Decolonizing education in Bourj Albarajenah: cosmologies of a Palestinian refugee camp

ABSTRACT

Palestinian refugee camps have long been challenging the coloniality over their land, but also of a humanitarian government that provides standardized educational services without responding to the unique educational needs of the community. So how can Palestinian refugees decolonize their own educational process to provide their children with education that meets their needs, acknowledges their story, and responds to their unique livelihood as a displaced community? Through autoethnographic recordings and in-depth interviews conducted in Bourj Albarajenah refugee camp, I find that these complex entanglements between memory, dreams, social reality, and community, developed throughout life at camp guide the child’s learning process. Refugee children learn by listening, seeing, living, doing, and being in a space of meanings, governed by conviviality. These camp cosmologies form place-based pedagogy that responds to the unique worlds of children, and therefore, should be recognized as a component for a more inclusive education in displaced communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestinian refugees
• decolonizing education
• refugee camp
• pluriverse
• Lebanon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Università degli Studi di Padova.

Notes on contributors

Yafa El Masri

Yafa El Masri is currently a PhD Candidate at the section of Geographic Studies, in the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World, University of Padua, in Padua, Italy. Has recently published her first paper on Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon, titled “72 Years of Homemaking in Waiting Zones: Lebanon's “Permanently Temporary” Palestinian Refugee Camps. Has previously published a chapter in the book: “Eleven Stories from Exile” which is published by the Palestinian Institute of Studies in 2017. Obtained her Master’s Degree in Local Development Studies from the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World, at the University of Padua in 2019.