Bridging the Gap Between Imagined and Plausible Futures for Refugees: What Students Wish Their Teachers Knew

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

AERA Open article examining the gap between the futures refugee young people imagine through education and the plausible futures available in exile. Interviews with Syrian students in Lebanon identify which elements of schooling are fixed and which are malleable in shaping student navigation toward future opportunities. Although schooling structures and content can feel exclusionary and immutable, teachers’ relational pedagogies—grounded in predictability, fairness, and care—help students interpret disconnects between imagined possibility and constrained realities. Findings extend to educators and systems supporting marginalized learners beyond refugee contexts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Bridging imagined and plausible futures

Education as a narrowing mechanism

Teacher relational pedagogies

AERA Open January-December 2024, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1–16 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584241230062 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2024. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Bridging the Gap Between Imagined and Plausible Futures for Refugees: What Students Wish Their Teachers Knew Vidur Chopra Independent Researcher Sarah Dryden-Peterson Harvard University Joumana Talhouk University of Oxford Carmen Geha Pompeu Fabra University There is a gap between the futures that refugee young people imagine will be possible through their education and theplausible futures in exile, where opportunities are truncated by social, economic, and political exclusions. Our study examineshow education can narrow this gap. Through interviews with Syrian students in Lebanon, we document fixed and malleable elements of education that refugee students identify as bridging their current education and their futures. Students experience the structures and content of schooling in Lebanon as both exclusionary and immutable, yet their teachers use what we call relational pedagogies rooted in predictability, explaining, fairness, and care to support students’ learning and navigation toward future opportunities. While our research focuses on refugees, it has conceptual implications for educators and school systems in other settings where teachers support their marginalized students to make sense of disconnects between what they imagine is possible through school and their future opportunities. Keywords: comparative education, immigration/immigrants, in-depth interviewing, pedagogy, qualitative research, refugee education, teacher education/development Introduction Globally, 68 percent of refugees have access to primary school and 37 percent to secondary school, rates that are deeply insufficient but, importantly, growing (Dupuy et al., 2022; UNHCR, 2022) . Refugee young people experience this education in contexts of extreme uncertainty. They face“unknowable futures”(Dryden-Peterson, 2017), particularly circumscribed by geographic limits on where these futures might be. Indeed, 75 percent of refugees seek exile in lowand middle-income countries (UNHCR, 2023), kept out of many high-income countries through policies and walls. Additionally, with conflicts lasting on average between 10 and 20 years (Devictor & Do, 2017), they know that returning to their countries of origin is nearly impossible in the short term and improbable in their educational and early working lifespans. Reflecting the protracted nature of displacement, refugee young people now generally enroll in schools within national education systems; refugees’ enrollment in national schools may seem commonplace from within the United States, yet until recently the vast majority of refugees globally were segregated in separate schools for refugees (Dryden-Peterson, 2016) . Currently, in the national schools they attend, refugee young people are typically taught as if the opportunities that are presumed to follow from a national education can accrue to them, and refugee young people imagine these opportunities will follow (Dryden-Peterson et al., 2019) . The opportunities refugee young people imagine mirror the opportunities other young people globally seek. They seek opportunities that are short term and long term, small and large. They wish to pass their end-of-year exams and proceed to the next level of school. They wish to go to university and become vets and engineers and teachers. They wish to build relationships with peers and feel happy and Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercia

FAQs

What gap does the study investigate?

The study examines the gap between the futures refugee young people imagine possible through education and the plausible futures they face in exile due to exclusions and constraints.

How was the evidence collected in this research?

The research used in-depth interviews with Syrian students in Lebanon across three schools located in Beirut and its suburbs.

What role do teachers play in bridging the gap?

Teachers support learning and future navigation through relational pedagogies rooted in predictability, explanations of fairness, and care, even when schooling structures feel exclusionary.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam