Teachers multitask in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar camps for Rohingya refugees

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

Bangladesh 1Anowar is a Rohingya refugee who has been living in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh for over a year. He is a learning instructor in the Burmese language. ‘I’m happy. We Rohingya need education. If we don’t get it, we’ll suffer a lot.

At the beginning, it was a bit difficult because children were scared by the things that had happened in Myanmar. They saw lots of people being slaughtered when they were fleeing, so they were depressed. We helped them come to school for education and helped cure them of the depression.’

Jui is a host community teacher in camp #2, supported by UNICEF.I noticed that the Bangladesh 2children are very excited about getting such love and caring.  We go to them and ask if they have any problems, and after listening, we provide them with a lot of games that we have and if there is any serious issue then we go to their parents and solve it there.

That is why they feel happy to come here in school, because we communicate well with them; they feel inspired, and that makes me feel very good. We don’t just make them aware of education – we make them aware of health as well. For example, a few days ago we were told to prepare the kids to take the diphtheria vaccine.’

Teachers do not have enough training to teach in displacement settings, where they often have to cope with overcrowded, mixed-age or multilingual classrooms, as well as children who have faced trauma. In the Syrian Arab Republic, 73% of teachers had no training in providing psychosocial support.Bangladesh 3

Recommendation: Prepare teachers of migrants and refugees to address diversity and hardship

Teachers of refugees and displaced teachers need to be trained to deal with stress and trauma among their students, but they also suffer extra stress themselves. Management policies need to recognize and relieve the extreme hardships under which some teachers work; to regulate and ensure equality among types of teaching professionals to maintain morale; and to invest in professional development.

Please download and share the youth report

Youth can use it to inform their campaigns and advocacy, while the stories can teach about the education status and challenges of your peers around the globe.

Teachers can use it as a classroom aid/pedagogical tool to discuss key issues on migration and displacement around the world, taking each story in turn, discussing the context, the implications, and the solutions.

Actions you can take to support the Youth report recommendations include:

  1. Tweet the stories and recommendations in the Report using the hashtag #EducationOnTheMove
  2. Find more stories and associated calls for change on the campaign homepage
  3. Share your own story of what it’s like accessing education when on the move via the campaign homepage and help us raise awareness of the issues needing attention
  4. Work up an advocacy campaign around one of the recommendations, sharing the key facts, stats and calls for change with youth networks, the media and at events.
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3 comments

  1. Teaching in a displacement setting demands vital skills and aptitudes as mixed ability and traumatized students need unique and tailored pedagogical approaches. Love and care may come in handy.

  2. Reblogged this on Rohingya Refugees and commented:
    In this article, it highlights the importance of educating refugee children while they are in refugee camps. After all, these kids had seen traumatic experiences when they were in Myanmar. Can you even imagine what it must’ve been like for these kids to have seen their family, friends, neighbors, persecuted or terrorized all because they are Rohingya? More importantly, the fact that these kids who are in refugee camps don’t get the ability to live a normal life, since these camps often are lacking in resources. By setting up places in refugee camps dedicated towards education, children in these camps would have a chance to live a normal life by going to school, playing games, and having people listen to their problems. While the article is right, these kids and their teachers do have to face problems with stress, considering the environment they are in, it is vital that refugee children get the chance to go to school to get a sense of normalcy in their lives.

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