“Teachers are a bridge between learners and the community”: A cross-country comparison of teaching in refugee camp and asylum accommodation contexts
A joint blog between NATECLA & IATEFL ESOL SIG - Ally Shepherd in conversation with Jean Harrison and Julia Kallinikou
In this conversation, Ally Shepherd (NATECLA Yorkshire & Humber; IATEFL ESOL Matters Assistant Editor) reunites with her former colleagues, Jean and Julia, to discuss their experiences teaching learners from refugee backgrounds in the UK, Greece, Cyprus, and Jordan. They discuss common issues like student turnover, low resource environments, including a lack of curricula and training for teachers in trauma-informed and critical pedagogies - as well as motivations for working with such learners, and the desire to advocate for them in our communities in a hostile environment.
Ally So I had the pleasure of knowing you both from 2014-2016 when we all worked in Myanmar on a national teacher training project between the UK and Burmese governments, run by British Council and Voluntary Service Overseas. And after Myanmar, I spent a year as Education Manager a refugee community centre in Northern Greece next to a refugee camp serving about up to 1000 people from Iraq: Yazidis from a Kurdish minority group who were fleeing genocide at the hands of ISIS. And then I came back to the UK and spent nearly two years - first as a researcher and volunteer teacher, and then as an interim manager - at another refugee community centre in the North of England.
Do you mind sharing what you two have been up to since we worked together?
Jean So my background is as a secondary school Head of English teacher, and 5 years working in a SEND secondary school. I’m retired now but I volunteered at an asylum hotel near Watford, England and now I volunteer every Tuesday afternoon in a hotel specifically for men between St Albans and Luton. It's in a part of the country that really there's nothing else. It's right next to the motorway. But apart from two small villages, one of which I live in, there's really nothing around. So they're quite isolated. We have this programme that's that we're supported by the hotel to go in there run by the NGO Care4Calais.
Julia Before volunteering in Myanmar I ran a language school in Cyprus and after Myanmar, I went to Jordan and worked on a project providing language, academic skills, and e-learning resources to Syrian refugees and disadvantaged Jordanians. This involved training Syrian English teachers and Jordanian aid workers in a large refugee camp, and teaching English classes to Syrian and Palestinian refugees and migrants whose further education had been interrupted. The idea was that you tried to get their English up to a level so they could get qualifications to join online courses in foreign universities.
After that, I worked volunteered on a Norwegian NGO English programme here in Athens, at a big refugee camp, Scaramangas, for asylum seekers from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syrian, and African countries as well. That was very demanding. I think I found that the hardest experience, mostly because of the tensions in the camp but also the limitations of the programme.
More recently, last year, I volunteered to teach for a Cypriot NGO with a centre in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. When I lived in Cyprus for 30 years, there were very few refugees (other than those of Greek Cypriot/Turkish Cypriot descent), but apparently that's changed a lot in the 10 years since I've left. So I was doing online lessons with a group of adults- most of them were from Palestine, but they were also from Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Congo, Somalia, other different countries.
And what drew you to working with people from refugee backgrounds?
Jean For me, I’m retired so I've got time on my hands. After Myanmar, I came back from Ghana and there was this refugee “problem” and I thought, ‘oh, I can help’. I just felt desperately sorry for these young men, in a hotel on a dual carriageway in the in the middle of nowhere. And I wanted to get involved locally. I didn't know people around, so I got to know my neighbours through volunteering.
Julia For me, I've had a very long career of language teaching, and I find that I'm so much more open and less frustrated by the context of people who are enduring far more struggle in their lives. Being part of that seems more worthwhile than just going through the motion of having a lesson in a system that you might not fully agree with. And they’re so grateful and engaged as learners.
Julia, you mentioned tensions in the camp, what were some of the other challenges?
Julia In Greece, I had to try and redesign the curriculum and advise the other teachers who were volunteers as well. But they were really just people here on holiday doing 2-3 weeks there and it was a bit messy.
Ally In both of the contexts that I was in, they were reliant on volunteers. So we often got a mixture of the occasional trained teacher, but a lot of people who weren't trained. Have you found that that was common across the other contexts as well?
Julia Yeah. That was in the situation here in Greece, but not in the other countries. In Jordan, everybody was trained because it was implemented by the British Council, so you had to have a background in education.
Ally So not Jordanian teachers, or people who were displaced but happened to be teachers as well?
Julia Most of the trainers were from England, training Syrian and Jordanian teachers to adapt their teaching to the camp context.
Any other challenges?
Julia Online, attendance was not regular. Equipment was very, very limited. They were working on mobile phones. They couldn't use cameras because they were either in a hostel and there were lots of other people around them, or they had young babies and children in the same room and wanted privacy. So it was speaking to a black screen, which I found incredibly difficult.
Anyway, they met twice a week for 1.5 hour sessions. It was actually very productive because we managed to bond as a little group, even though attendance was erratic. Especially for the guys who were working, they didn't often get back on time or they were too tired and they'd join and then they'd fall asleep. It was difficult. But there was a core of about six or seven people who were very keen. It was it was like A2 level, quite low. But they all had different types of vocabulary according to, you know, who they were mixing with and things like this. We did have a digital course book which was not very useful. They were supposed to have a test at the end of it and then progress to the next level, but I think what they've done with the organisation is to say that students have to go to the city for the face-to-face classes now, so we stopped.
Photo credit @ A Shepherd
Jean For us, there's normally about three or four volunteers go in. We never know how many students are going to turn up because they're in the hotel context, you know, they come and go. Sometimes the hotel’s packed out and sometimes it probably depends on the weather and the crossings, I think. I haven't noticed a big influx recently. But we have a complete mixture from really very good English to practically zero. And the progress is very, very slow. I mean, we only give them a couple of hours a week. But one of the volunteers has contacts with the local colleges. So when they've been here a certain length of time, then they're eligible to go to college and go to the English classes there, which is obviously much better as it’s much more hours.
And what about a curriculum? Do you have one or plan lessons yourself?
Jean That same volunteer now organises the lessons too. Before she came, we tended to just take it as it came, depending who came, what they wanted to talk about, or we'd go back to very basics. Now she does more planning of lessons. Which can be a good thing and sometimes I would say not such a good thing [laughs]. I think the others sometimes get very focused on what they were intending to do without much thought as to the need that is there.
Ally It’s getting popular now talking about dogme or working with emergent language, and in this context it's actually really useful to take a more flexible approach and chuck the lesson plan out the window, or have a rough lesson plan butveer in other directions as wanted or needed.
Julia It depends on the mentality or mood of the moment. They come in and they can be traumatised by something that's happened. And you need to deal with that in a way that is supportive. If you're connecting with your learners,you can't follow a plan alone.
Jean It’s just what I do. It's my anarchy. I just I just connect with them and ignore what we're meant to be doing [laughs].
Ally But that's a methodology with a whole body of theory and literature behind it. And there's a whole bunch of benefits to working like that. I'm a big advocate of that way of learning and working – for any context!
Jean I did suggest that we asked the guys what they wanted to learn (I think it was something from something you did, Ally) that they produced a plan and of what they wanted to do. But we found the students didn't want to suggest things.
Ally Yeah,sometimes people are like, “we want this, we want that, we want that”, and I'm like, “great, great, great” [laughs]. But I've found that sometimes, especially when people are used to a teacher-centred approach, they say “whatever you want, teacher”. So when they've been a bit more hesitant, I've found it's better to give a list of topics to choose from, and then at least you're not making them learn something they’re sick to death of [laughs]. It's sort of a middle ground. Because sometimes people are tired. They don't want to have to think about planning their own lessons, which is fair - and we are trained at this. But it's nice to have choice and to know that you're offering something that they actually are interested in.
Jean, are you the odd one out being the trained teacher or not?
Jean To start with I was, but now there are four trained teachers and one not. So there is quite a lot of expertise. But I would say less expertise in teaching in this context. Understanding the different needs teaching these learners. So that's a problem because you know what teachers can be like [laughs]. Once they've done their lesson plan, there's no deviating. And some teachers have no experience of people from other countries and other cultures, what they know and what they don't know, and it can be quite condescending sometimes. So that's a problem. I've had quite a lot of experience - not as much as you two - working overseas, learning and being immersed in other cultures. So I'm probably unusual in the sort of people we get around this area.
Ally I was going to mention intercultural communication skills as important.
Julia I think there has to be an opening for them to talk about their customs and festivities to draw a parallel to ours in diverse groups. It can’t be one way.
And what is the local reception like to the hotel being in this small village?
Jean It’s very mixed. The local church does a coffee afternoon every week where they distribute clothes and SIM cards, and the people that run that are brilliant. They go and play board games and get coffee and cake. But in the area I live there's quite a small minority that have travelled the world or understand what they might be going through. It really is quite upsetting and vile some of the stuff that I read. Obviously, not everyone, but the students are quite wary.
Ally I feel like the media has done a good job of scare mongering about single men. So as a hotel for men, I feel like that could whip up dissatisfaction in the population.
Jean Absolutely. A couple of years ago a load of guys would come through the village with their phones filming around them. Well, that caused absolute uproar. I spoke to as many people as I could. I said, when you're on holiday, do you not take pictures? They're just saying ‘this is where I'm living’ to friends and family.But it caused huge problems and, in the end, they were set upon and beaten up.
That’s horrible. Were you volunteering at the time? Did that get talked about in the classes? How did you deal with that?
Jean Oh, yes, it did get talked about. I mean, they were bruised, so I said, “how are you?” So I started it, but they were happy to talk about it because they were quite upset. They were just saying, “I don't know why”. And we tried to explain that people were scared. And they are scared because of the media and you're all men and they're just scared. But they were very upset and hurt, understandably.
Of course! Do you ever plan lessons around things like the hostile environment or racism?
Jean No. Thinking about it, I'll suggest that. We don't really know what's happening with their refugee status and sometimes we might chat to them about what's going on and their dealings with the solicitor when they have to go to London. But that’s it.
Photo credit @ A Shepherd
Julia, in any of your contexts, have your learners experienced this?
Julia There's a hostel near where I live, and there's quite a lot of opposition to that. It's for unaccompanied youths who are waiting to be placed. There's graffiti on the walls in Greek, insulting slogans and so on. But in my dealings with the people I worked with in Cyprus, I did ask personal questions like, how do your children get on at school? That worried me because my daughters grew up in Cyprus and were half English, half Greek Cypriot, and they were not really accepted by a lot of the other children and families. So I definitely asked about these things. But they were very polite because they didn't they didn't want to appear to be criticising anything.
Ally One of the reasons I was asking about talking about it in class is because I'm constantly thinking about, when teaching learners from refugee backgrounds, how to balance trauma-informed teaching, which says don't ask people about this kind of thing in case you trigger them, but also critically supporting people when there's challenging things going on instead of just pretending it's not happening. I've spoken to a lot of teachers who have critical values, but they don't know how to put that into their teaching without causing harm, so they just don't talk about it.
How can teachers support students balancing the trauma-informed and critical?
Jean I've done it very individually, not as a not as part of a lesson, when I've been chatting quietly to the guys maybe before or during the class. And that, I feel, works.
I don't think I would feel qualified- I would be very wary of doing as a whole class, I think I would need training. But we do have an art therapist come and do an art therapy group with them. She's a psychologist and she's very well aware of trauma. And so that class is there and I hope that it helps.
Ally We had an art therapist both in Greece and the UK at the community centres. One of them would do activities with us, the staff, as well, because of second-hand trauma. That was interesting. But I agree that if you are potentially unlocking something, it helps to have training to be able to support people in case they do get triggered.
For my PhD, I facilitated a participatory research course. They chose the topics that they wanted to research, which was language and integration, and also multiculturalism. We talked about things like racism and discrimination, but not in a personal way as in ‘have you experienced it?’ People could bring that up if they wanted to, but I never outright asked. As if it was a sociology class almost, like, let's talk about what racism or discrimination is. These are some of the statistics in the UK. Let's have a conversation about that. So it was opening up awareness about what was going on and opening space to talk about it if they wanted.
Obviously, you have to be super careful when you facilitate these sessions, responding to learners if they start to look upset, you move on, things like that. But it was my favourite class to teach. They said it was some of their favourite classes as we talked about things not usual in ESOL class. They said, “no more food and present simple please!” [laughs] I should also mention that this class was optional. It wasn't like I turned a General English class into a political class. I did say: this is an extra class that you can decide to come to or not, which I think helped in terms of they were ready to a different way of teaching and learning.
Photo credit @ A Shepherd
Do you think that something like that could work in any of the contexts that you've worked in?
Julia I think it's an excellent approach because you're giving them the choice to disclose their personal experience or to shield themselves from it. And giving them this kind of topic which is relevant to their lives. I think any teaching has to be connected to their life experience or their goals. I mean, you have to teach them the present simple. You have to equip them with the vocabulary. But that can be through emergent language, and they don't even know they're doing it.
I think maps are great to use with literacy learners, even though you can tell if there are some people who don't really want to talk about where they are from and prefer to talk about where they are now. So it needs sensitivity to that.I don't think it's the materials, I think it's actually the flexibility of the person who's implementing the class.
Jean We do often do news items, what's been on the news this week. But a mixture of things about, for example, conflict and racism, but other things a bit less intense.
Ally Oh, absolutely. We talked about the positives of multiculturalism like, here's where it's really working. We don’t want to depress the students! But I find that even when you're talking about heavy topics, you can do it in a waythat still has space for humour. You want people to feel like empowered, like, oh, we've talked about this thing and now I can talk about it with others. But I also warned, here is a safe space, but not everyone in the UK might want to talk about, for example, the British Empire. They might feel ashamed or angry.
Jean Yes, we have we have talked about what's inappropriate. Like, taking pics of children is a big no. And I saw one of the guys when I was with my granddaughter getting on the bus and he gave my granddaughter a two-pound coin, which was lovely. I mean, I felt terrible, but he said, ”it’s my culture”.
What advice would you give others teaching or wanting to teach in these contexts? Is there anything you wish you'd known before you started?
Julia I think you have to find out something about their culture.
Ally Agreed.I find most teachers of English usually have a curiosity for learning about other cultures. But it depends. Or if they’ve been teaching in another context.
Julia Yeah, I remember a teacher who was always complaining that they weren't serious students. If you just stop to think about what those students have done before the lesson and what they have to do after, then you wouldn't make a comment like that. I think teacher expectations are often cultural, but it’s also necessary to consider where students are living, who they're mixing with, and how they can be supported in making headway in that environment. Like what you're saying about the situation in the UK. It’s pretty damning this idea that you can go out and get attacked and have no idea why. So I think the teachers are a bridge between the unknown for the students and the local community or people of that country. I don't think anybody going to teach in this context should solely rely on their experience as teachers, but they should be willing to learn from the context.
Ally That was lovely advice.
Jean And I think we need specific training.
Julia Yeah,training’s useful. Oryou could observe each other, if that's possible; do team teaching and learn from each other. People like us could be more supportive of people who are less experienced.
Ally Yeah, when you're relying on volunteers, the experience is so varied, so the employer or organisation should train or support or encourage things like peer teaching. Though the problem is that many NGOs are run off their feet already. It’s a vicious cycle!
Anything else you want to add?
Jean I often use the bus as I’ve got a free pass. I take my grandchildren, and they love it. And the guys are often on the bus so if I see them there or in the village at the shop, I always make an effort of say hello and we shake hands and I do it very visibly, not for me, but I'm trying to demonstrate good behaviour.
Ally You're being a role model for the community. Because then you're showing people that they're not scary, they're just regular people. They're polite, they're nice.
Jean That's right, and what more can you do? I talk about it with friends in the pub, but I'm not sure that I change hearts and minds. Maybe.
Ally You never know.
Julia You might make them just question things a little more. That's a start, isn't it?
To discuss further, you can contact us on:
Julia juliakallinikou@gmail.com