Chapter 5: Reconfiguring Public Life: Refugee Education As Joint Inquiry

Abstract

The initiative featured here constructs a partnership between a refugee community with roots in South Sudan and the United States largest university writing program in an international resettlement city. The initiative positions inquiry, as a premise for authentic learning, in public as a participatory practice; it approaches difference as a resource for joint problem solving. Here, inquiry is something both public-workers-in-training and adult refugee learners do together – with one another and a host of other stakeholders with vested interests in the capacity of public institutions in order to become more responsive to diverse constituents resettling in Phoenix, Arizona, under conditions of forced migration. The research is presented across four phases. In counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of South Sudanese as a people “in need,” the culmination of the chapter presents interviews with citizens across South Sudan. These interviews bear witness to communities’ self-determination that instead casts education not only as their responsibility, but also their desire – one to which they have historically committed significant resources. In this fourth phase, findings with community members in South Sudan are put in conversation with the previous three phases wherein South Sudanese refugees tell of their encounters with credentialing institutions in Phoenix.

Keywords: adult literacy, experiential design, intercultural inquiry, resettlement, South Sudan