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This chapter will explore the impact of life in warzones, life in transit, and life in camps on children’s development. It will consider the potential of play-based approaches in supporting children holistically, providing respite, and enabling positive learning experiences.

It draws upon the authors’ experiences of two visits to the Dunkirk Refugee Children’s Centre at La Liniere refugee camp, located in the Grande-Synthe area of Dunkirk. We will discuss the approaches that have proved successful in supporting children’s learning and development, the challenges faced, and the lessons learned. It will consider how these approaches could support successful transition into more formal education. Finally, it will examine the implications for staff training and development.

This chapter summarizes a therapeutic art-based education project in Houston and two United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement camps in Burkina Faso, a small landlocked country in West Africa. The project, which was developed and led by the authors, Be the Peace – Be the Hope, was born from a spirit of hope and concern for the plight of children; particularly, for the mounting numbers of children displaced by war and conflict. Many of these children now live in resettlement camps. The ages of the participating students ranged from 8 to 22 in the camps. Many participating Houston middle and high school students had arrived recently in the United States and several had been refugees themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the diversity of trauma Latin American (LA) refugee children in the USA experience across migration. It proposes ways that practitioners and policymakers can use knowledge from existing research to improve services and respect the rights of LA children.

The paper used a systematic review approach supplemented by additional sources to capture current representative knowledge. The paper uses staged migration and social ecological approaches for organization and discussion.

LA children have historically and contemporarily been exposed to more instances and types of trauma than their non-immigrant US counterparts. LA refugee children have a high need for international protection that is not reflected in the US policy.

Knowledge of possible trauma types among LA children can inform practitioner expectations and prepare them for care management. Officers must be well-trained in both potential trauma-related content and geographic context and have excellent interviewing skills. Lawyers, advocates and judges – the latter who create precedent – play a critical role in children’s cases and should have access to high-quality, geographically and historically relevant and contemporary information.

The levels of violence in Latin America; the rate of child trauma; and the spike in unaccompanied children at the border compels the USA to reassess their positions on (a) refugee caps, (b) asylum screenings and (c) interception-related policies, protocol and practice.

This the first review to specifically focus on empirical trauma research specific to the LA child’s migration experience.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the contemporary “refugee crisis” is being presented to children through picture books and teaching materials. It uses the concept of refugeedom as an approach that takes into account the multiple facets involved in the forced movement of people in the past and present and seeks to show the value of historical understandings in educational contexts when framing resources for teachers and students.

The paper examines a sample of high-profile English language picture books about children’s stories of forced displacement and the most prominent freely available teaching materials connected to the books. A critical discursive analysis of the books and educative guides considers the ways in which ideas and information about forced displacement is framed for child readers and children in primary school classrooms. The context for the authors’ interest in exploring these books and educational resources is that in response to the numbers of children who are part of the current “refugee crisis” alongside a public call for the “crisis” to be explained to children.

The paper argues that picture books open up spaces for children to explore refugeedom through experiences of forced movement and various factors involved in the contemporary “refugee crisis”. In contrast, in the teaching resources and some peritextual materials, the child in the classroom is addressed as entirely disconnected from children who are forcibly displaced, students in classrooms are positioned to learn from the refugee “other”. When links are made between students in classroom and children who have been forcibly displaced it is through activities that position students in classrooms to imagine themselves as forcibly displaced, or to suggest they act within a humanitarian framework of welcoming or helping refugees. The authors believe that if teaching resources were more directly informed by discipline specific tools of historical concepts, more nuanced approaches to past and present histories of forced movement could be considered and from that more fruitful learning opportunities created for all students.

This research provides ideas about how materials to support the use of picture books in educational settings could be developed to promote historical thinking and contextualisation around key social and political issues in the world today. It also makes the case for historians to be involved in the creation of teaching materials in a collaborative way so that academic insights can be brought to teachers and students at all levels of education.

The value of this research is to understand how children are positioned in reading and learning about forced displacement and query the impact of decontextualised approaches to learning. It argues for the critical interpretative value that historical understanding can bring to present day issues which are history in the making.

Turkey hosts around three million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers, more than any other country in the world. Most of the Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers face poverty-related barriers to education, with parents unable to legally work or meet associated costs, or feeling they have no option but to send their children to work rather than school. According to a UNICEF report (January, 2017), even though there is a 50% increase in school attendance for Syrian refugee children in Turkey since June 2016, more than 40% of them (around 390,000) are still not receiving an education. One of the biggest challenges for the Syrian refugee children who are able to go to school in Turkey is the language barrier. The language of instruction in Turkish public schools is Turkish while majority of the Syrian refugee children grew up learning and speaking Arabic. Furthermore, the refugee children often encounter experiences of discrimination, exclusion and marginalization from the non-refugee peers and teachers who cannot recognize and meet the diverse needs of these children with their lack of teaching experience in the culturally diverse classrooms. This narrative research examines the lived experiences of Syrian refugee children attending a Temporary Education Centre (TEC) in a city located in the north-west of Turkey. Narrative research is a way of inquiring into individual and social dimensions of experience over time through storytelling. It is often employed to illuminate the experiences of marginalized or excluded individuals and communities. Given the influx of refugee children in TECs and schools in Turkey, it is important to provide an in-depth understanding of the refugee children’s lived reality in schools and centres particularly, the factors contributing to their academic success, resilience and psychological well-being, so that future studies will have a basis for further investigations of newcomers.

Each year, our university’s small community welcomes 200 refugees. Many refugee children’s schooling is interrupted due to long waits in refugee camps, so they need additional educational opportunities. Families from the refugee community and representatives from the Church World Services, a local refugee-resettlement agency, partnered with James Madison University to create a summer program that provides children from the refugee community with more support in English and reading. Creativity And Reading Education (CARE) is a summer program for Pre-K-3rd grade children in the refugee community that integrates creativity and English/literacy development by utilizing community-based field trips for real-world connections and applications. Pre-service teachers in this six-credit experience planned and facilitated morning meetings, integrated literacy/creativity activities, read aloud sessions, and vocabulary focused on field trips. We partnered with the schools and recruited 16 pre-service teachers, 30 children, and 10 parents to participate in the three-week program. This chapter explicates how CARE was conceptualized and implemented during its pilot year. We highlight our community partnerships, illuminate challenges and lessons learned, and explain next steps as the subsequent iteration of the CARE program that evolves to serve more students and families.

With the increased flow of Syrian Muslim refugees entering new places such as Scotland, attention has been given to Syrians’ adaptation to their new settings. This chapter explores refugee parents’ roles in mediating their children’s educational experiences. The study is informed by theory of identity (Hall, 1996), Orientalism (Said, 1978), framing (Bernstein, 2000), and hegemony in curriculum (Apple, 2004). Snowball sampling was used to recruit participants in Glasgow. Semi-structured interviews and vignettes were used to generate data with 12 parents and 12 school-aged children in 12 refugee families. The chapter explores how these families have encountered new aspects of their education, such as different pedagogy and Eurocentric curriculum. By examining the participants’ various ways of dealing with these aspects, the chapter explores educational challenges that did not exist before their displacement, demonstrates the inherent diversity within refugee populations, and conceptualizes their negotiation with new contingencies using Hall’s concept of identity as a relational and contingent process.

There are approximately 24 million children living in conflict areas across the globe who are not enrolled in school. The reasons vary greatly; while some have access to a school, many do not attend. School safety is a primary concern, in the form of bullying and racism, school attacks, and sexual abuse. Other refugee children are required to find employment during normal school hours to help their family. In addition, host governments struggle to find qualified teachers and administrators in many of these conflict-strewn nations. Over the next 10 years, these unschooled refugees will reach adulthood, lacking the tools necessary to build successful lives, either abroad or back in their devastated homelands.

The modern homeschooling movement presents an opportunity to address these challenges. Key technological enablers – fast microprocessors, high-speed internet, cloud computing, etc. – are becoming ubiquitous and cheap. Online, free curriculum, combined with translation software, presents a new paradigm. Even caregivers with limited education themselves can facilitate a learning environment in the home, wherever that home may be. While homeschooling will not work in every situation, it could quickly become an option that positively affects the future of tens of thousands of refugees.

In this discussion essay, characteristics of the provision of formal and non-formal education for refugee children in Greece will be explored through a comparative approach. The comparison reveals aspects of the social environments in the lives of refugee children. These will be examined through the lens of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1986) ecological systems theory as a means to understand the context of refugee children’s lives and also propose a more holistic approach to refugee education.

Refugees living with disabilities are among the most vulnerable, isolated and marginalized populations, and, of this group, children are particularly vulnerable. The purpose of this study is to identify current knowledge and research gaps specific to the experiences of refugee families who have children with disabilities. The authors assess the quality of evidence and describe the theoretical underpinnings of research that focuses on refugee families who have children with disabilities.

The authors searched nine electronic databases from database inception for English language, peer-reviewed publications. The authors identified themes from the included studies.

The authors identified 10 studies that fit their inclusion criteria and shown key findings in the form of six themes. Families who have children with disabilities experience structural barriers; their experiences are impacted by family factors and the degree and kind of support received, as well as the knowledge of parents about their rights. Gender differences made visible the precarious situations experienced by girls with disabilities. Gaps in educational standards and the capacity of schools, particularly in refugee camps, were highlighted.

The authors show that there is a lack of evidence-based research focusing on refugee children’s own experiences of living with disabilities. Children’s experiences that were visible were, for the most part, attended to through other’s accounts of their experiences. Many studies that the authors found (the current knowledge to date) describe children with disabilities through third-party accounts, including parents, caregivers and those who provided services to this population. There is an urgent need to explore the experiences of children who have disabilities and are displaced from their home country.

This systematic review focuses on refugee children experiences that has not been conducted before and identifies the research gaps for this group. Attention to how disabilities are understood philosophically and who are defined as refugees are needed in order for the research to accrue in ways that build a consistent body of literature. Without some consistency, it is not possible for studies to build on one another.