On November 14, 2019, six students at Vassar College began an Intensive course with their advisor, Professor of Education Maria Hantzopoulos.Footnote 1 At the beginning of a semester-long class titled “Finding Place: Refugee Youth Schooling Experiences,” the four authors and two additional peers, none of whom had collectively met before, were eager to examine the intersection of forced migration and informal educational spaces in Athens, Greece. As Intensives were a new pedagogical initiative at Vassar to get students out of the classroom and diving deep into a focused topic, we, the authors of this chapter, felt anticipation over the openness of the experience and our ability to shape the direction of the course.

Ultimately, “Finding Place” aimed to (1) study the sociopolitical and historical contexts surrounding forced migration to Greece, (2) assist our professor with fieldwork on a project she is conducting on refugee education in Greece, and (3) work in partnership with a Greek refugee-led grassroots organization providing cultural and educational programming for refugees. While the planned class initially entailed a trip to Athens to research and learn on the ground, the onset of Covid-19 made this impossible, and the course required significant changes. Nevertheless, this chapter illustrates the important lessons we learned, in hopes of contributing to a growing discourse on how to incorporate more inclusive, community-engaged ways of teaching about forced migration into higher education classrooms.

In light of recent and unprecedented global migration, many institutions of higher learning are increasingly studying the effects of forced migration on various sectors of society, such as health, politics, economy, and education. For some, the impetus for this interest is not only to understand the impact of forced migration more broadly, but also to understand how people who have been forcibly displaced bring knowledge, ideas, and skills to their new local contexts. Too often, academia and mainstream media marginalize the lived experiences of affected communities. At the same time, there is a growing push to highlight refugee voices. Thus, with “Finding Place,” Professor Hantzopoulos created a course that incorporated these voices into an academic setting with students from different disciplinary backgrounds. Specializing in Peace Education, Professor Hantzopoulos’s work combines theoretical foundations, restorative justice, and multidisciplinary techniques to create practical changes through curriculum development and design, collaboration, service, and action. She had been deeply engaged with students in the large migrant community in the greater Poughkeepsie, NY, area. The hands-on, community-engaged learning experience carried that expertise beyond the Hudson Valley, providing a first-hand lens for us students to understand the complexities of forced migration in educational contexts.

This chapter discusses the context of our field work in tandem with the course’s aims and structure. It also details how the course integrated restorative justice pedagogy, using one of our workshops as an example. Due to our inability to travel because of the pandemic, this chapter will detail the pivots and pitfalls we experienced. Through it all, we concur that multidisciplinary approaches paired with student-led projects are key to developing a critical understanding of forced migration and possible inventive partnerships. Thus, we conclude with several recommendations for future initiatives based on our experiences with developing instructional material. In the end, we gained a deeper understanding of the importance of contextualized, developmental initiatives within undergraduate classrooms.

Context, Course Overview, and Workshop Design

Over the last 30 years, Greece has become a site for an increasing number of refugees to seek asylum. The collapse of the USSR in 1991, the subsequent expansion of the E.U., and the Schengen Agreement of 1985 that led to the abolition of Europe’s national borders radically transformed European immigration patterns (Kasimis and Kassimi 2004). As the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia sought to overcome difficulties related to state-building under capitalist auspices, Greece experienced the highest increase of immigrants at the time, due to its location and extended coastlines (Kasimis and Kassimi 2004). Compounded by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and conflict in Africa (notably Eritrea and Somalia), Greece continued to experience an influx of displaced populations. Although many refugees sought to migrate beyond Greece, new border control measures passed in 2016 suppressed movement into Northern Europe, consequently leaving Greece with the responsibility of integrating the more than 50,000 refugees present (International Rescue Committee n.d.). While approximately 16,000 refugees remain confined to the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios, Kos, Samos, and Leros as of 2021, the majority (38,000 refugees) live on the Greek mainland in urban environments (International Rescue Committee n.d.). There, refugees face unique challenges navigating social and economic integration in Greece, particularly in urban areas.

While most refugees entering Greece come through the islands, an increasing number of refugees are settling in Athens. Education plays a crucial part in this decision to settle there, specifically as students seek language instruction in Greek and English to begin integrating into Greek society. As a result, there has been a rise in the creation of urban refugee centers to provide support and resources to these communities. Professor Hantzopoulos had been working in partnership with one of the refugee-run organizations, Zaytun,Footnote 2 for several years. Located in Exarchia, a neighborhood in Athens renowned as a haven for asylum-seekers from overcrowded camps, the organization was established to offer humanitarian relief to those experiencing protracted displacement in and from the Middle East and beyond. Their commitments include child protection, education, food security, and shelter, and to increase the quality of life and maintain sustainable conditions for refugees. Zaytun’s branch in Athens offers a variety of courses, including empowerment projects for refugee women and children, a reading and storytelling group, and English Language Learner (ELL) classes.

The initial goal of the course was to have Vassar students travel with Professor Hantzopoulos to Athens in March 2020 to collect data at Zaytun for her research project exploring how programs for refugee and migrant children foster and/or hinder a sense of well-being and belonging for refugee youth who are experiencing trauma from war, displacement, and dispossession. Participation in this study and international research experience required an application and interview. The six students included four students majoring in Educational Studies and two majoring in International Studies. While some of the group had experience with curriculum building, other students had worked with refugee populations in the Poughkeepsie area, NY. After being selected in fall 2019, students were expected to meet and prepare by reading broadly about topics like migrations and schooling, contemporary Greek politics and economics, and EU refugee policies. This part of the class was not interrupted by the pandemic, and the class met biweekly between November 2019 and December 2019 to discuss the possibilities and parameters of the project. During this time, we were introduced to Zaytun’s work. From January 2020 to March 2020, we met weekly and prepared for ground-level work in Athens by studying a variety of economic, political, theoretical, and pedagogical texts, as well as reading on historical and socioeconomic contexts in Greece, refugee education, and workshop development. We then learned about global migration to Greece, refugee education and education in emergencies at large, and, more specifically, refugee educational initiatives in Greece, to situate the work of Zaytun.

Professor Hantzopoulos stressed that research should be reciprocal and collaborative, and, as a result, she thought it was important that we find out from our Greek partners what they might need from us while we were there conducting interviews and observing. Since Professor Hantzopoulos already had an established relationship with them, she facilitated some calls early on to discuss what was needed from her students before their planned arrival in March 2020. Over the March 2020 spring break, students were scheduled to travel to Athens for two weeks to help conduct interviews and surveys at the site, as well as volunteer at the site based on the host’s needs. Finally, upon return, students were expected to work together to analyze data and complete a final project. Out of a desire to maintain an intimate, cooperative group setting, as well as because of budgetary constraints since this was funded through a grant, Professor Hantzopoulos intentionally limited the group’s size. Students came from a variety of concentrations: Education, History, Political Science, International Studies, Forced Migration Studies, and Urban Studies.

Zaytun initially asked us to examine and update their comprehensive English language curriculum, which served people mainly from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Their students belonged to different age groups and had different levels of English language fluency, from beginner to advanced learners. Zaytun also asked us to make their curriculum more socially and culturally relevant. Further communications with Zaytun brought up an interest in professional development of the volunteer educators, some of whom are refugees themselves. As a result, the second phase of our work focused on creating and conducting teacher-centered workshops. Our partnership with the organization remained the foundation of the course’s bottom-up structure, granting us the ability to create learning materials and projects that centered the needs of English language learners at Zaytun. These considerations compounded into a cooperative effort between us, Professor Hantzopoulos, and instructors at Zaytun as we explored various modes of learning, from traditional ELL curricula to digitally engaged learning activities.

Our first major task was revising their existing curricula, which were targeted at speakers of varying English proficiencies, from beginners to advanced students. We augmented the work by creating projects that focused on vocabulary for daily life, restorative justice activities that facilitated connections between students, and journaling exercises to promote building one’s own voice in a new language. We divided the curriculum by level and then worked in pairs to tackle each part. This allowed us to use our personal strengths in curriculum development, elementary education, drama, and arts to revamp the English curriculum. For instance, rather than simply have students memorize decontextualized vocabulary about places, we created an activity that engaged students in scenarios about navigating public transportation. In another instance, we suggested interactive lessons like a staged food market where the lesson allows students to navigate their new environment. We relied on communication and guidance from Zaytun—without their position as a grassroots organization with intimate knowledge of their community, it would have been difficult to update their comprehensive English language curriculum in a culturally and socially relevant fashion.

Alongside this revisionary curriculum development work, we came up with a preliminary menu of workshops for Zaytun’s volunteer educators to determine what would be most useful for the organization. The menu of workshops, a product of our individual expertise and passions, went through a polling process. There, at the collective suggestion of Zaytun’s instructors, we created three workshops: Narrative and Creative Writing with Kids Learning a New Language; Improving Classroom Functions: Tools for Class Participation and Discussion; and Using Technology in the Classroom. The six of us split into three groups of two to develop each workshop separately. Each week, we communicated with teachers at Zaytun through Professor Hantzopoulos to ensure that the activities and curricular changes we proposed were relevant to students’ needs and followed trauma-informed teaching strategies. As a precursor to our work in Greece, we planned to meet directly with the organizers upon arrival in March to review the materials, and then determine how to implement the workshop on the day it was scheduled.

However, one day before departure, we received the heartbreaking news that we had to cancel our long-planned trip because of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, the organizers asked us to send the materials so they could implement the Creative Writing workshop with local volunteers, even though they were not fully designed for others to simply implement. However, given the educational deficit and need, Zaytun thought they could potentially implement this workshop on their own. The Improving Classroom Functions and Using Technology in the Classroom workshops were then postponed for June 2020, under the assumption that by then the pandemic would end and we would be able to travel. In the following section, we discuss more broadly the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings and development of the three workshops, and then focus on the Narrative and Creative Writing course to discuss both the possibilities and limitations we faced in enacting this workshop with the local host site.

Integrating Restorative Justice Pedagogy: Theory, Practice, and Reflection

In designing the workshops, each of us brought unique knowledge from a variety of subjects, yet we shared a common desire to create workshops that would support teachers in teaching refugee students English through restorative justice practices. Restorative justice practices have often been understood in education as a way to understand disciplinary structures, yet Greg Ogilvie and David Fuller illustrate how restorative justice can also act as a pedagogy and framework for teachers. This can “provide a more appropriate, relevant, and compassionate curriculum” (Ogilvie and Fuller 2016). By framing students and teachers as peers with equally valuable, albeit differing, experiences, restorative justice pedagogy is especially effective in breaking down power dynamics between students from vulnerable populations and volunteer teachers, who often have privileged identities. We hoped that through the lens of restorative justice pedagogy, the workshops could provide tools for teachers to create caring environments in which refugee learners were able to fully share their ideas and humanity.

Linda Christensen’s (2009) book Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom provided a key framework for examining how social justice and providing spaces for marginalized groups may be achieved through language arts. Though her work examined social justice education in American high schools, members of our Vassar group attempted to adapt Christensen’s framework to use in creating workshops that provided the space for refugee students to examine social and political institutions and the surrounding structural violence. Determined to be culturally aware and trauma-informed, our workshop aimed to introduce a pedagogical approach that highlights refugees’ experiences without reintroducing trauma.

The restorative justice pedagogical framework was woven throughout our workshops, but was manifested mostly through our students’ creative writing workshop. When the creative writing workshop was selected by the staff at Zaytun in January, two of us, Adam and Sophie, were best positioned to take on its design. At Vassar, Adam had created a Spoken Word workshop at a local high school for a Peace Education Class, and Sophie had a background in arts education. Together, Adam and Sophie created a 30-slide presentation for Zaytun and other community teachers as part of a two-hour workshop. Adam and Sophie wanted to create an environment that allowed participants (in this case, instructors) to experience the activities as well as learn about other activities that could be brought into refugee classrooms. One activity was called “Writing for Justice,” which asked students to write a narrative scene about an injustice they might have experienced while incorporating terms like ally and bystander. The activity would be accompanied by a conversation about how people are complex beings who constantly shift into different roles, depending on their environment and surroundings.

Overall, Adam and Sophie hoped to give community teachers the tools to provide spaces where refugees could practice their writing while also exploring their identity. Throughout the process of creating the workshop, the greatest concern was not pushing the refugee learners into situations that might force them to relive their trauma. For example, when discussing whether to include an “I am From Poem” activity that centers students’ histories and identities and sense of place, Adam commented: “I am wondering in this context if this actually might be too triggering, given that folks have been displaced from their homes. Maybe we could flip these to ‘Who I am’ poems?” Ultimately, the activity was replaced by “I am” poems where students would describe who they are in varying detail.

While we planned to review the materials with our hosts, getting to know teachers and students in person, revising the material as needed, based on input after we arrived in March, we were unable to do so when the trip was canceled due to the pandemic. Instead, as previously mentioned, the education director asked us to send her the materials so she could determine whether she could train volunteer teachers on her own. Since the intent of these workshops was to work with the ingenuity and experience of individual teachers, we thought it would be best to send material over first to see if they could be useful to the organization. However, we had initially anticipated that, at the very least, we would have time to connect in person and meet to discuss. While disappointed that we would not be able to deliver what we planned ourselves, we were grateful for the flexibility and generosity of our partners.

After sending the materials, the education coordinator reached out to discuss areas that needed improvement, including academic levels, and situating the work in the context of the majority of the refugees. For example, Sophie and Adam received an email regarding a short excerpt by Yasmin Hai, titled “Revenge of Young Muslims,” from Stories of Identity: Religion, Migration, and Belonging in a Changing World that was in the lesson plan:

I’m afraid this text is not very suitable for our demographic, most of our beneficiaries do not have anywhere near the reading skills to understand the text and the subject itself is extremely delicate, for most of our beneficiaries religion is a very sensitive issue that we try not to pick apart too deeply in classes. I also feel some of the content in the rest of the PowerPoint needs adjusting—I wonder if at some point this week we could discuss at least this creative writing workshop in greater detail?

When that email hit our inbox, our stomachs sank. We had missed the mark. Despite our major goals with creating a critical, caring, culturally responsive workshop, we found that we still engaged with Zaytun through a “Westernized lens.” In our attempts to engage the local refugee population, we did not actually include appropriate materials. This was partly because we had not had the opportunity to meet them yet, which compounded our lack of community knowledge. While the story we chose for the workshop was meant to reflect the identities of the young people, the story was not only too triggering for children that migrated to Greece under harsh and traumatic circumstances, but also dealt with a subject (religion) that they might want to avoid discussing in that space. In addition, the language used was too advanced for the level of English language learners at Zaytun. We had chosen this excerpt because the subject matter loosely reflected the population Zaytun worked with, but it was not a successful choice.

The email illustrated how little we understood the refugee populations we hoped to work with, as well as our lack of knowledge on how to actually approach creating accessible, caring curriculum. Professor Hantzopoulos reassured us that if we were at Zaytun we would have been able to observe the organization before presenting, and then been able to modify our workshops to better fit the students’ needs and experiences. Nonetheless, we Vassar students fundamentally misunderstood the level of language proficiency of Zaytun’s students. While Adam and Sophie had created the workshop using Christensen’s models of social justice education in a distinctly U.S. racial context, the workshop needed to better translate such frameworks across cultures. Thus, we found that certain U.S.-oriented materials on social justice education and refugee youth schooling experiences proved limited in this predominantly non-Western setting. Moreover, on the subsequent Zoom call with Zaytun organizers, the main organizer also shared that she felt that the workshops might be accessible to community teachers, but the activities themselves might not be accessible to their refugee students.

The Zoom call highlighted the divide between two whiteFootnote 3 Vassar undergraduate students sitting in their homes and an international NGO (nongovernmental organization) doing ground-level education work with refugees. Though the class strove to close this divide by having the six Vassar students travel to Greece and Zaytun and discussed the importance of context and cultural relevance, we still initially struggled to connect the theory from class to this broader global context by not fully thinking through the relationships among ourselves, the refugees’ identities, the work, and refugee education. After the Zoom call, Sophie and Adam revised and reconsidered their approach and pivoted to create three new activities that were more accessible to the language level of Zaytun learners, as well as less focused on potentially volatile identity-based structures. Examples of the new activities were fill-in-the-blank writing, in which teachers give students a template with some words missing. Students could choose which words would complete the sentence, with the possibility of making the paragraphs about certain students.

Recommendations for Future Implementation

Overall, we appreciated that the Vassar pilot course was multifaceted, with three core topics integrating theoretical frameworks and practical approaches to pedagogical interventions for displaced students. First, we contextualized the sociopolitical and economic situation in Greece through news sources, studied the transformative role of education in refugee experiences through reports from the United Nations and other NGOs, and engaged with theory on pedagogical practices for forcibly displaced populations.Footnote 4 We believe that this part of the course was necessary to ground our curriculum development. As well, we felt that the bottom-up approach, where we worked collaboratively alongside each other, our professor, and the host site overseas, modeled how community relationships can be built and potentially sustained. Another key insight we learned in conducting work alongside and with community organizations was the need for constant flexibility and adaptability. As we mentioned, the class had intended to travel to Greece and conduct the workshops with volunteer teachers at the partner organization over a 10-day period in March 2020. However, after the outbreak of Covid-19 and the trip’s subsequent cancellation, our group could not fully implement our planned activities.

Much can be learned from the challenges our group faced to better incorporate field work into future courses relating to forced migration. One of our main obstacles was communication difficulties. Due to privacy concerns and the time difference between New York and Greece, much communication between Zaytun and our group was conducted in early mornings or after hours through our advising Professor. Professor Hantzopoulos diligently relayed the plans and requests of the Zaytun organizers and teachers. Similarly, feedback from Zaytun’s organizers and refugee teachers were relayed through such meetings. Nonetheless, our Vassar student group was unable to directly communicate with the organization’s teachers and students given the time constraints. The general lack of direct communication also contributed to our student group’s misunderstanding of Zaytun’s students’ language levels and needs. Moreover, more direct communication between both groups would have eased the responsibility to transmit information borne by Zaytun’s head organizer and Professor Hantzopoulos alone.

While we were all planning on meeting in person, and that portion rapidly shifted overnight, it might be something to keep in mind in the planning stages as well (though none of us could have predicted the sudden global impact of Covid-19). We learned that it is key to build a strong connection between the organizations beforehand to facilitate clear communication. It is also crucial to build interpersonal relationships with organizers and students in advance. Through such dialogue, both groups can establish shared expectations for the forthcoming work, as well as mutual respect and appreciation. Furthermore, direct and ongoing feedback from the partner organization is critical to keep the needs of the community being served at the forefront of the project. Because of on-the-ground realities, we were not always able to get feedback when developing the workshops. We learned that communication delays due to environmental and technological circumstances, such as unstable Internet and time zone differences, should be anticipated.

Another key recommendation our group proposes for future courses includes lengthening the duration of work and increasing the frequency of meetings. Since our course met weekly over one semester, we feel that more time devoted to planning workshops for refugee teachers and students would have been beneficial. Thus, we recommend shifting to a longer course that may cover multiple semesters or quarters, with students meeting multiple times a week to ensure clear communication and ample time to prepare fieldwork. However, since our group was unable to fully conduct field work due to the pandemic, these recommendations solely reflect what our group imagined would have been more useful if we had had the chance. Moreover, because we were able to provide only one of the three workshops virtually, our evaluations are able to reflect on only some of our work. Nevertheless, we feel that undergraduate students and professors looking to build courses on forced migration that include fieldwork can learn from our experiences.

Overall, the approach of the course also allowed our group to focus our coursework on modifying and creating programs for refugee students based on the needs of Zaytun. Thus, our recommendation for future researchers and educators includes an interdisciplinary framework that centers on the experiences of refugee learners and emphasizes a strong working relationship with a collective or organization on the ground. While there were some glitches in communication, and a global pandemic upended our plans, we did find this to be the heart of the course and something that should be retained. As more higher education institutions attempt to study forced migration and refugee populations, we believe that the experiences of refugee students must be at the forefront, particularly as migration studies continue to gain popular attention. By centering on refugee student experiences, this course aimed to fulfill a proposed goal of higher education by “shap[ing] policies and build[ing] democratic systems of governance by producing researchers, teachers, education practitioners” and other individuals committed to uplifting refugee voices through studies of forced migration (Pherali and Lewis 2019, 6). Centering refugee voices and building global partnerships enable higher education institutions to engage with studies of forced migration in a way that asks students to serve as active participants in global responses to, and discourse on, the subject.

Conclusion

In light of rapidly increasing rates of forced migration around the world, institutions of higher education must develop relevant and socially conscientious studies of forced migration. Through this cohort of six Vassar students, the course’s model combined theoretical approaches to education with first-hand understandings of ongoing displacements. We specifically sought to implement restorative justice practices for forcibly displaced peoples through educational workshops, and our partnership with the local refugee-led organization remained the centerpiece of the course’s bottom-up structure. Through our suggestions, we promote a similar model for other institutions of higher education to undertake as applied scholarship on forced migration grows.

Moreover, we were given the opportunity to work with refugee educators and students, as well as reexamine pedagogical approaches to teaching about forced migration in the higher education classroom. Specifically, centering personal narratives, elements of field work, and multidisciplinary, culturally aware, layered approaches to forced migration should be the foundation for curriculum building on the subject. For higher education institutions to teach students effectively and holistically about forced migration, it is necessary to ensure that students understand the subject beyond its abstract implications. We hope that our grassroots classroom structure can inspire other students to consider how they might get involved. We benefited from this project immensely and, in some small way, were able to develop curricular resources for a group of students whose educational needs often go unmet.