Portraits of Education Change: Redefining Pedagogy & Technology in Refugee Camps
In the current global refugee crisis, significant funding is going into educational technology to support refugee education in refugee camps (see Menashy and Zakharia, 2017). In these settings, there is limited empirical and qualitative research available about the social and cultural conditions of how technology - ranging from radio to social media as examples - is being used to mediate, facilitate, or support teaching and learning. In a landscape where top-down, quantifiable measures and scale are the prevailing method of interest for large humanitarian aid and development funders, there is a need for nuanced, participatory, and qualitative research to understand the human experience of education and technology in refugee camps, and distinctly for and among women.
Our previous work has shown that for refugees in camps, there is a complex configuration of factors that make a particular technology valuable and useful, and that teaching and learning happen in varied, social, peer to peer ways that are sometimes difficult to quantify. This precedent work shows how unexpected and existing technologies connect refugees across camps and across the world in ways that are meaningful and that facilitate community outreach and education around gender equity in schools (Dahya, Dryden-Peterson, Douhaibi & Arvisais, 2019), and across groups of women and men locally and in diaspora to support the pursuit of higher education from within camps (Dahya & Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Dryden-Peterson, Dahya & Adelman, 2017). This current project seeks to build on these findings and identify where else technology has a role to play in meaningful teaching learning, with a focus on informal and emergent pedagogies that make the adoption of these tools both possible and sustainable.
