Education beyond safety

Privileged teachers’ fears of the risks of transformational learning reproduces segregation by preventing refugee students from sharing their knowledge about violence and injustice with non-refugee students. With this paper we aim to unpack the potentials of and resistance towards facilitating meetings between refugee and non-refugee youth in global citizenship education. The analyses are based on participant observation in a school-based intervention in three locations and were developed on the principles of design-based research [DBR]. The experiences from these interventions are analysed considering decolonial perspectives on education, as well as the educational philosophies of Sharon Todd and Gert Biesta. The article exposes both how meetings between students could be deeply educational and how teachers prevent meaningful interaction between students out of concern for refugee students. Meetings between students across differences are crucial for the possibility for ethical relationality and for privileged students’ transformational learning. Social studies must accommodate the facts of violence and injustice globally to facilitate marginal students and their experiences. An implication of our study points to that privileged teachers’ concern for retraumatising or offending marginalised students can veil unconscious protection of the privileged self against the students’ trauma and should therefore be subject to critical reflection. We find that more research is needed on how students care for themselves and others in transformational learning contexts.