Education, merit and mobility: Opportunities and aspirations of refugee youth in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp

Abstract

Drawing on observations and interviews with teachers and students enrolled in a camp secondary school, this article documents how youth aspirations are constructed, supported and constrained in the context of a limited opportunity structure. Data demonstrate that schools enforce cultural scripts of meritocracy, along with assurances that hard work in school will be rewarded with post‐secondary education and economic returns. The possibilities for upward social mobility driving this narrative were central to sustaining hope for students, despite being structurally out of reach of the vast majority. Nearing school completion, as young people confronted a gap between their aspirations and the opportunities available for their fulfilment, they more readily critiqued the inequitable distribution and quality of educational opportunities available to citizens and noncitizens. Yet even as they developed these critiques, they strategically reasserted the logic of educational meritocracy, rationalising that ranked systems benefitting a few to the exclusion of the majority were reasonable and just in contexts of scarcity. This study illustrates the ways that marginalised groups such as refugees deepen awareness of structural inequities and develop systemic critiques informed by their experiences, while strategically reinscribing trust and aspiring to inclusion in the same system in which they experienced betrayal. In the context of unprecedented global im/migration, this article draws attention to everyday struggles of refugee youth and a rapidly growing educational challenge that needs to be addressed systematically in contexts of displacement.

“What is the Point of School Anyway?”: Refugee Youth, Educational Quality, and Resettlement Tunnel Vision

“…Madziva and Thondhlana argue that a quality education lies at the intersection of these three environments, and cannot be achieved otherwise. The second underlying assumption to refugee youth’s aspirations is that personal responsibility, effort, and accountability are key to the ability to fulfill them (Bellino 2021; Poole and Riggan 2020). The research reviewed below destabilizes these maxims.…”

“…Refugee education scholars have advocated for refugee youths’ access to quality education as a means of providing them with life‐saving physical, psychosocial, and cognitive protection (Burde et al 2017); integration and belonging (Abu El‐Haj et al 2018; Warriner 2007); as well as economic mobility (Dryden‐Peterson et al 2019). Scholars have also questioned these promises for refugee youth, given the challenges that define the contexts in which they are embedded, such as low‐quality schooling refugee camps (Bellino 2021; Mendenhall et al 2015); segregated education in national schools (Chopra and Adelman 2017; Dryden‐Peterson et al 2019); and limited post‐secondary educational and employment opportunities in developing host countries (Horst 2006; Poole and Riggan 2020). Studies concerned with youth in the global south have demonstrated that while quality schooling might aid students in achieving agency and a sense of empowerment, it does not always aid youth in fulfilling their aspirations, including gainful employment, leadership opportunities, and/or a chance to give back to their communities (Bajaj 2009; Jeffrey 2010).…”

“…Bellino’s (2021, 9) research, concerned with refugee youth in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, traced the ways that meritocratic discourses were pumped through refugee camp schools, evidenced by teachers who encouraged their students to “dream big,” rationalizing that “educational success is accessible to everyone who works hard and performs well in school.” In order to protect students from the harsh reality awaiting them upon graduation, teachers made a concerted effort to conceal the structural inequities that would make students’ dreams impossible to fulfill, such as low‐quality camp schools; corruption in the Kenyan tertiary education system; and limited opportunities for students after graduation. For the most part, students who faced these struggles and realities daily took up these meritocratic notions, blaming themselves for their failures rather than the quality of their schools, problematically feeding into the belief that “individualized advancement came not from organizational efforts to improve the conditions of schooling or practices employed to make schools more inclusive; rather, individuals were expected to persevere despite poor conditions” (Bellino 2021, 16). However, as Bartlett et al (2018, 448) remind us, “optimism cannot overcome material circumstances.”…”

“Slowly by Slowly”: Youth Participatory Action Research in Contexts of Displacement

“…Recognizing shared aspirations to continue postsecondary schooling also drew attention to glaring access barriers and the unwelcome reality that, at the time, less than 1% of refugees globally had access to tertiary education (UNHCR, 2016b(UNHCR, , 2018. Though this opportunity gap was present throughout their schooling, youth co-researchers had selectively upheld meritocratic scripts, assuring themselves and one another that hard work in school would be rewarded (Bellino, 2021). Once they, too, found themselves having completed secondary schooling but with few opportunities to draw on their educational investments, they began to reflect on their participants' views differently.…”

Basic Medical Training for Refugees via Collaborative Blended Learning: Quasi-Experimental Design (Preprint)

“…Education is often touted as providing a sense of purpose amid the uprootedness of refugee status and life constraints in refugee camps [10,11]. It is championed for playing a vital role in facilitating endurance and transitions for refugees by providing them with the skills they need to increase their social capital and ability to adapt to different and challenging contexts [12][13][14][15].…”