(Previous page — from left to right) York University master’s student Abdikadir Bare Abikar, studying from Dadaab, Kenya, is seen onscreen in a Toronto classroom as he speaks with York assistant professor Kurt Thumlert and Borderless Higher Education for Refugees program administrator HaEun Kim.(This page) Abdikadir Bare Abikar is seen with his three daughters outside of their home in Dadaab, Kenya.
Yasin, a research associate at York who earned a PhD from the Toronto-based university. “When he took on the IT leadership role, he was really helping to foster that community between the two cohorts.”
Abikar has also gained significant skills and insights from his time on council.
“I have learned that students have a lot of voice. Wherever they stand, they can help become the ambassadors of whatever they are,” he said. “The council has given me a different dimension of leadership.”
Mirco Stella is getting used to pre-dawn wakeups. He leads a weekly hour-long online tutorial with students in Dadaab and will be up at 5 a.m. to ensure preparations are in place ahead of the morning session. As YGSE co-chair, Stella and fellow council members have held meetings as early as 8 a.m. Toronto time — seven hours behind Dadaab — to ensure Abikar can participate.
“I think the major contribution, in this sense, from Abikar has been to try to also push other students into sort of taking on leadership positions,” said the PhD student. “He’s trying to work a lot — especially with the new cohort of students — to try to develop leadership among themselves as well.”
Long before their paths converged at York, Mohamed Duale and Abikar were bonded by more than their pursuit of higher learning. Like Abikar, Duale and his family were refugees who left Somalia, resettling in Canada in the mid-1990s.
During the first two years of his PhD program, Duale was Abikar’s teaching assistant (TA) — a role Abikar also took on in a course Duale directed. Now as fellow graduate students, the duo was part of a collective who co-authored an article about the challenges experienced by refugee teachers. The paper was published in Forced Migration Review, a journal edited by the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University.
Duale said he hopes in the longer term to see more of what they were able to accomplish: research about refugees being done by refugees.
“Eighty-five per cent of the research is coming from the global North even though 85 per cent of refugees live in the global South. And the voices of refugees even among that 15 per cent is quite nonexistent in terms of the refugee research,” said Duale.
“I think there’s a real value to investing in higher education for refugees, if not as a way to empower them, but also to tell us something about what it means to be a refugee. I think there’s a missing element in our discipline.”
Abikar’s pathway to post-secondary education was paved online. He received a teaching diploma from Kenya’s Kenyatta University, one of 23 universities that are part of the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium, co-chaired by UNHCR. Prior to pursuing his masters at York he was accepted into the university’s Bachelor of Arts program. York is the lone member of the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium to offer a masters degree to refugees.
I think there’s a real value to investing in higher education for refugees, if not as a way to empower them, but also to tell us something about what it means to be a refugee.
York is part of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project. BHER is an international collaboration between Canadian and Kenyan universities and NGO partners in Canada, and is supported by UNHCR.
“There is a big, big demand and need for education among refugees and in Dadaab,” said BHER program administrator HaEun Kim. “There are overcrowded classrooms, there are untrained teachers; and so there’s a big demand for education, but there isn’t the infrastructure in place to run quality education. So, this was responding to that need.”
Kurt Thumlert, an assistant professor in York’s Faculty of Education, said much of the work Abikar has done is “creating new technology in self-directed ways.”
As part of a course about technology and learning, Abikar co-created
RefugeesRespond.org with Abdullahi Yussuf Aden. “They built this website in order to … have a platform to tell their own stories, as well as, again, to develop these technology competencies that they can apply to their situations as teachers there,” said Thumlert.
“They do see themselves as changemakers in the present and in the future, which is really inspiring to me.”
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