Educational programmes for refugees have to function differently to courses that can assume a great degree of similarity in educational attainment levels across the student body. Refugee learners are coming from extremely diverse educational contexts and may have had their formal learning suspended at very different points in their learning (see ‘understanding who your students are’ for more details). Some of our students, for example, had high levels of digital literacy whereas others were starting almost from complete scratch; the same could be seen across topics. The need is, therefore, to invest in skills and knowledge-based training at all levels to enable students to both engage with courses and feel confident to take up opportunities that become available to them. 

Involving refugee learners and other students (e.g. the Mastercard Foundation Scholars in the case of FFA) throughout the process can help build a socially, politically and culturally relevant pedagogy. It can take many different forms and shapes; the curriculum and course design and getting started sections provide some examples of student participation in the planning, delivery, and assessment of the courses (these three steps are, incidentally, key to achieving a form of participation that is genuine rather than merely tokenistic, as highlighted in a dense and relatively old literature already; e.g. Paul, 1987). We could add to such engagement the careful psycho-social support that allows the surfacing of key issues throughout the programme or the development of a literature review process with the learners. All are crucial to making the idea of refugee-centred design and implementation more than a buzzwork.

In FFA for instance, staff and faculty members have offered their skills and experience while also embodying a stance of co-learning with the refugee students and other supporting students, who bring their own skills and experience to the team as we collaboratively engage in mutual efforts to deepen our understanding of our action research focus. As a result, the students (including the Mastercard Foundation scholars) were engaged in all stages of the research from research design, to data collection, to data analysis; and the project has been enhanced by their unique and experiential knowledge about access to higher education for marginalised and displaced youth. The thoughtful questions, reflections, and ideas posed by the researchers from their varying personal and academic backgrounds is increasing the relevance and depth of the programme’s endeavour.

A key implication of such a ‘thick’ approach is that it requires additional resources. The solution, however, is rarely as simple as an increased attention at the planning and budgeting phase; thick approaches are often iterative and require flexible funding to be effective. This is a substantial issue as many funding models require projects to be fully pitched before the detailed work can be done. 

Thickening the approach, and the resources, during FFA In the case of FFA, the Mastercard Foundation and refugee scholars, faculty members, tutors and other staff were all involved in various dimensions of this project as researchers, teachers and learners. We sought to embrace a creative and iterative research methodology with collaboration as a central pillar that would increase the capacities of all team members to contribute to the research, while prioritising the skill-building for the Mastercard Foundation and refugee scholars. This capacity-building was ongoing as a full team, in small groups, and in one-to-one sessions between peers and scholars/faculty. The timing and expectations for Scholars’ engagement was differentiated and calibrated to accommodate other circumstances in their lives including pressures related to studies, family responsibilities, work, and disruptions like the pandemic.  … and its costs Prioritising the scholars’ involvement over preconceived deadlines did in many cases extend the timeline for project activities, but it has been instrumental in sustaining scholars’ engagement in the project. Our initial failure to recognise the resource-implication of a genuinely thick approach at the time of budgeting for FFA (before the workshops in Lebanon and meetings with potential students in Uganda) resulted in vastly underestimating how much time it would take to produce content for FFA. The team had assumed that resources would be available through the University of Edinburgh, AUB and RLP that could be very simply repurposed for learners on FFA to work through. We quickly realised, however, that the content might be inappropriate or irrelevant for refugee learners, pitched at the wrong level, and potentially not very engaging or inspiring as the central part of any educational programme, as opposed to as supplementary materials in a complete learning environment. Much of the easily available content was material for students to work through independently, whereas we knew we wanted interactive and participatory teaching to create productive and inclusive learning environments. We thus used some existing resources as templates or ideas for designing FFA-specific classes, but the class outlines and teaching structures were largely new.