Refugee crisis and education: case of Tibetan teachers

1. Refugee Crisis

The world has witnessed an unprecedented refugee crisis in the recent years as a large number of people were forced to flee their native lands. UNHCR (2024) reports that an estimated 122.6 million people were forcibly displaced from their countries of origins due to conflict, violence, persecution and human rights violations out of which 43.7 million are refugees. There has been a strain on local resources and infrastructure as 71% of refugees are hosted by lower and middle income countries (UNHCR, 2024, p. 11) and the crisis is likely to be accelerated further. This includes children as UNICEF (2024) reports that there are approximately 19.1 million refugee children and asylum seekers in the world. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its companion 1967 Protocol define a refugee as

Despite being neither a signatory to the 1951 Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, India hosts varied refugee groups from Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet and others. It lacks a formal refugee law which often results in ambiguities and inconsistencies in the treatment of refugees (Rajan, 2022). The legal system of India classifies Tibetans as “foreigners” and “honoured guests” (Tibet Justice Centre, 2016).

1. Tibetans as refugees in India

Tibetans are hailed as the most successful and resilient refugees in the world (Choedon, 2018) and are lauded for their success in ensuring education of children and retaining their identity intact (Mishra, 2014). They have organized themselves politically by establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Exile in India which functions democratically with a parliament and 42 elected leaders.

Tibetans have been living in India as refugees since 1959 when the XIV Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of Tibet – was forced to flee Tibet (Shakya, 1999) and thousands of Tibetans followed him while making the harrowing journey, traversing the treacherous Himalayan terrains (Liard, 2006). India’s Prime Minister Nehru granted asylum to Tibetans and allowed them to live in different parts of the country, some of which were in harsh, humid regions different from Tibet’s high altitude and cold climate. The refugees toiled as labourers on road construction sites earning only meagre compensation (Avedon, 1998). According to Craig (1992), when the hope to return to their homeland immediately dwindled, the Dalai Lama sought for a stable solution involving living and educational arrangements. The Indian government leased lands to the refugees in jungles which had to be cleared and houses and care centres built from scratch (Goldstein, 1989).

Children emerged as a vulnerable section as many of them were either orphaned or separated from their parents while undertaking the treacherous journey or at road construction sites. In his recently published memoirs, Dalai Lama (2025) recalls having requested Nehru to help in establishing children’s education and care centres. They discussed that there was a need for the refugee children “to have a thorough knowledge of their history and culture” and to be conversant with the modern world” (Lama, 2025, p. 53). This led to the establishment of Tibetan Schools Society (TSS) in 1961, an autonomous body, within the Ministry of Education, Government of India, which started several schools. Beginning in 1962, several autonomous societies were formed by Tibetans and schools opened under their umbrella with the help of international aid (Rigzin, 2003). An abandoned old British hill station Dharamsala, became the Dalai Lama’s permanent residence (Klieger, 2021). It is now popularly known as the seat of the Dalai Lama and it serves as the location of the parliament of CTA in Exile, a Tibetan Museum and, Buddhist monasteries and markets (Diehl, 2002).

1. Tibetan refugee education: two important issues

The Department of Education (DoE), under CTA in Exile, manages schools as well as higher education and professional training institutions. According to Bernstorff (2003), the refugee community has established religious, cultural and educational centres at several levels in order to preserve and promote Tibetan heritage. These institutions focus on Thangka art and literary studies, Tibetan medicine and astrology, music, dance and opera, advanced studies in Buddhist philosophy, higher Tibetan studies and liberal education and there is a library for religious texts and archives. There are 253 monasteries and 36 nunneries in India, Nepal and Bhutan to give religious education to people ^[1]. According to McConnell (2016), these traditional monastic institutions flourish in exile while they serve as crucial learning sites reviving Buddhist scholarship. These traditional institutes have been constantly reassessing their approach and accommodating rising demands. One of the most significant developments in recent years is the introduction of the doctorate in Buddhist philosophy to nuns, titled as Geshema (Geshe: doctorate & ma: a woman). It was historically limited to monks but now even nuns can become teachers and assume various leadership roles in religious institutions. It is a landmark achievement for gender equality achieved in exile by a refugee community (Whitaker, 2016).

In the context of school education, DoE (Department of Education, 2005) declared a two-pronged goal. On the one hand, the objective is to preserve distinct Tibetan linguistic and cultural identity while on the other, it aims to provide modern education. The DoE functions as an administrative authority and council that looks after curriculum development and teacher-training. It runs and manages 62 Tibetan schools in India and Nepal under four autonomous administrative bodies ^[2]. Two well-known systems are: Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), a full-fledged member of SOS Kinderdorf International and Tibetan Homes Foundations (THF). TCV and THF schools were modelled on the Pestalozzi villages, nurturing and providing home-like care and environment to the destitute children in the company of foster parents (Kauffmann, 2015).

There are two distinct issues that emerge in the school level education of Tibetan children. The first issue has to do with two script system and diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) as there is a difference between the literary and spoken varieties of Tibetan language. Tibetan has honorific/polite speech called Zhesa (DeLancey, 1998) which is used to show respect and deference while speaking to elders, monks, teachers or someone of high social standing. It has its own forms for verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives and is used primarily in formal settings (DeLancey, 1998). The general idea of an educated Tibetan is someone who speaks using the honorific form. The declared goal of education is to preserve Tibetan – as an identity marker with memories and symbols of a cherished past and desirable future – but not the variety that people speak. The goal is to preserve a high order variety by teaching it at school. As a result, the issue becomes more complex than a divide between the mother tongue and standardized language. It is indeed the mother tongue ^[3] and yet it is distant from a child’s life giving rise to ambivalence, similar to the divide that is observed in the Indian context (LaDousa, 2010).

According to Tournadre and Suzuki (2023), the writing system of Tibetan language was invented in the seventh century by drawing from the Gupta script used in the Gupta Empire (roughly between c. 320 and 550 CE) of Northern India. Later, in Tibet, it evolved into two scripts: Uchen (headed) and Umed (headless). Umed is written in such a way that all the words in a sentence are joined together and the letters are drawn in a stylized manner so as to make it beautiful in a calligraphic form, which gives it a dense appearance. In Uchen, words are written separately. In current refugee schools, children learn both the scripts, wherein Uchen is used for reading and Umed for writing. Tibetan refugee children learn the literary Tibetan, two scripts along with one’s calligraphy, and honorific speech (Bangsbo, 2008). There is a lot of mechanical drill involved in mastering Tibetan language.

The degeneration of Tibetan language among its youth is a consistent concern in the refugee community’s and CTA’s discourse (Rigzin, 2003). Despite institutional efforts and reforms, there has been a collective voice that young Tibetans show reluctance and disinterest in learning and using the Tibetan language.

Mishra (2014) perceives the problem as the gradual detachment of Tibetan youth from their cultural roots and responsibility to Tibetan culture and language. The collective worry has been exacerbated by the status of Tibetan language being diminished to a minority language in Tibet. Radio Free Asia (2020) reported that children in Tibet are losing proficiency in their mother tongue as the medium of instruction in primary schools is Mandarin.

Tibetan language is a constructive factor in Tibetan identity and culture. Using Anderson’s (1991) construct, it can be argued that it serves the function of “national consciousness” (p. 44) and “generating imagined communities” (p. 133) for the refugees. Tibetan has attained the status of the voice of resistance and identity assertion (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Recognizing the significance of language as an identity marker, the present study was designed to investigate the underlying ideas, and approaches with which Tibetan teachers teach it. Teachers’ understanding of the aims of language education is pertinent as it help us to grasp how teachers of the refugee community view language education and their role in it. What do teachers really think about language as a school subject and as a site of conservation while education was organised as a site to address the refugee crisis. And, who are these teachers? These two enquiries form the core of the study.

The study was conducted in 10 Tibetan refugee schools in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, at the foothills of Himalayas. They were all affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) ^[5] for the school leaving certificate exam. A total of 50 primary school teachers participated in it, all of whom were Tibetan refugees themselves.

In order to interact with the teachers and capture their ideas and perspectives, I used a blend of simple questioning and projective technique (Catterall & Ibbotson, 2000). According to Murstein (1965), projective techniques are indirect questioning techniques designed to elicit the participants’ underlying assumptions and pedagogic perspectives that might be withheld with direct questioning. The techniques depersonalise the question to the participants as a result of which they deactivate their defences and respond in a relaxed manner. The techniques give access to the feelings, perceptions and attitudes that can be difficult to capture by direct questioning. The tool was purposefully designed to draw out their implicit beliefs and perspectives concerning various dimensions of language teaching and its connection with identity and conservationist agenda of the refugee community. All the teachers were interviewed in their schools during their free-slots. The interaction with the teachers originally took place in Tibetan and their responses were transcribed and translated into English. The content analysis method (Carney, 1972) was employed to analyse their articulations. The findings and the related discussion are presented below.

A detailed profile of Tibetan primary teachers has been constructed by collecting demographic details, information about professional qualifications and teaching experience. Regionalism plays an important part in the individual identities of Tibetans drawing from the specific regions in Tibet and their respective dialect (Diehl, 2002). A cumulative identity of being Tibetan is a fairly new phenomenon borne in the conditions of refuge in India. The regional identity and respective dialect is important as it influences the topics that teachers’ emphasise.

Tibetans from the U-Tsang region constitute the largest demographic group within the exile community because of its geographical proximity to the Indian border and therefore they constitute the largest group of teachers (Brox, 2016). There were 86% teachers who identified themselves with the U-Tsang province ^[6], signifying a substantial dominance within the refugee teaching population. Out of the total, 70% teachers were born in India and grew up in refugee settlements. They belonged to either the second or third generation of Tibetans refugees. There were 26% teachers who were born in Tibet and migrated to India at a very young age. They like to present themselves as the living signifier of the struggle for Tibet’s freedom. There were 4% teachers who were born in Bhutan or Nepal. Notably, 70% of participant teachers had lived in the same Indian settlement where they were born and thus attended the same school until Class VIII. The remaining 30% of teachers moved around India in different settlements and thus changed schools, however only in refugee institutions.

I enquired about the sources from where the teachers had learnt Tibetan language and its dialects. Their responses are presented in Figure 1.

Out of the total, 60 % of the teachers reported that Standard Tibetan ^[7] was commonly used in exile so they picked it up and 36% of the teachers acquired the dialects from their family and relatives in Tibet. They would regularly talk using social-media apps until 2020. Later, the Chinese apps were banned in India (BBC, 2020). Another 24% of the teachers learnt it from their parents living with them in exile and 16% of the teachers learnt it in their interactions with their classmates in school and colleagues who came from Tibet. A small group of 12% of the teachers learnt it from their schoolteachers who originally came from Tibet and insisted on the original variety and reading literary texts. For an even smaller group, that is 6%, spouses and TV series from Tibet were the sources of learning. It is noteworthy that about 42% of the teachers learnt specific Tibetan dialects because of communication technology and entertainment media. There are diverse sources through which the refugee teachers learnt Tibetan dialects and maintained an interest in the linguistic diversity of Tibetan language while an intergenerational linguistic amalgamation takes place in exile.

Tibetan refugees are considered to be very particular about their traditional dress. They consider the traditional dress Chupa ^[8] as integral to their identity along with language and religion. A task was created to capture their thoughts on the possibility of a woman teacher who does not wear a Chupa but teaches Tibetan very well. The findings are presented in Table 1.

Half of the teachers took a stand that the teacher’s effectiveness in teaching Tibetan is more important than her attire. However, the other half insisted on wearing a Chupa as they underscored the role of teachers in instilling cultural traditions in children. Additionally, 20% emphasized the importance of Chupa for teachers’ dignified and decent appearance. A smaller fraction of teachers, that is 8%, proposed that female teachers should regularly wear the traditional attire while male teachers can take the liberty but not miss the important days. Two teachers considered indifference to Chupa to be a result of flawed parenting. The point to note is that half of the refugee teachers thought that a teacher’s role in upholding traditional norms is more important.

Tibetan women in refugee institutes including schools, administrative offices and hospitals wear Chupa daily to work whereas men wear shirts and trousers. Only on Wednesdays ^[9], men wear just honju (traditional shirt), not the complete full body Chupa. The dress code regarding Chupa has remained a burning topic of debate and discussion in the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile which keeps passing resolutions urging all the officials to a wear traditional dress to work every day (Tenchoe, 2021). Men largely escape it and women follow it with extreme sincerity. They must look Tibetan all the time. A small group of teachers echoed similar ideas about the dress.

There were 76% women and 24% men among the participant teachers. The presence of more female primary teachers than males is a result of the general recruitment policy in Tibetan refugee schools where women are given priority. The pervasive gendered notion of women being more suitable for teaching jobs shapes the recruitment policies of a refugee education system (Department of Education, 2005).

Basic Education Policy (Department of Education, 2005) prioritises the recruitment of women teachers in early school years as it assigns the role of care and nurturance to them. The policy and the data give us the picture of feminisation of teaching profession (Drudy, 2008) in the refugee population. However, it may be an important element to analyse using the theoretical construct of Parsons (1964) that a woman teacher in early primary grades exposes children for the very first time to the occupational role of women where they learn that the teacher figure is different from parental figure.

Through identification with their teacher, children of both sexes learn that the category “woman” is not co-extensive with “mother” (and future wife), but that the feminine role personality is more complex than that (Parsons, 1964, p. 308).

Women teachers may have been prioritised for gendered notions but in a refugee community, which has nomadic origins and close attachment to tradition, they may be serving what Talcott Parsons (1964) theorised as a complex role. This role involves recognising a teacher as an adult, characterised by the generalized superiority rather than an ascriptive relation to the students, who performs an “occupational role” which requires her to focus on performance and the differential reward of achievement (p. 307). Probably the policy of appointing women teachers helps in disseminating the image of women as professionals in a refugee community that insists on maintaining tradition and history.

1. Professional profile of the teachers

The teachers’ professional profiles were developed by collecting the information about their qualifications and teaching experience. It was considered instrumental in understanding them as professionals teaching in a secular school system. A sizable group of 46% of the participants taught for 15 years or more, indicating a significant portion of seasoned teachers. Additionally, 6% had taught for 12–14 years while another 6% had 9–11 years of teaching experience. There were 24% of the teachers who had been teaching for the last 6–8 years and only 18 % of the teachers were relatively new to teaching. In sum, the majority of teachers had taught for more than a decade.

Teachers’ professional qualification is germane to their proficiency and the ability to facilitate teaching-learning processes. There were 62% of the teachers who had completed a diploma in teacher training. Among the participants, 36% of the teachers held a Bachelor in Education (B.Ed.) degree, a professional program offered to graduates and postgraduates in order to prepare them to teach in secondary schools. As per the Indian recruitment system, B.Ed. graduates are not equipped to teach in primary grades, however, the CTA in Exile is not so strict with recruitment rules.

DoE (CTA) runs a teacher education institution in Dharamsala, College for Higher Tibetan Studies ^[10] (CHTS), in which an 18 month-long teacher education diploma is offered. According to the Basic Education Policy for Tibetans in Exile (Department of Education, 2005), the diploma was designed to provide a comprehensive approach to teacher education, incorporating both contemporary subjects and traditional knowledge with Tibetan as the medium of instruction. The certified teachers are recruited as primary teachers in Tibetan schools. Among the participants, 16% of the teachers had studied at CHTS. However, CHTS is not recognised by National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) ^[11]. This implies that the teachers, who studied at the CHTS – CTA in Exile’s best institution – are professionally trained but their training is not certified by the Indian regulatory system. This is a unique reality of a refugee community that runs its own teacher education program to blend pedagogy and educational theory with traditional knowledge and language but lacks recognition by the host government.

These demographic and professional details help us to form an image that the average teacher of refugee children is a refugee woman who has been teaching for a decade and prioritizes Tibetan language, dress and culture. Such a teacher has studied in refugee schools run by the CTA in Exile and Indian or Tibetan higher education institutions and is fluent in Standard Tibetan.

As discussed earlier, Tibetan language and identity are deeply intertwined. The language is diglossic in nature with a huge gap between the spoken and written variety encoded in two scripts (Denwood, 1999; Tournadre & Dorje, 2003). This article investigates the teachers’ views and perspectives on language teaching in general and in specific for a refugee community. Their responses opened up various dimensions of language and its role in the community that has been dealing with the crisis of forced migration and political exile.

1. Aims of teaching languages

The first dimension that I enquired about relates to teachers’ understanding of the aims of teaching languages in school. The teachers were asked about the aims of education in two different ways. In one, they had to list the aims of teaching languages in school and in the other, they had to share the aims of teaching Tibetan. However, in both the cases, they framed their responses by referring to Tibetan. Their responses to the first question are presented in Figure 2.

A significantly large number of the teachers held a view that the aim of teaching languages was to preserve culture, identity and to maintain its purity. There were 66 % of the teachers who outrightly connected language teaching with its preservation. A notable 40% expressed that the aim of language teaching was to enable children to communicate and to enhance their language and 30 % of the teachers considered it as a medium through which all learning takes place. There were 26% of the teachers who ascribed learning foreign or multiple languages for the survival of the refugee population as an aim. For 20% of the teachers, the aim of teaching language was to enhance children’s linguistic knowledge, four Rs and vocabulary and 12% of the teachers stressed the significance of language for the survival of the nation. For 8% of the teachers, teaching literary or honorific variety of languages was an aim and 4% of the teachers referred to the Dalai Lama.

Most of the teachers interpreted the aims of teaching languages only in the context of Tibetans in refuge. They largely viewed a language for political assertion, survival or learning other subjects. They differentiated the purpose of teaching and learning Tibetan and other languages where they accorded Tibetan language for preserving cultural heritage whereas English, Hindi or foreign languages helped in survival.

In order to identify the teachers, who solely prioritised the curricular and academic goals of language teaching, their articulations were further studied to pay attention to the combination of ideas that each teacher presented. The specific findings are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 helps us to identify that 18% of the teachers visualised the aims of teaching languages solely for academic purposes. The remaining 82% (includes 56% visible in the table and 26% were less frequently occurring responses) teachers visualised the aims of teaching languages for the preservationist, cultural and religious ends. The teachers’ responses did not get into the domains of critical thinking, meaning-making and aesthetics. There was a strong assertion of religious-cultural identity preservation at the expense of language learning as a meaningful experience. When asked to narrate the aims of teaching Tibetan, the teachers perceived it as a repeated question and gave responses that are discussed in the next sub-section.

1. Tibetan: an identity

In the participant teachers’ views, Tibetan serves as a site for identity construction and conservation for the politically displaced community and that constitutes its curricular aim. A careful reading of their responses revealed three categories in which the teachers visualized the aims of teaching Tibetan. Their responses are presented in Table 3 categorized according to the themes.

As it emerges in Table 3, the participant teachers largely articulated political-cultural aims and only a small group focused on pedagogic issues. There is a fair consistency in the pattern that emerges in Table 4.

For a majority of the teachers, that is, 76%, the primary aim of teaching and learning Tibetan was to preserve one’s father tongue. Almost a quarter of teachers, that is 24%, underscored the significance of language in maintaining one’s ethnic and national identity and 22% of the teachers outlined the aim of preserving identity and cultural traditions. There were 8% of the teachers who cited compliance with the policy for the same reasons of preservation.

According to Anderson (1991), nation is an imagined community, constructed through language, print culture, shared narratives and symbolic practices, which can exist even in the absence of sovereignty or statehood. It emerges from the teachers’ responses that despite statelessness and displacement, a strong sense of collective national identity persists among the community and its school teachers. The is assisted quintessentially through a language which is a medium to learn and practice religion and culture. They continue to imagine themselves as part of a unified nation, bound together by a shared language, religion and political struggle. This collective identity persists outside the borders of Tibet in the conditions of exile and even after attaining citizenship of other countries and generations. Language serves as a medium of imagined belonging and a crucial site of national imagination. Tibetan language emerges as a symbol of resistance and an agent of cultural continuity and survival (Fishman, 1991). Amid efforts by the Chinese state to marginalize Tibetan in favour of Mandarin in Tibet (Bristow, 2024), maintaining Tibetan language in exile is a direct act of defiance and identity protection. Therefore, language emerged as a political tool to craft a state beyond boundaries and “national consciousness” (Anderson, 1991, p. 44).

Approximately 18% of the teachers articulated pedagogical aims for teaching Tibetan. For them, the principle aim of teaching Tibetan was to build a strong foundation of the language from the initial stage and 8 % of them taught it to facilitate better comprehension. For 6% of the teachers, the aim was to enable learners to acquire literacy and the same number of teachers aimed at drawing of the letters and pronunciation. The fourth articulation has been categorized in the pedagogic realm but it connects with the preservation of the seventh century script and speech system of Tibetan language. Less than 10% of the teachers thought of reading-writing and comprehension and no one referred to thinking, familiarity with new ideas and Tibet’s literature as part of language teaching.

A small segment of teachers, that is 14%, visualized the aims of teaching Tibetan in a purely religious context as 8% of the teachers valued the introduction of religion and culture to the younger generation and 4% of them cited the XIV Dalai Lama, and one Buddhist philosophy.

According to Tournadre and Suzuki (2023), Tibetan language is inextricably linked with Buddhism as the origin of its script can be traced back to the period when Buddhism became the State religion of Tibet. In refugee schools, Tibetan is also taught as the vehicle of Buddhism and its philosophy because both are subsumed under the syllabus of Tibetan as a school subject. The impetus for teaching and learning Tibetan is being deeply shaped by religious and spiritual needs (Kauffmann, 2015). Although these tables do not bring this point out explicitly, the teachers mentioned it in different discussions held in the study.

In order to gain even deeper insights into their perspectives and views, the same issue was raised by asking the teachers to respond from the learners’ perspective. They were asked to give reasons for the necessity of learning Tibetan for refugee children even though they are expected to migrate to a wester country. Their responses are presented in Table 4.

For an overwhelming majority of teachers (86%), children must learn the language so that they do not lose their identity, language and cultural heritage. Almost a quarter of the teachers reasoned that if children learn Tibetan, it will benefit the Tibet’s cause and 14% of the teachers reiterated its link with Buddhist philosophy and Tibet’s history. There were 18% of the teachers who reiterated the significance of Tibetan in following the religion and accessing Buddhist philosophy. A small group of 8% of the teachers related Tibetan with a sense of self-worth as children would feel proud of their knowledge in a different land. According to 8% of the teachers, learning Tibetan is crucial for children to communicate with fellow refugees. Others gave reasons such as the ability to transmit the language to future generations, advocating for the Tibetan political cause and to learn Tibet’s history and literature. It is interesting to note that while visualizing the issue from the children’s perspective, they did not think of survival and academic issues at all.

The cultural and political motivations permeate all the teachers’ concerns regarding learning a language. They displayed a rather staunch and resolute outlook while articulating the necessity for refugee children to learn Tibetan. There was no reference to child-oriented aims of learning language which could have caused them to reflect on in the realms of ideas, aesthetics, construction of the self and meaning-making (Halliday, 1978). Their discourse was not child-centric and they did not mention fairytales, folktales, animals, snow or poems about Tibetan mountains and palaces that could evoke wonder and imagination in children, and help develop a sense of a child-centric relation with Tibet in a purposeful and meaningful manner. There was no recognition and acknowledgment that the children are growing up in difficult circumstances which comes with its own cognitive, and emotional struggles.

According to Bettelheim (1989), fairy tales act as symbolic narratives that enable children to process unconscious fears, desires and existential dilemmas. They offer an imaginative space to engage with anxiety, loss and moral uncertainty in developmentally appropriate ways. For Tibetan refugee children, use of child-centred materials and imaginative literature like fairytales could be of immense help. However, the teachers do not visualise a relation between refugee children’s emotions, language education involving literature and the political crisis. The teachers’ articulations brought out a gap in their pedagogical repertoire wherein preservation acquires prominence and the developmental concerns get neglected.

The teachers emphasized the importance of learning Tibetan for refugee children despite an equally pressing desire of attaining Western citizenship in order to stay connected to their cultural roots, regardless of where they live in the world. Learning Tibetan is not viewed as a personal or individual pursuit, but as a contribution to a collective goal of cultural preservation and political non-violent protest. The underlying assertion is that no matter where Tibetans live, they should maintain a strong Tibetan identity borne out of their language and heritage and sustain it.

1. Challenges in language preservation

Despite the overwhelming commitment to Tibetan language, there has been a widespread concern that the youth is not taking enough interest in learning Tibetan and mastering it. The CTA in Exile keeps conducting studies to investigate the matter. As discussed earlier, the SARD (2018) found that Tibetan children did not take interest in reading and writing it as soon as they reach secondary school. Against this backdrop, I asked the teachers to identify the reasons for the same. The participant teachers called out several factors contributing to the growing rift between Tibetan students and the Tibetan language which largely fall under three domains; (1) larger linguistic ethos; (2) school, curriculum and teachers (SCT) and, (3) society and family. They are presented in Table 5.

Half of the teachers attributed children’s waning interest to the pervasive presence of Hindi and English in the internet and media. They were aware of the influence of the larger socio-linguistic ethos in which refugee children live and acquire other languages. However, nearly half of the teachers, that is 46%, considered the school environment as responsible and 36% of the teachers identified the shift in the medium of instruction from Tibetan to English in Grade VI as an important cause. Moreover, 32% of the teachers cited children’s lack of foundational knowledge in Tibetan as a factor for the students’ growing disinterest, exacerbated by the subject’s complexity and 18% of the teachers upfront acknowledged their flawed pedagogic approaches. This implies that about 45% of the teachers indirectly criticised themselves. A small section of teachers, that is 18%, held parents and family responsible for providing a conducive home environment for fostering interest in Tibetan language. There were 16% of the teachers who cited the difficulty level of language used in Tibetan textbooks and orthography as the cause for students’ declining interest.

Tibetans living in the settlements in southern and western India pick up regional languages and several of them speak fluently. The teachers viewed children’s exposure to multilingualism as a challenge rather than a resource because they considered Indian languages and English as responsible for the loss or degeneration of Tibetan. The idea of the transferability of language (Cummins, 2000) from first to secondary languages is missing from their understanding.

The second domain where teachers identified challenges is of school curriculum and their own pedagogical practices. The teachers appeared critical of the policy of switching to English medium in the high school. They criticized their own group, that is primary school teachers for children’s weak foundational knowledge. The shift in the medium of instruction from Tibetan to English and the implementation of three-language formula in Tibetan schools appeared as major challenges. The three-language formula ^[12] is an Indian educational policy aimed at promoting multilingualism and national integration. It mandates all school students in India to learn three languages but its implementation remains uneven across India and a site of repeated ideological assertions (Yadav, 2025) and rarely gets curricular attention. For refugees, the three-language formula has wider implications as all Tibetan students learn Hindi as the third language from Grade VI to VIII. This significantly reduces the time allotted to Tibetan as a subject which is already overloaded with themes covering Tibetan history, calligraphy, Buddhist philosophy, grammar and literature. As a result, exciting aspects of teaching a language such as literature, drama, poetry etc. get reduced and it becomes mechanical, burdensome and disassociated from the refugee students’ life.

In the final domain of society and family, teachers blamed the parents and the larger community for not fostering love for Tibetan language and cultural heritage. Their narratives reflected challenges and tensions created by the competing forces of traditions, refuge and industrial modernity. The refugee community’s deep sense of crisis and insecurity regarding their identity was palpable as they want every Tibetan to be committed to the struggle. However, the teachers grapple with challenges in preserving children’s interest because of multilingual ethos, free media and modernity. As a result, several important functions of language teaching are absent from their perspectives.

The study investigates the situation of teachers responsible for educating youth who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Tibet living in India. It explores how language education serves as a central mechanism for building and preserving refugee identity among children in Tibetan schools in India. The study uncovers an overwhelming emphasis on the preservation of Tibetan language and culture as the primary goal, often to serve a broader political cause of constructing refugee identity.

The findings indicate that the teachers are much more focused on instilling in their pupils an appreciation for traditional Tibetan cultural precepts. They disproportionately emphasized the political functions of language teaching where it is used as a tool for constructing refugee consciousness for the displaced community while language as a field of knowledge and its pedagogical considerations take backseat. As a result of the emphasis on political and cultural functions, what suffers, is the exploration of language structure and use, as well as any critical approach that would allow for a reflexive consideration of the curriculum leading to a pedagogic crisis. Alongside, the child as a learner and her context remain unacknowledged in the curriculum. The preservationist route to negotiating the refugee crisis gives rise to a pedagogic crisis of sorts.

The study is important as it helps us to realise that how a refugee community’s efforts to preserve its language and heritage become the reasons for its children’s lack of intent in the same. The study addresses a crucial and under researched area at the intersection of forced migration, education, language and identity. The findings point towards a need for the teachers to develop a reflexive stance, seeing language within the larger sociolinguistic ecology in which they live, and opening themselves to asking questions about their traditional forms rather than emphasizing their reproduction.

This paper forms part of a special section “The Politics of Post-Crisis Challenges Confronting Education”, guest edited by Dr Latika Gupta.