The Toolkit is designed for those who are interested in
- Learning more about the barriers and facilitators experienced by refugees seeking to access higher education through an introductory literature review on blended bridging programmes and how they might look to address these challenges and opportunities
- Exploring the possibility of setting up a bridging programme for refugees and marginalised learners. It provides a set of ideas, and more importantly questions, about how to decide whether a bridging programme is the right approach for students in that context
- Designing a bridging programme for refugees and marginalised learners. It offers a Design Framework that details the various conceptual and practical components that we considered central for developing and implementing bridging programmes in low resource environments, with examples from our team’s experience of how we approached these different dimensions
- Access to higher education for refugees in Lebanon and Uganda. We provide detailed case studies and reflections on two bridging programmes that our teams implemented in 2018-2021 in Lebanon (PADILEIA) and in 2021 in Uganda (Foundations for All)
It is based on a participatory action research project that was established in 2018 between the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. In partnership also with the Mastercard Foundation, the project aimed to design and implement a blended bridging programme across two sites in Uganda to support refugee and disadvantaged host community students wishing to study at University. In brief, its aims were as follows, with further information on how these aims were established available here:
- To enable students to access and thrive in higher education, to become leaders and advocates for their communities, and to feel empowered to enact broader change in systems of higher education
- To design assets-based educational programmes for refugee and host community learners built on mutual respect that celebrate diversity
- To provide spaces for refugee and host community learners that are inclusive, transformative, and effective
- To evidence collaboratively-developed, holistic and contextually relevant higher education programmes
- To support calls for structural change in how institutions of higher education and host governments respond to refugee learners
Our findings and reflections from this project are shared throughout the Toolkit, with a detailed background about the project to be found here [link to FFA Case Study].
Alongside the main sections of the Toolkit, this introductory section also contains brief notes on the key principles underpinning the broader FFA methodology.
Methodological Principles of FFA
All aspects of the project have been informed by the following overarching approaches:
Participatory Action Research
Participatory action research aims to understand and take action to address a specific societal challenge by engaging people or communities most impacted by the challenge as equal partners in the process.
We are committed as a team to ensuring that both our research and practice (manifested in the FFA program) are informed by key stakeholders and especially by perspectives that are often left out — those of students from disadvantaged and refugee backgrounds, and the front-line practitioners and educators who work with them. Participatory engagement of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars and refugees has been at the heart of our action research processes, including through capacity building to equip these young people as researchers and contributors to the overall project.
Assets-Based
An assets based approach to research and program design looks for and aims to leverage capacities instead of focusing on deficits. We have explicitly adopted an assets-based approach which focuses first on the strengths and potential of refugee learners, frontline educators and practitioners who work with them, and their communities.
Holistic and Contextualized
A holistic understanding of learners, educational challenges faced, and educational programs within their larger socio-economic, political, and historical context is essential. FFA aimed to engage refugee learners with dynamic socially and politically-relevant pedagogy.
‘Thick’ Collaboration
The overall ethos of the partnership has been collaboration, mutual respect, and mutual support. Engaging in equal and participatory collaboration with team members in different roles across the three institutions — including tutors, Mastercard Foundation and refugee Scholars, faculty members, FFA programme participants, and staff administrators has been fundamental to our approach. We have developed close working relationships through continuous communication and creative use of digital tools to facilitate collaboration and deliberation. We have recognised the complementary strengths and resources that individuals within each team can bring, in particular given varying access to a reliable internet connection and to teaching and academic resources, and have drawn upon these to support each other through every aspect of the project. Team members have always tried to work with humility and an open attitude to learning and improvement, rotating roles as learners and capacity-builders depending on the need.
Flexible and Intentional Use of Technology and Connectivity
The Foundations for All project team took a flexible and intentional approach to the use of technology grounded in the project’s aims and specific contexts. The role that technology played in the blended bridging programme was largely a supporting one, providing a means by which the distributed project and course teams could develop and disseminate teaching content. We routinely dropped technologies that were not proving suitable for the context, and pivoted to others as need and opportunity arose, maintaining our focus on what would best facilitate the learning of these particular students at this particular moment. This flexibility was necessary to overcome technological barriers and the effect of those on student motivation, as well as the impacts of Covid-19-related closures. One impact of this was extensive communication through what are often seen as ‘personal’ social media platforms (particularly WhatsApp), thus challenging some of the orthodoxies, particularly within Global North Universities, about which spaces are ‘appropriate’ and professional’ to teach through.