An online programme that provides refugees on the Thai-Burma border with the opportunity to study for a university degree is the subject of a chapter in a new book called Ethnicity and Race.  The programme is the brainchild of the Refugee Tertiary Education Committee (RTEC), which was formed by Fr Michael Smith SJ from the Australian Province.

The genesis of the programme

In 2000 Fr Michael visited the Mae La Refugee Camp on the Thai-Burma border. During his visit he noticed that tertiary education was missing from the relief model, and asked: “Isn’t access to tertiary education also a human right?”  He decided to see if something could be done using online education.

When he returned to Melbourne Fr Michael gathered together a small group from different universities and IT companies that was to become RTEC.  At RTEC’s request an initial pilot programme, funded and run by Australian Catholic University (ACU), offered refugees the chance to study for an undergraduate Diploma of Business Administration.  It proved very successful with 16 graduates and showed that a mixed mode of online education plus face-to-face tutoring was the most effective way to provide the tertiary education for refugees envisaged by Fr Michael.

Other universities, including four Jesuit universities in the United States and one Canadian university, subsequently joined the ACU online tertiary education programme. The programme has been running for over eight years.

The need is great 

In Thailand there are an estimated 140,000 refugees who have fled the military junta in Burma and live in camps just across the border.  Until this programme became available, life for the majority of refugees was mostly about the struggle to survive.  Dreams of a university education were out of the question. 

For one, it has been particularly traumatic. He lived with his family in a small village in the Karen State of Burma.  Everything changed when soldiers killed his parents, who were accused of insurgency, in front of him. He fled into the jungle and eventually made his way to the capital, Yangon. There he won a scholarship to a Japanese university but, because he came from an area of insurgency, the Burmese Government did not issue him a passport.

He ended up in one of the refugee camps and graduated from the online programme last year. The man now leads a backpacker medic organisation taking medical supplies to internally displaced people in Burma.

To date, 36 refugees have graduated from the ACU programme and another 37 are currently enrolled in an internationally recognised eight-unit Diploma of Liberal Studies.  According to Fr Michael, most of the graduates are employed by non-government and community-based organisations on the Thai-Burma border, or they teach in the primary or secondary schools in the camps.

Where to from here? Can this programme be expanded?

American Jesuit universities have taken up idea pioneered by Australian Catholic University and have begun an initiative called Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins (JC:HEM)  JC:HEM works closely with Jesuit Refugee Service and is currently running pilot programmes in both Kakuma refugee camp (in Kenya) and Dzaleka refugee camp (in Malawi). In addition, urban refugees in Syria currently have online access to Jesuit higher education too.  

In an address he gave in Mexico City in 2010, Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, called on Jesuit institutions worldwide to ask:  “Who needs the knowledge we can share, and how can we share it more effectively with those for whom that knowledge can truly make a difference, especially the poor and excluded?” 

From March 5 to 8, 2012 there will be a meeting at Regis College, Denver to discuss how to expand the provision of higher education for refugees. The goal of the meeting, which will draw together university educators from around the world, is to envision a model for higher education for refugees and others who are poor and excluded that is sustainable, scalable, and transferrable.  

The ACU online programme has shown that the provision of university education to refugees is possible.  The chapter in Ethnicity and Race detailing the programme is entitled “Bringing Higher Education to Displaced Ethnic Minorities on the Thai-Burma Border: Three Academic Models for Overcoming International, Ethnic, and Technological Barriers.”  It was co-authored by Fr Michael Smith, Susan Costello (RMIT), Marie Joyce (ACU), Duncan MacLaren (ACU) and Thein Naing (RMIT), all members of RTEC. 

For any university educator interested in offering a programme of tertiary study for camp-based refugees, the book Ethnicity and Race is a must read. 

Fr Michael is Dean of the Institute for Christian Spirituality and Pastoral Formation in Melbourne, Australia: http://www.icspf.edu.au 

To find out more about the Outreach of Universities to Refugees, go to: http://www.our.asn.au 

To find out more about Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins go to: http://www.jesuitcommons.org 

For information on the book Ethnicity and Race, go to: http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Ethnicity-and-Race.