I Don’t Expect the Change the World, I’m Going to Help in Whatever Small Way I Can Part III

It’s August and now is the time for me to recover from stats class and get a few projects done before school starts in a few weeks. That means I’ll share the last section of my literature review. In the meantime, you can save the date on your calendar – in case any of you want drop by Hawaii – to see me speak at the 8th International Conference on Education and Social Justice in Honolulu.

This lit review should now be published on Open Praxis! (It’s not though, but it should be soon. Keep your eyes open for it.) It’s my first published journal article, so it’s very exciting. You can read my blog posts which are an earlier version of the article or the much-refined version all in one place here Vol 10, No 3 (2018) — just kidding, it’s not on their site yet.

This post is the third and last section that I’ve published on my blog and is part of the earliest version of this lit review that I submitted for my class. It took a few turns along the way and is a different paper now than what I started with. In Part I I began with an introduction to education for refugees. In Part II I addressed the importance and benefits of this much neglected aspect of refugee life. Here I discuss online learning and the programs that are the forerunners of this spectacularly innovative way to address education for refugees.

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I Don’t Expect to Change the World, I’m Going to Help in Whatever Small Way I Can Part II

Before we do anything else, I’d like you to do a visualization with me. I’m about to throw a bunch of numbers at you, and I want you to get a sense of what these numbers really mean.

Imagine standing on the fifty-yard line of a football field. Now imagine if that football field were covered in one-dollar bills. How many would it be? According to the Internet, it would be 517, 254. Now multiply that by one hundred and twenty, and you have about how many displaced people there are in the world. That number is not all refugees but because of either civil unrest, environmental disasters or famine, these people have been driven from their homes. That is a lot. And many of these people are not getting their basic needs met.

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I Don’t Expect to Change the World, I’m Going to Help in Whatever Small Way I Can

In an area where the ultimate goal is to help people, it is unfortunate that the refugees who are gaining more attention as subjects of research are not gaining much directly from that research. It is also unfortunate that to see some positive effects from the results of that research can take years, possibly decades. The consequence is that refugees feel taken advantage of and used. This is understandable. I would not like to perpetuate this negativity in my own research. Of course I’m trying to make a positive contribution, and I want to do my best to not create harm on my way to doing some positive work. I’ve chosen to do this by volunteering at a refugee organization in downtown Vancouver called Inland Refugee Society of BC. I’ll be teaching again, which I dearly miss, and I’ll be adding some positivity in this arena.

To give you some background, the following are the first couple of pages of the literature review (a summary of the current studies in the subject) I wrote for my first class. I’ll probably write more about my area of research, so this will build a more complete understanding of this issue. The introduction gives a general view of the current state of refugee situations.

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