A Review of Program Inquiry for Refugee Adult Education in the United States

Abstract

According to the UN Refugee Agency's annual Global Trends Report, 68.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as of June 2018. This humanitarian crisis raises the question of responsibility on host countries to address the dire need for education access. Questions around how existing adult refugee educational programs should be evaluated remain relatively unexplored. The purpose of this review is to examine existing bodies of academic literature on how evaluation is applied in adult educational programming for refugees within community organizations and how programs utilize evaluation to improve their effectiveness in serving adult refugee populations in the United States. This literature review explores two questions: (1) how is evaluation structured in practice in nonformal educational programs for refugee young adults and adults in the United States? (2) What outcomes typically follow the implementation of evaluation within these programs (i.e. does evaluation influence the effectiveness and accessibility of adult educational programming, such as by providing educational and vocational training?). Considerations which emerged from this review include utilizing theory knitting in evaluation to reduce theoretical segregation and accumulate additional theory that may be present within the current literature. Exploring socio-cultural capital frameworks such as Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth can further categorize and investigate additional experiences based on specific ethnicities in emerging literature within refugee integration in a country of resettlement in addition to Ager and Strang’s Understanding Integration Framework. Lastly, to better identify the approaches on use of evaluation within the scope of nonformal adult educational settings for adult refugees, expanding Alkin & Christie’s Evaluation Theory Tree to include international perspectives from the development sector should be considered.