Editorial – Connected Learning in Contexts of Forced Displacement

Why connected learning and why now?

We start this editorial with several questions: Why is there a need for a special issue on Connected Learning in contexts of forced displacement? Have we not reached a stage where education is a right for all, including the forcibly displaced? Why do we need to cast our gaze to connected learning in such contexts? Can this connected learning be complemented or indeed supplanted with national and regional efforts at educational inclusion? This is not a rhetorical exercise as all these questions inform this special issue and indeed this editorial.

At the time of writing, we are experiencing a critical moment in the world’s history with conflicts on the rise worldwide, violent acts and partisan divisions that seem beyond reconciliation, human rights violations, threats to democratic institutions and processes, growing inequalities, a technological incursion that at times appears beyond governance, and alarming numbers of forcibly displaced people. Over 122 million people are now forcibly displaced, or 1 in every 78 people on earth (UNHCR 2025) fleeing war, violence, persecutions, and natural and environmental disasters. These figures are the highest ever recorded. Indeed, when we first met to discuss this special issue this number was 108 million people. It is growing and shows no signs of abating.

Within this, situations of conflict are becoming more protracted and root causes of displacement more complex. For the forcibly displaced living in extended exile, this means that they remain in precarious situations for prolonged periods of time after displacement (Kraler, Etzold & Ferreira 2021). Such precarity is both well reflected in and compounded by the lack of opportunities to access education, with the most recent evidence showing that only a small percentage of refugees (7%) participate in higher education (UNHCR 2022). In many instances, the absence of a long-term vision and coordinated national solutions make educational inclusion of the forcibly displaced particularly problematic.

While higher education (HE) is seen as one of the most viable ways of supporting refugees to rebuild their lives and create a better future for themselves, the lack of coordinated approaches to creating educational pathways to university compromises progress in increasing this 7%. There remain multiple, complex and interconnected barriers that impede access to quality HE (Bauer & Gallagher 2020; Halkic & Arnold 2019). These range from a lack of accreditation and recognition of previous learning, a lack of trained teachers, language skills, access to scholarships and financial support, opaque university practices, access to technology – to name a few. These barriers are often heightened in resource constrained environments, which is also where the largest numbers of refugees are enrolled in universities. As 75% of forcibly displaced people are hosted in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (UNHCR 2024), it is critical to learn from these contexts and their efforts at educational inclusion. Many of the papers in this special issue are set in LMICs.

In recent years, there has been significant activity designed to mitigate the barriers that refugees experience in accessing and succeeding in education, whether that be directed at the mitigation of administrative barriers and paperwork loss (Kelly 2020; Nambi, Najjuma & Gallagher 2023), providing bridging programmes designed to facilitate access largely to higher education (Akello et al. 2024; Reinprecht et al. 2021), scholarships and funding (Campbell & Neff 2020), providing counselling and pastoral support (Im, Rodriguez & Grumbine 2021), or by offering opportunities for refugees to engage in the social fabric of higher education outside formal coursework (Nambi, Najjuma & Gallagher 2023).

One strand of this activity is directed at exploring how digital technologies might support efforts at educational inclusion for the forcibly displaced and participation in high-quality education, as laid out by the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) (United Nations 2015). Digital, blended or connected learning is increasingly seen as a viable mechanism for providing HE provision in contexts of forced displacement, purportedly affording flexibility in time, space, and pace of learning. Such provision can potentially be “accessible in refugee camps, during migrant itineraries or while settling down in host countries” (Halkic & Arnold 2019: 346), if the infrastructure is in place to support it. Further, such provision is seen to potentially scale as it provides at least the theoretical capacity to pool resources and distribute responsibility across institutions and sectors.

Within this, connected learning (Ito et al. 2013) is one such example, defined as the development and exchange of knowledge and ideas among students and teachers through use of technology that enables learning not bound by geographical limitations in contexts of fragility (Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium 2017). It potentially promotes embeddedness in local and global learning communities, adaptive critical thinking and new media literacies. It does not diminish the opportunities and pedagogical importance of face to face instruction and community, but rather complements them (Dridi et al. 2020), Despite the potential barriers with such an approach (discussed in El-Ghali & Ghosn 2019), it has shown some promise in low-resource learning contexts in building affected populations’ capacity to recover from the crisis of displacement (Abdullateef, Parkinson & Sarmini 2020), to engage with the development of learning through participatory approaches (Yanay & Battle 2021) and to work towards gender parity in educational inclusion (Dushime, Manirafasha & Mbonyinshuti 2019). Developments in connected learning are often driven by investments and institutions in high-income countries (HICs) and reinforced in global policy networks around digital development (Gallagher & Najjuma 2025 Forthcoming), but are currently gaining momentum and recognition in LMICs.

The implications and impact of connected learning programmes in increasing HE enrollments in refugee hosting countries still needs to be further researched. Yet we feel this special issue modestly begins to address that need. It does so across many of the facets that might be seen to constitute connected learning, whether that be trauma-informed English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes (Palanac & McKenna 2025), teacher professional development in contexts of displacement (Pherali et al. 2025), the surfacing of the perspectives of teacher trainees working towards refugee education (Gichuhi 2025), the role of leveraging African orality in education in emergencies (Class et al. 2025), the experiences of studying on a connected learning programme in a refugee settlement (Leomoi 2025), the nuances of collaboration and psychosocial support in multinational refugee education programmes (Reynolds et al. 2025), or the role of a digital commons in establishing and maintaining connectedness in an otherwise destabilised context (Scott et al. 2025). It does so across a range of geographies as well, from Kenya to Palestine to Niger to Uganda and beyond.

Specifically, and as the concept of connected learning suggests, this special collection at the Journal of Interactive Media in Education is centred on the use of digital technologies in such contexts. Through scholarly work taking place, including the papers published in this collection, we are looking to address that growing urgency in HE to continue developing theory and practice that strives towards widening participation for marginalised groups, particularly those forcibly displaced. When as editors we first discussed the possibility of creating this special collection, we were aware that an evidence base is strongly needed to inform appropriate action in such contexts.

We were also aware there is a need to further conceptualise what is connected in connected learning, to surface the ways in which this connectedness is expressed, and to pay close attention to how that might mitigate barriers to educational inclusion for refugees. The papers in this special collection provide further nuance to the idea of connected learning, arguing for a connectedness that is rooted, at times, in pastoral support, in human relations, in local cultural traditions and forms, in language, in resistance, in trust, in care, and in possibility. It is, as many of these papers suggest, at odds with how digital transformation is expressed discursively in broader policy and strategy documents aimed at refugee inclusion: scaled, data-driven, skills-based, and predicated on a range of open educational resources (OERs) that are often incongruous to the contextual realities of the refugee experience (Gallagher, Najjuma & Nambi 2023). As such, this special collection is designed to capture some of the experiences of those engaged in designing, teaching, and studying on connected learning programmes across a range of contexts that constitute forced displacement – in urban areas, in designated settlements, and in resettlement and asylum contexts.

Papers in the collection

In our call for papers we specifically aimed at presenting research articles which have an educational focus or application in higher, tertiary or post-compulsory education, ones that illuminate the contribution that digital technologies can make to refugee learners’ knowledge, understanding, skills, or acts of educational inclusion, as well as furthering educational opportunities and trajectories. As editors of the special collection, we were keen to make an effort to ensure diverse participation and representation and thus mitigate the risk of having the collection only filled with papers authored by researchers, likely based in high-income countries. We had been clear in our intentions that the collection should have a mix of papers and authors from both HICs and LMICs, and that we would welcome submissions authored with/by refugees themselves and we are pleased that this is indeed the case with the papers presented here. We drew on personal and institutional networks to ensure that the call for papers was spread widely. We were also inspired by mentoring arrangements that Lambert and Czerniewicz (2020) put in place in another of JIME’s special collections on Open Education and Social Justice research. We, thus, included mentoring arrangements and asked all the authoring teams (upon acceptance of their abstracts) to express an interest in this, if they so desired.

Overall, there were 15 expressions of interest and we were able to accept 10 high-quality abstracts on a diverse range of topics. Of those, 10 full manuscripts were submitted and went through a double blind peer-review process. 7 papers are published in the collection and include authors from LMICs (Kenya, Niger, Palestine, Myanmar, Uganda) and HICs (UK, Switzerland). One of the papers in the collection is authored by a displaced person, recent graduate of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) programme in Dadaab camp in Kenya (Leomoi 2025), offering valuable reflections abstracted from their experiences at the camp. Whilst this one is a reflective piece, all other papers are empirical articles and describe the collection and interpretation of data concerning the design or use of educational technology artifacts in contexts of forced displacement.

Two teams requested mentoring support and were paired with two editors (Charitonos, Gallagher). Another team requested this tentatively, but they felt it was not needed after all. The mentors and mentees had to find ways of communicating with one another, using virtual tools and shared documents, and discussing needs and requests, which at times had to do with the presentation of evidence, the framing of claims, and use of language, and other times was around editorial advice. Although mentoring in HE is often presented as an important practice and a powerful tool for increasing equity (e.g. Rinfret, Young & McDonald 2023), mentoring itself embodies complex power dynamics (see Hlengwa 2020). We are mindful that we – two white academics, in established positions in institutions in the UK – were paired with authors from LMICs for mentoring relationships, and as such we may have unintentionally reinforced such power dynamics and a ‘Eurocentric epistemic’ logic which legitimates global northern knowledges at the expense of global southern ones.

In this process, as editors-mentors, we developed relationships with the authors who requested our assistance and we both feel we have learnt and benefitted from this process. We hope this was reciprocal. We, as co-editors, also engaged with all authors throughout the process and we feel privileged to have been part of such conversations and offer practical support. We are, further, grateful to all the reviewers who took an interest in the special collection, engaged with the process and submitted high-quality peer review reports: their contributions and feedback were invaluable for both the authors and us as editors in the development of the special collection.

Starting with the papers focusing on refugee settlements, Ochan Leomoi’s (2025) paper focuses on the Dadaab Refugee Complex which hosts nearly a quarter of million registered refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya. The author provides a reflexive account of the perspectives of refugees in Dadaab refugee camps and Dadaab host-communities on the role of HE for individual and social transformation, particularly focusing on the author’s experience of BHER.¹ His account includes reflections on how technology was employed, albeit with challenges, to connect Dadaab with other higher education institutions within and beyond Kenya’s boundaries.

Remaining in a Kenyan context, Loise Gichuhi’s (2025) paper focuses on educational provision at Kakuma refugee settlement and situates the study around the persistent challenge of not having enough trained teachers in contexts of forced displacement. The author describes the introduction of a teacher education diploma online course, as a formal qualification offered by the University of Nairobi, targeting both refugee and host communities in Kenya. This study draws on a mixed-methods approach, with interviews and questionnaires with teacher trainees studying in the programme, who offer their perspectives on the use of online technologies in their studies. Gichuhi highlights that when designing and implementing new approaches in teaching and learning in displacement, contextual characteristics should be among key considerations.

Barbara Class, Moussa Mohamed Sagayar, Harouna Mounkaïla, Amadou Saïbou Adamou, Abdeljalil Akkari, Florent Dupertuis, Ramatoulaye Almoustapha Soumaila, Inoussa Maman Sanda and Thierry Agagliate (2025) turn our attention to studies which, similarly to Gichuhi, share insights on provision that is embedded within formal university structures and qualifications. Class and colleagues’ paper presents a new distance learning programme run by the University of Geneva through partnership work with institutions in Niger, namely the Certificate of Open Studies (COS) in Education in Emergencies.² The authors describe the partnership work and the development of the distance programme, including the framing as connecting learners with their language and cultural heritage, and offer some insights from the first implementation of the training programme between 2023 and 2024. The paper offers an important perspective of co-designing educational provision by taking into consideration local knowledge and culture, in this case ritual pedagogies and orality, as foundational principles of the programme.

The next paper by Andie Reynolds, Sharon Boateng, Martha Akello, Sandra Nanyunja, Brooke Atherton El-Amine, Apollo Mulondo, Michael Gallagher, JB Falisse and Georgia Cole (2025) focuses on another major African refugee-host country, Uganda, and presents a long-standing partnership between Makerere University and The University of Edinburgh. The paper focuses on a connected, blended, bridging programme, Foundations for All,³ which is designed to enable refugees to access and participate in HE. Through critical reflections of the overall programme gleaned from interviews with teachers and students, the authors focus on two discrete elements of this project – the collaborative practices of the disparate project partners and the embedded psychosocial support – and discuss how these two elements might inform the further conceptualisation of connected learning in refugee education contexts.

The provision of psychosocial support in university programmes to students from refugee backgrounds is a well-documented challenge in the sector. Aleks Palanac and Deirdre McKenna (2025) present a UK-based programme, RefugEAP,⁴ that is a free, online, pre-university academic English and skills course. The paper describes how the RefugEAP programme has been informed by trauma-informed pedagogy principles and similar to Reynolds et al.’s paper, they also identify pastoral support as a key element to consider in such provision. The authors report an action research approach to course development and evaluation, drawing from qualitative data from students and tutors, as well as observations from course designers, to evaluate the course and inform future iterations.

The next paper by Tejendra Pherali, Min Layi Chan, Wirachan Charoensukaran, Elaine Chase, Eileen Kennedy, Greg Tyrosvoutis, Gabi Witthaus, and Diana Laurillard (2025) focuses on teacher professional development (TPD) through informal learning along the border between Myanmar and Thailand. In this paper, the authors argue for working from local needs, trialling and harnessing local solutions, and sharing these methods and outcomes globally so that others can consider their relevance and adapt them to their own contexts. They illustrate this through their work with teachers of refugees and migrants from Myanmar, now in Thailand, and the development of Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaborations (CoMOOCs) for widening access to quality tertiary education through TPD in contexts of mass displacement.

The final paper of the special collection focuses on Palestine. The paper by Howard Scott, Montaser Motia Ujvari, Aida Mohammad Ali Bakeer, and Khaled Shanaa (2025) postulates how connected learning in Palestine is characterised by the metaphor of Sumud as a steadfast resistance to disruption. Sumud, according to the authors, symbolises connectedness for displaced people. Drawing from data resulting from an Erasmus+-funded project between the UK and Palestine, they draw on the concept of digital commons in their paper. The digital commons is presented as a potential toolkit of decentralised online spaces for shared learning opportunities, encapsulating Sumud for connected learning among displaced people. The authors propose that a theoretical framework for Sumud as a metaphor for critical pedagogy must reconcile the separate constituents of safe online spaces, social aspiration, cultural sovereignty, and political displacement.

The fact that the articles included in this special collection do not focus on emergency situations points to a persisting research gap when it comes to connected learning and provision of HE in emergencies. This has been particularly evident in the recent months in the ongoing war in Gaza, the unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and the ‘scholasticide’, referring to the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s educational and cultural infrastructure. Educational provision is not viewed as a priority in such situations, despite the fact that, as we have witnessed in Gaza, there is a critical need to continue to serve communities and uphold the right to education as a form of resistance and hope. Therefore, we hope that this special collection serves as a wake-up call for the production of research about higher education in emergencies through connected learning. Education provides support to endure and recover and should be part of both emergency response and sustained long-term provision in contexts of forced displacement.

We hope the collection contributes to strengthening the research base to further the field conceptually and empirically, and by also raising critical perspectives on such developments. We hope you enjoy reading the papers and draw on these as an inspiration for shifting conditions and structures that will enable participation and inclusion in HE for the forcibly displaced.

Competing Interests

MG served as one of the editors and has co-authored one of the papers included in the collection (Reynolds et al. 2025); he did not take part in any editorial decisions relating to this paper. There are no further competing interests to declare.