Abstract:

Millions of children globally are displaced from their countries of origin and seek education in exile. Amidst growing displacement, global policy is increasingly oriented toward the inclusion of refugees in national education systems, understood to enable access to higher-quality education for refugees as well as post-school opportunities. But this shift to inclusion in national schools also means that refugee young people must contend with education in unfamiliar languages. The challenge of linguistic submersion at school is particularly evident in Uganda, a linguistically diverse country that hosts the largest refugee population in Africa and the third largest in the world, and where English is the dominant language of school. This paper draws on Reddick & Dryden-Peterson’s (2021) framework for understanding language issues in refugee education, considering Fraser’s conceptualization of social justice as “parity of participation” to examine the relationship between educational inclusion and English-only instructional policies for refugees. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with Sudanese and South Sudanese refugee families living in Uganda, national Ugandan teachers working in integrated schools, and policymakers and program leaders intervening in refugee education, the paper considers the extent to which refugees who are linguistically submerged at school have access to the kinds of economic, cultural, and political participation that can enable them to achieve parity of participation in exile and to build futures amidst uncertainty. The paper finds that access to English at school is intended to facilitate economic participation for refugees in host countries like Uganda, but this single-minded orientation complicates refugees’ cultural, political, and economic participation across contexts, that is part of full inclusion.