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Education, Diversity, and Inclusion in Burmese Refugee Camps in Thailand

Societies place great responsibility on their education systems to promote the acquisition of knowledge, skills, social norms, and cultural values. The form and substance of these education systems are, however, highly contested: Which types of knowledge and skills should be taught, and whose social norms and cultural values related? These tensions reveal themselves in education policies and practices, especially in relation to the issue of diversity and inclusion in education. Certain aspects of education play a positive role in promoting inclusion, whereas other components may intentionally or unintentionally reinforce exclusionary attitudes and practices. This article explores the “two faces” model of education through which Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli (2000) describe the positive and negative roles that education can play in situations of ethnic conflict. We apply it more narrowly to analyze the effect of inclusion and diversity in education in a conflict situation. In addition to the Bush and Saltarelli model, we use an analytical framework of inclusion that we developed during our research. This framework defines inclusion as consisting of three dimensions: access to schools, quality and relevance of the learning experience, and equality and diversity in management structures. Employing a participatory approach to collect data on social inclusion in education, we conducted fieldwork in 2006 along the Thai-Burmese border in six refugee camps inhabited predominantly by members of the Karen ethnic group. From case studies on adolescent pregnancy and marriage, special learning needs, and the language of instruction, our findings demonstrate how tensions between the positive and negative effects of education manifest themselves in a protracted refugee situation in Thailand. We supplemented our findings with individual interviews with 28 young women who left school after becoming pregnant and/or getting married, as well as with statistical data from schools and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In sum, our findings illustrate the explicit and implicit mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion operating in schools