REFUGEE EDUCATOR ACADEMY
Refugee Educator Academy
Launched in the spring of 2017, the Refugee Educator Academy is the flagship project of the Center for Learning in Practice. The Refugee Educator Academy strives to increase the number and accelerate the preparation of qualified refugee educators and service providers in the United States and around the world.
Why a Refugee Educator Academy?
With more than 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world, the well-being of refugees has taken on crisis proportions. Failure to offer refugees opportunities to learn and develop not only poses an immediate threat to their well-being and health; it also threatens personal, national, and international security in the long term. We are called upon as a global community to attend to the basic human rights of each person and to offer the promise of a better tomorrow and a brighter future to each of our children, neighbors, and colleagues. Yet, there is a staggering shortage of people qualified to teach and support the complex needs of the 65 million displaced people worldwide. Sustained professional learning opportunities and supportive communities are essential to build the dynamic, informed, skilled teaching workforce required to meet current teaching and learning demands.
Supporting practice mastery and developing teacher leaders
There is an abundance of quality content, including for example on minimum standards for child protection, teacher training packs, social emotional learning, and other critical content areas. We seek to build upon this knowledge base, making existing content more widely available in measured, digestible chunks which educators can instantly make use of in their unique contexts. By placing participants at the center and building out from their goals, we aim to develop foundational skills, shared language, immediately useful lessons and materials, and learning design (or instructional) practice mastery. We cultivate teacher leadership and lift educators’ voices to advocate for joyful and sustainable learning environments for all teachers and students.
Mission & Objectives
The Refugee Educator Academy strives to increase the number and accelerate the preparation of qualified refugee educators and service providers in the United States and around the world with the goal of reaching 10,000 teachers/service providers by 2025.
The Refugee Educator Academy seeks to build upon the excellent work in existence through vibrant partnerships, the open exchange of ideas and content, and the movement of refugee educator and service provider learning into a virtual community space. The academy will provide an integrated system that includes courses, certifications, practice communities, and a general online support system marked by excellent facilitation and strong relationships among participants.
