Decolonization as a Cultural Order: Exploring the New Frontiers of Educational Justice in Refugee Early Childhood Education

This dissertation explores the ethical lives of humanitarian educators by focusing on how they articulate social justice norms in early childhood education policies and programs for refugees. Conducted as an international, multi-sited ethnography, the study involved 12 months of participant observations across three NGOs, 42 semi-structured interviews with teachers, policymakers, aid workers, and government officials, and a review of relevant documents. The research seeks to understand how nonformal early childhood educators of refugees conceptualize educational justice, how these beliefs are articulated in refugee educational inclusion policy and practice, and what implications, if any, changing ethical norms in the field may have on refugees’ cultural expression and self-determination in classroom settings.

Findings reveal that educators generally agree on the importance of early learning programs for achieving social justice for refugees. However, there is disagreement about whether educational justice should be primarily understood as an issue of equal representation or cultural tolerance. Historically, policymakers have focused on refugees’ equal access to host-country educational services, seeing schooling as a universal human right. But more recently, there is a growing expectation for educators to consider how the relationships conditioned by educational aid programming might contribute to refugee forced assimilation and social oppression. Reflecting demands for a more relationally just sector, this study shows educators are beginning to experiment with decolonizing their work, hoping to eliminate instances of hegemonic Eurocentricity in educational aid.

Decolonizing educators engage in two main processes: first, they seek to expand the epistemic tolerance of the field by challenging European knowledge hierarchies and promoting non-European knowledge traditions in classrooms. Second, they aim to strengthen Global South representation in humanitarian aid architecture by confronting the concentration of financial power and decision-making in Global North organizations. The study highlights tensions between universalizing human rights approaches and decolonizing approaches to educational aid, as well as tensions between the two decolonizing approaches, the combination of which causes ethically motivated humanitarian educators significant angst.

I end the paper with my own vision for educational aid reform. While I maintain decolonization as an important aspiration, I break with anticolonial scholars of education who assert that any and all knowledge with European origins should be eliminated from educational aid, advocating instead for a colonially sensitive rights-based approach. This approach encourages humanitarian educators to value knowledge based on its outcomes rather than its origins and to appreciate any socially situated emancipatory knowledge regardless of its cultural source. I argue that this dedication to ideological openness is an important ethical obligation for humanitarian educators, as it pushes them to attend to the immediate political needs of refugee communities alongside seeking to address the relational harms common to the global education sector.

This research provides valuable insights for early childhood educators in emergency contexts, policymakers, and donors by offering empirical support for relational justice reform efforts and providing recommendations for balancing decolonized education with standardized schooling. By highlighting the potential trade-offs these normative interpretations have on policymaking and programming, the study helps educators navigate the conflicting ethical demands of the field. Also, by emphasizing the ethical dimensions of educational aid, this paper helps guide policymakers and practitioners through making morally informed decisions that can enhance the well-being and emancipation of refugee children and their communities.