Educational Equity for Refugees: Sustainable Practices

Alia Hadid, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

Melissa Hauber-Özer, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, US

Global instability and regional conflicts have led to the forced displacement of 117.8 million people (UNHCR USA, 2025a). School-aged children account for 12.4 million of this displaced population (UNHCR USA, 2025b), rapidly diversifying classrooms around the world and requiring teachers to equip themselves with new knowledge and skills. To ensure refugee students’ long-term success, teachers must be prepared to meet this population’s unique needs and help them integrate into the school community.

In this article, we highlight an essential resource for educators serving refugee students: a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies that we co-edited, titled “Educational Equity for Refugees: Sustainable Practices” (Hadid et al., 2025). Along with our introduction and a concluding afterword by Shawna Shapiro, the issue includes 11 studies conducted with refugee populations in various displacement and resettlement contexts. Together, these papers offer concrete strategies that teachers, schools, and governments can adopt to create more equitable learning environments. 

The articles demonstrate that advancing refugee education is a multi-layered effort that requires looking beyond individual students to examine the interconnected educational systems surrounding them. The research addresses these dynamics across three distinct levels: the resources individual learners bring, the vital role of family and community, and the systemic impact of school structures and curricula.

Learners

Equitably addressing the needs of refugee learners requires a fundamental shift in perspective. Research indicates that displaced students are frequently perceived through a deficit-based lens that focuses on academic gaps and language barriers (Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017). Treating refugees exclusively as victims of adversity reinforces this framing. Instead, educators must recognize these students as resilient individuals striving to rebuild their lives in a new environment. Advocating for an asset-based perspective means adopting a humanizing pedagogy where learners feel valued and have a sense of belonging. This inclusive environment empowers them to gain confidence, cultivate talent, and effect change (Bajaj et al., 2022). Furthermore, humanizing pedagogy includes holistic care for the learners, balancing language learning and academic progress with attention to emotional well-being (Hadid et al., 2025). 

Family and community 

Equity cannot be achieved if schools operate in isolation from the families and communities they serve. While past research has often framed refugee parents as passive and disengaged from their children’s education (Bergset, 2017), this special issue challenges that narrative. Contributors demonstrate the vital role of parents in their children’s educational success. For instance, Al and Akay document how newcomer refugee mothers leveraged personal and communal resources to sustain their children's learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, families enrich school communities by introducing valuable cultural practices, diverse linguistic skills, and unique adaptive strategies.

School and curriculum

To foster educational equity, schools must transition from a monolingual, deficit-based model to an institutional culture that values what students bring to the table. The contributions in the special issue demonstrate how educators can actively incorporate refugee communities’ existing cultural and linguistic knowledge in the curriculum through culturally sustaining pedagogy, scaffold complex subjects like STEM, and create welcoming environments that foster emotional safety. For example, Özel and Sümer demonstrate the potential of peace education to foster harmony, helping both refugee and host-country students navigate social cohesion and resolve conflicts constructively. Furthermore, schools must extend their reach beyond the classroom by building authentic, relational partnerships with families and dismantling systemic barriers to higher education and career pathways. 

Practical steps

Below is an inexhaustive list of strategies that contribute to fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and equity-based environment:

1. Adopt a care perspective that values students and responds to their needs. 

2. Emphasize an asset-based perspective that builds on students’ backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences. 

3. Establish classroom cultures that foster collaboration and engagement. 

4. Cultivate culturally responsive and sustaining classroom environments. 

5. Adopt curricula that students see themselves in and can relate to and create opportunities for learners to share about themselves, their languages, and cultures. 

6. Highlight the essential role of parents and families and create opportunities to involve them in their child’s learning.

7. Identify ways for communities to participate in learners’ education and advancement.

8. Practice self-reflexivity to identify personal biases, avoid mistakes, and ensure neutral and inclusive spaces.

Conclusion

The papers in this special issue illustrate that enhancing refugee students’ education is a multi-layered issue that requires coordinated action on various levels. By foregrounding refugee students and their families as assets, drawing on their unique perspectives, fostering welcoming school cultures, and implementing culturally responsive and sustaining curricula, we can set the foundation for an inclusive educational system that fosters belonging. Such a system is rooted in equity and holds promise to empower students and support sustainability. 

Alia Hadid, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the TESOL/Bilingual Education Program at Rhode Island College. With a strong focus on equity in education, her work emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds that students bring into the classroom.

Melissa Hauber-Özer, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Qualitative Inquiry in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Missouri. She employs critical and community-based participatory, ethnographic, and narrative methodologies to examine issues of equity and access for linguistically and culturally diverse learners.

References

Hadid, A., Hauber-Özer, M., & Hos, R. (2025). Educational equity for refugees: Sustainable practices. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 12(2). https://www.ejecs.org/index.php/JECS/issue/view/46

Hadid, A., Hos, R., & Hauber-Özer, M. (2025). Empathy in action: Nurturing sustainable educational change through Nel Noddings' ethics of care. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 12(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/2438

UNHCR USA. (2025a, June). Global trends. https://www.unhcr.org/us/global-trends

UNHCR USA (2025b, October). Five takeaways from UNHCR’s 2025 education report. https://www.unrefugees.org/news/five-takeaways-from-unhcrs-2025-education-report/