2025 Theses Doctoral

A Story of Anticipatory Hope: Rohingya Refugee Teachers’ Motivation to Teach in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

Henderson, Christopher J.

Since the Myanmar military’s 2017 campaign of ethnic cleansing, close to one million Muslim minority Rohingya from Rakhine State have resided in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. As of late 2024, over 6,000 learning facilities and nearly 10,000 teachers from refugee and host-community populations serve almost 400,000 Rohingya children and adolescents (ISCG, 2025). Education’s purpose in Cox’s Bazar is multifaceted due to the liminality of Rohingya displacement. It contributes to the protection of children’s rights and it creates a tentative sense of belonging via the Myanmar Curriculum and Burmese language, which are taught in anticipation of their desired but unlikely repatriation to Myanmar.

Amid global teacher shortages (UNESCO, 2024), United Nations agencies and international non-governmental organizations in settings like Cox’s Bazar attribute the conditions in which conflict- and crisis-affected teachers work to a ‘teacher motivation crisis’. In parallel, a ‘global learning crisis’ sees teachers deficit theorized by these same actors, who highlight teachers’ weak academic foundations, dated teaching methods, and need for urgent and intensive teacher professional development (World Bank, 2019). In both instances, teachers’ propensity to be ‘alternatively qualified’ (Kirk and Winthrop, 2007) and ‘transformative intellectuals’ (Pherali et al., 2019) is overlooked, rendering teachers as passive system inputs rather than agents of change.

To better understand this reality and its effects on Rohingya education, this study employed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design to explore the experiences and factors associated with Rohingya refugee teachers’ motivation to teach. A plethora of studies from high-income and stable contexts define teacher motivation and measure the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. However, a dearth of evidence from refugee-hosting settings means our understanding of refugee teachers’ motivation to teach is based on anecdote more than empirical fact. My study in Cox’s Bazar finds that intrinsic factors like a sense of self-efficacy and agency and extrinsic factors like professional development and compensation are powerful motivators for refugee and host-community teachers alike. But the ‘anticipatory hope’ of repatriation, education’s perceived role in achieving this aim, and the empowering effect of teaching on Rohingya women’s identities in particular, underscore Rohingya refugee participants’ stronger motivation to teach than their Bangladeshi host-community peers, despite their untenable work and living conditions.

As suggested by the ‘impossible fiction’ of refugee teachers’ work (Adelman, 2019) and the ‘parameters of hope’ that refugee education can represent (Dryden-Peterson and Reddick, 2017), there are practical limits to what education in refugee settings can achieve. Building on this reality, in this study I present the concept of ‘anticipatory hope’ to affirm teaching’s fulfillment of purposive, normative, and instrumental functions such as the right to quality education, a vocation, and a livelihood. But for Rohingya refugees it also emphasizes the transformative function of teaching as an inherently human and political act: teaching helps reshape Rohingya identities and a tentative sense of belonging in Bangladesh and to Myanmar while laying groundwork for their repatriation, even if it never comes.