Dear Colleagues,

Worldwide, there exists an estimated 103 million forcibly displaced people, who are part of a broader grouping of “refugees/(im)migrants”, a term that indicates the complex social construction of migrants. Of those forcibly displaced, 41% are children and nearly 27.1 million are formally recognized as refugees under the UNHCR definition: People who are “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”. Nearly half of these refugees are under the age of 18. Despite significant gains in recent years, access to education within host countries can be challenging, and UNHCR estimates that at least 3.7 million refugee children were out of school prior to COVID-19 related school closures; refugee children are five times more likely than their non-refugee peers to be out of school. In host countries around the world, refugee students attend schools, and both adult and youth refugees engage in learning and teaching outside of schools—in job training centers, at community organizations, through resettlement agencies, and informally across refugee networks. Some create their own learning and teaching spaces.

This Special Issue will bring together different empirical research, conceptualizations, and expertise in multiple and varied forms of learning and teaching in refugee/(im)migrant communities. It will situate refugees to include those legally designated as refugees by the UNHCR, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and migrants who self-identify as refugees to show the complexities and multiplicities of migrant categorizations and experiences. Furthermore, while there is a small, but growing body of research on refugees/(im)migrants’ experiences in formal schooling and schooling in refugee camps, this issue will bring much needed attention to educational contexts outside of schooling. While potentially illuminating the challenges of refugee/(im)migrant education, individual pieces will focus on the ways in which these challenges are met, negotiated, resisted, and undone. In the aggregate, and in conversation with one another, the papers will push back against deficit framing of refugee/(im)migrant educational needs to demonstrate the ways in which refugee/(im)migrants learn, share knowledge, and educate themselves and others. The Special Issue will address the broad question: In what ways, with whom, and where do refugee/(im)migrants teach and learn?

Possible topics include, but are in no way limited to:

• Activism and advocacy as learning and teaching with/by refugees/(im)migrants;
• Critical refugee studies in education;
• Education in refugee/(im)migrant organizations;
• Experiential learning as refugees/(im)migrants negotiate new institutions, policies, and norms;
• Heritage language education;
• Intersections of adult and youth refugee/(immigrant) education;
• Limited/lack of access to formal schooling;
• Organizing and knowledge sharing in refugee/(im)migrant communities;
• Racializing refugees/(im)migrants in education;
• Refusing to learn in formal schooling contexts and the creation of new learning spaces.

Prof. Dr. Jill Koyama
Dr. Yalda M. Kaveh
Guest Editors

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• refugees
• immigrants
• education
• community
• critical refugee studies