primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Refugee education was also one of the core themes of the where 63 official co-sponsors, including 13 states, pledged about $350 million to improve refugees’ access to learning.

Additionally, since 2019, Canada’s Minister of International Development, Karina Gould, has been to launch a global initiative on refugee education.

Dr. Maha Shuayb’s powerful piece in openDemocracy sheds light on the negative impacts of Lebanese containment policies on learning outcomes for Syrian refugee children. Based on extensive research Dr. Shuayb demonstrated how Global North countries and the Lebanese government developed an informal agreement where international donors would pay Lebanon politicians for the costs of the Syrian children’s education program, in order to keep Syrian refugees away from Global North borders.

Through these agreements, Lebanese politicians were able to embezzle millions of dollars’ worth of donor funding allocated to the education of Syrian refugee children, which resulted in the exclusion of 40% of Syrian children from educational opportunities.

Given the existing international focus on refugee education, Dr. Shuayb’s work makes a timely and substantive contribution to these policy discussions to ensure that refugees all over the world have access to quality education and other crucial opportunities.

Read the full piece .

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The , with the support of LERRN, has released a new report on how education for refugees and nationals in Jordan has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and making recommendations for future responses.

In Jordan, more than 2 million students across public, private, and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools have had their education interrupted since schools closed in mid-March 2020. With the spread of COVID-19, Jordan took the quick decision to implement a lockdown but to continue with education, albeit delivering its content remotely. The Ministry of Education (MoE) developed a quick response plan to provide a sense of normalcy for students as well as prevent the risk of students dropping out due to interruption in learning. This report outlines the MoE response to COVID-19 in Jordan, and builds on this response to visualize a roadmap for important interventions on the short, medium, and long terms. This roadmap is visualized based on emerging global resources during the pandemic and knowledge from education in emergency situations.

This report draws on the results of a larger multi-year study on the trajectories from education to employment for refugees and nationals in Lebanon and Jordan, a collaboration between the Centre for Lebanese Studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and the , Oxford Brookes University, with the support of , , and LERRN.

Download the full report: Education in the Time of Covid-19 in Jordan (PDF).

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By Christina Klassen

“Youth engagement.” This compelling but vaguely defined term drew me to apply for the LERRN Youth Engagement research placement in Lebanon in the summer of 2019. I submitted my application more out of a curiosity to understand why the local team in Lebanon had chosen this as an area of research priority than out of any of my own clear ideas of what a research project on youth engagement in Lebanon should look like. My background reading told me that youth engagement is what results “when young people are involved in responsible, challenging actions to create positive social change” (1), and that it requires involving youth in decision making and planning for issues that affect their lives and the lives of others. I had spent just under a year in Lebanon prior to my experience with LERRN, and it seemed to me that it would be challenging to study this kind of engagement in a country where, although people are often politically vocal and care deeply about their country, corruption is rampant, political power is restricted to an elite few, and initiatives promoting active citizenship receive little to no support from the governing bodies.

While in Lebanon with LERRN, I had the opportunity to speak with people who have a personal, vested interest in the issue of youth engagement: refugee and Lebanese youth, heads of activist organizations, and leaders of nonprofits that seek to support young people in Lebanon. A common theme that came out in these interviews was, indeed, the sense that any formal policy on promotion of youth engagement is experienced on the ground as little more than lip service to real notions of involving youth in active citizenship.

This is especially unfortunate given that meaningful youth engagement can be a protective factor for some symptoms of mental illness (2) and helps youth develop a sense of agency. Particularly in cases where people are facing multiple stressors, as is the case for many refugees in Lebanon, having a sense of personal control can help individuals manage stress and promote wellbeing (3, 4). When those desiring to be active citizens have few opportunities to engage with the decisions affecting their lives, wellbeing can suffer.

Facilitators and Challenges to Engagement

Some of the key stakeholders I interviewed worked for organizations with a youth-specific focus, others with a more general mandate that is open to youth (a demographic group that is loosely defined by organizations, ranging from the early teenage years to mid-30s). With regard to refugees, organizations more focused on influencing public policy did not specifically seek out refugee youth for involvement in their projects, though some nevertheless ended up involving refugee individuals in their programming, since their work impacted on these communities.

In my interviews, I found it especially interesting to learn about what factors stakeholders saw as promoting youth engagement. Among others, interviewees described how having access to mayors and municipal governments was important for allowing decisions to be made. The ability of the mayor to make decisions, his/her receptiveness to input, and the municipal council’s homogeneity were all important factors in allowing youth to make their voices heard. I also saw how some organizations focused on building the capacity of youth and training them to contribute socially, for example, through initiatives aiming to influence government policy and through training as citizen reporters. One particularly passionate activist spoke of how young people’s willingness to commit to long term engagement through slow activism was crucial to doing the work of sustainable change.

This last point highlights one of the key challenges in refugee youth engagement in particular. When asked about how any of their projects sought to engage refugee young people, many interviewees replied by emphasizing how the transience of most Syrian refugee community members made it hard to engage them in long term change initiatives; members of the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon, being more permanent, were more likely than Syrian youth to be targeted for projects specifically on youth engagement. Others shared how their perception of refugees’ inability to influence government policy was another reason why they were less likely to recruit refugee youth for such initiatives. What’s more, one leader stated that “refugees feel that they have more to lose than to win if they voice their concerns”, reflecting the precarious status of most refugees in Lebanon. In a country where even the longstanding Palestinian refugee community has limited rights (5), more recently arrived Syrian and other refugees barely stand a chance at asking to have their voices heard.

More generally, for both national and refugee youth, interviewees described how NGOs often stepped in to provide public services where the government was absent and failing in its duties. However, when NGOs lacked skilled staff, stakeholders shared how this could lead to a lack of vision to inspire youth towards engagement. Insufficient needs assessments and evaluations of interventions were also seen as challenges to creating meaningful projects to engage young people. Overall, insufficient funding contributed to precarious or non-existent sustainability for even effective initiatives promoting youth advocacy. A further challenge described was that funding from international donors was often tied to a desire to create political change in Lebanon that suited the foreign powers’ own interests. Overwhelmingly, a key challenge to youth engagement was the sense among youth that their voices and investment would not make a difference and would not reach the political elites’ ears in a way that could actually create change.

°Ő´Ç»ĺ˛ą˛â’s protests in Lebanon

As I write this post, Lebanon is in the midst of protests that, beginning on October 17, 2019, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri on October 28. As we witness the events continuing to unfold around Lebanon, we are faced with a very clear form of engagement, perhaps engagement at its rawest form: protest. This summer, I heard many Lebanese friends and colleagues express a sense of powerlessness that they and other young people in the country have felt as they struggled with, among other issues, the sweeping unemployment in the region, leaving many people unemployed or working for unstable pay in jobs outside of their fields, some even after obtaining multiple university degrees in desperate bids to be employable. Now, with these protests, what some are calling a revolution, there is a sense of hope, the kind of hope that comes when you have the chance, especially as a young person, to finally feel that you have some say in the decisions that shape your life.

As LERRN continues its partnerships with the Centre for Lebanese Studies at the Lebanese American University and other community partners, it will be interesting to see the effects of these protests on stakeholders’ on-the-ground experience and perception of youth engagement in Lebanon. For refugee Syrian and Palestinian young people, the protests have created mixed experiences (6), with some young people feeling empowered and united with Lebanese citizens against government corruption and others feeling threatened. Some Lebanese citizens see decreasing the number of refugees its strained infrastructure is currently supporting as a necessary step towards economic prosperity, while others feel that, with good governance and proper management of public funds, Lebanon could better support both refugees and its own citizens. A leader of a youth-focused community organization that I interviewed this summer expressed the importance of diversity in youth engagement initiatives, saying that bridges need to be built between communities, regardless of religious sect and refugee/national status, so that they can express and work to address their concerns together. Following a summer of intense government crackdowns on undocumented Syrians and other non-Lebanese individuals in a bid to force refugees to return home (7), it remains to be seen how public sentiment and future government policies will promote or prohibit engaging refugee youth and the building of such bridges.

One of the community activists I spoke with this summer said, “spontaneous mass protests, without leaders (…) break up as quickly as they form even though [they are] very powerful and inspire a lot of youth … on the short term. (…) but then [youth realize] it’s not lasting (…) so either they organize politically properly or they go back to their daily lives”. Time will tell whether the results of this revolution will be a slightly modified return to the status quo, with a few political elite setting the direction for lives in Lebanon, or whether a new government will do more than draft policy for show, and give a chance to youth, whether Lebanese or refugee, to be meaningfully, sustainably engaged and have a say in creating a positive future in Lebanon for themselves and the generations to come.

References

1. ACT for Youth. (Last updated 2019). What is youth engagement, really? Retrieved from .
2. Armstrong, L. L., & Manion, I. G. (2015). Meaningful youth engagement as a protective factor for youth suicidal ideation. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 25(1), 20-27.
3. Taylor, S. E. (2010). Mechanisms linking early life stress to adult health outcomes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(19), 8507-8512.
4. Allen, J., & Allen, M. (2016). The social determinants of health, empowerment, and participation. Oxford textbook of creative arts, health, and wellbeing, international perspectives on practice, policy, and research, 27-32.
5. Vohra, A. (14 December 2018). Palestinians in Lebanon reflect on ‘fading dream’ of return. Retrieved from
6. Alwani, G. (24 October 2019). Lebanon protests also bring Syrians, Palestinians out onto the streets. Retrieved from
7. El Deeb, S. (20 June 2019). In Lebanon, Syrian refugees face new pressure to go home. Retrieved from

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