In today’s world full of conflict and war, it seems an estimated of 13 million children to be out of school in conflict-affected areas, this is as per UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring Report. Additionally, conflict, the climate emergency, and the hunger crisis have pushed education systems to the brink. Combined, this means that 224 million school-aged children now have their education severely disrupted by crises. When these young learners, or displaced children, or refugees, or migrants are accommodated back in the a classroom, they are usually labeled for the convenience of the school, state or educational systems. Like the flower in my painting, the same but not the same. I completed the painting sometime back thinking of the flower that is forgotten or is not part of the bouquet and hence named it ‘The Blues’.

We all experience this blue feeling sometime or the other, but what happens if it becomes a constant state of mind because of the education systems or policies. Education often speaks the language of global mindedness. We celebrate mobility, intercultural understanding, multilingualism and learning across borders. We encourage young people to see themselves as part of a shared humanity. And yet, there is a painful contradiction at the heart of this aspiration. How do we include children who have had to cross borders not as a choice?

For some learners, crossing borders is presented as an educational opportunity: a semester abroad, a university pathway, an international qualification, a passport to global citizenship. For others, crossing borders is an act of survival. It may mean fleeing conflict, war, violence, persecution, climate disruption or political instability. For these learners, education is not simply interrupted. It usually becomes inaccessible altogether.

I read a recent UNESCO reporting that reminded me of the scale of this inequity. Refugee participation in higher education has increased, but remains profoundly below global participation rates. Behind this gap are not only questions of affordability or language proficiency, but also missing documents, unrecognised qualifications, disrupted schooling, restrictive admissions systems, limited information, systemic bureaucracy, and institutional processes that were never designed for displaced learners.

This should give all of us in international education pause. Think about the systems we create, is access being masked as equity? Realizing the harsh reality of our diverse classrooms where there are more and more displaced or refugee or migrant children.

Equity cannot be reduced to opening a door and hoping someone can walk through it. Equity asks whether the building itself was designed with everyone in mind. The solution is in the design.

Access is only the beginning

When we discuss inclusion, we often begin with access: who is admitted, who receives a scholarship, who is offered a seat in a classroom. These questions matter deeply. But access alone does not guarantee belonging, participation or success.

A learner who has escaped conflict or war or has been displaced from their country of origin may enter an institution to be included in education and still feel invisible. Their previous learning may be treated with suspicion because it does not fit familiar records or systems. Their linguistic abilities may be viewed as a deficit rather than an intellectual resource. Their experiences may be invited into the classroom only when the topic is war, displacement or trauma.

This is not representation. It is conditional acceptance. Ironically the word conditional acceptance is also a norm in higher education.

True representation means that refugee and displaced learners are not positioned merely as recipients of support, stories of resilience, or subjects for others to study. They must be recognized as thinkers, contributors, knowledge holders and co-creators of learning spaces. Most importantly they are here as we left them nowhere to be.

International education has an important responsibility here. If our purpose is truly to develop learners who can engage thoughtfully with complexity, then we cannot build programmes that treat some forms of knowledge as universal and others as peripheral, traditional or indigenous, minimizing their significance. Categories should exist to treat them at par not as lesser than.

Representation in pedagogy, who is expected to speak, learn and belong?

Pedagogy is rarely neutral. Every classroom makes assumptions about participation, confidence, language, prior knowledge and what counts as success.

In many multicultural classrooms, we reward the learner who speaks quickly, debates confidently, makes eye contact, asks questions publicly and articulates ideas in the dominant language of instruction, mostly English. These may be valuable skills, but they are not the only indicators of intellectual engagement. How does the pedagogy ensure intellectual indicators that are diverse and not common.

A learner who has experienced displacement may need time before contributing in a large group. They may express understanding through writing, visual representation, collaboration, observation, careful reflection or even silence. They may carry linguistic and cultural knowledge that expands the discussion but does not emerge through conventional participation structures. How do we create learning spaces for psychological safety of these learners?

An equitable pedagogy creates multiple pathways for learning and expression. This can only happen if we build systems that recognize and acknowledge the world around them and the changing nomenclature of our classrooms.

This might mean offering varied ways to demonstrate understanding, building in structured reflection before discussion, valuing multilingual thinking, using collaborative rather than exclusively competitive learning structures, and ensuring that classroom dialogue does not demand personal disclosure as the price of participation. It also means being careful not to make refugee or displaced learners representatives of an entire country, conflict or community. No student should have to relive their displacement in order to make a lesson feel authentic for others. They should not be used as case studies.

The question for educators is not, “How can we include displaced or conflict impacted student stories in our curriculum?” It is, “How can our learning environments recognize the full humanity, expertise and agency of displaced or conflict impacted learners?” I avoid using the term ‘refugee’ as I feel it misinterprets the lived experiences of the learner.

Representation in epistemology, whose knowledge counts?

International education must also confront a deeper question: whose knowledge counts?

When knowledge is presented as if it has only one centre, learners from the margins are expected to enter someone else’s intellectual world rather than seeing themselves as participants in creating it. A more equitable curriculum does not simply add diverse names to a reading list. It asks broader questions: Whose voices are missing from this unit?Which histories have been treated as central, and which have been treated as supplementary? What knowledge has been carried through memory, language, community practice or lived experience but excluded because it does not fit conventional pedagogy?

For conflict impacted or displaced learners, this matters profoundly. Displacement does not erase knowledge. A student may arrive without reports or transcripts but still bring deep knowledge of languages, local economies, cultural systems, environmental realities, migration, political histories and resilience. If our education system cannot recognize such knowledge, it is not just failing individual learners. It is limiting itself.

Representation in implementation, where do values become real?

Equity is often strongest in vision statements and weakest in implementation. We may speak beautifully about inclusion while maintaining admissions procedures that assume every learner has uninterrupted schooling, official transcripts, stable internet access, financial guarantees, standardized test scores and familiarity with complex bureaucratic systems.

This is where international education policies must move from aspiration to action. Where do we see the values in action?

Institutions can begin by reviewing whether their admissions, assessment and support systems and policies unintentionally exclude displaced learners. Flexible recognition of prior learning, competency-based assessments, provisional admissions, alternative evidence of qualifications and clearer guidance can make a difference. But the work does not end there.

Students also need practical support and they need staff who understand that trauma-informed practice is not about lowering expectations. It is about creating conditions in which high expectations are possible. These learners need to see themselves in the curriculum, in institutional leadership, in student voice structures and in the decisions made about their learning.

Most importantly, they need to be asked what would make education more accessible and meaningful for them. Not consulted after decisions have already been made. Not invited to share a story for a brochure. Not admitted to raise the school diversity profile. Asked as partners in design.

Internationalism as responsibility

This is the urgent moment for international education to reconsider what internationalism really means. It cannot only mean the ability of some learners to travel easily between countries, institutions and opportunities. It must also mean responsibility towards those for whom borders have become barriers. And responsibility of who created these conditions for displacing young learners.

The promise of international education is that every learner will be recognized for who they are within the journey they are already navigating, not for how they fit in their new environment.This is a question of rights, dignity and intellectual justice.

And for all of us working in international education, it is a reminder that representation must be visible not only in the faces in our classrooms, but in the knowledge we teach, the pedagogies we use and the systems we choose to build. Equity has to begin with access, but it only becomes real when learners are able to arrive, belong, contribute and shape education for their present and future, together.

At a recent conference on flourishing in the Anthropocene, I found myself sitting with two feelings that are not always easy to hold together: intellectual curiosity as well as deep discomfort.

The conference brought together urgent and necessary questions. What does it mean to flourish in an age where human activity has become a geological force? How might education respond to ecological collapse, climate grief, social fragmentation, and the exhaustion of systems built on extraction? Social, economic, educational, or political systems that survive by taking more than they give back. How do we reimagine education beyond competition, hyper-individualism, marketisation, and the narrow metrics of success that have shaped modern schooling?

These are important questions. They are questions educators cannot afford to avoid.

And yet, as I listened, another question began to form within me: who is being invited to answer them?

Much of the discussion returned, understandably, to colonization. Coloniality was named as a legacy we continue to carry: a way of thinking that separates humans from nature, privileges Western knowledge systems, reduces complexity by categorizing, and positions some people as knowers while others become objects of study. There were calls to disrupt colonial frameworks, to center marginalized voices, to rethink flourishing through relationality, land, community, ecology, and justice.

But as a person shaped by colonized histories, I felt a familiar unease. Too often, the colonized appear in such conversations as evidence, as metaphor, as moral urgency, or as intellectual raw material. Their histories are invoked to critique dominant systems. Their suffering becomes the foundation for reform. Their knowledge is referenced as a solution. But are they present as equal architects of the future being imagined? Isn’t that the urgent need?

This is where my discomfort sat. Is it enough to speak about colonial harm if the people most marked by that harm are not invited or consulted into the centre of the conversation? Is it possible that even well-intentioned reform can reproduce the same hierarchy it claims to resist? Could the message unintentionally become: we colonized you, and now we will teach you how to heal from colonialism?

This question is painful, but necessary. At a systemic level who should lead on this solution-the colonizer or the colonized? Does this feel I am segregating communities into categories, if it does, then I have succeeded in giving you an idea of how I feel sitting through these conversations.

Education has always been deeply implicated in colonial projects. It has classified, ranked, corrected, civilized, assimilated, and erased. It has taught some children to inherit the world and others to doubt their place in it. It has privileged certain languages, literatures, histories, epistemologies, and ways of reasoning, while treating others as local, informal, indigenous, spiritual, emotional, or anecdotal.

So when education now turns toward decolonization, sustainability, relational wellbeing, and the Anthropocene, it must do more than change its vocabulary. It must examine the architecture of participation itself.

Who designs the conversation themes?
Who frames the questions? Who is answering these questions? Who leads and who is led?
Who is cited as theory?
Who is invited as testimony?
Who is present in the room, and who appears only in the slides?

The Anthropocene is often described as “the age of man,” a term that captures the unprecedented impact of human activity on the Earth’s systems. But even this framing demands scrutiny. Which humans? Whose activities? Whose industrial revolutions, empires, economies, and appetites? To speak of “humanity” as a single factor risks erasing histories of responsibility. The farmer in India displaced by extractive economies, the Indigenous community in Africa defending land from business giants, the child/ren dying in war zones, and the corporation profiting from extraction and war are not equally responsible for the planetary crisis. Even allegiance makes a difference. Hence I sit in my confusion in these conversations.

At the same time, I wonder whether the Anthropocene should limit us only to the binary of oppressor and oppressed. That binary is necessary for naming injustice, but I strongly think it is not enough for imagining flourishing. If we remain only within the context of harm, colonized vs colonizer, oppressed vs oppressors, we may diagnose the system without learning how to truly live as equals.

I am grateful for the conference that reminded me that flourishing cannot be understood as individual achievement alone. It is relational. It is ecological. It is cultural. It is spiritual. It is linguistic. It is intergenerational. A flourishing student is not merely one who performs well academically, but one who is rooted, connected, purposeful, emotionally alive, critically conscious, and able to imagine futures beyond inherited limits.

But for education to nurture this kind of flourishing, it must resist the temptation to turn relationality into another fashionable framework. Land-based pedagogy, Indigenous knowledge, community epistemologies, photovoice, storytelling, and decolonial thought cannot become decorative additions to an unchanged system. They cannot be extracted from communities, translated into Western academic language, and then re-presented as innovation. That would not be decolonization. It would be epistemic recycling.

The deeper work is not simply to include marginalized knowledge in existing systems, but to ask whether the system itself is capable of being changed by that knowledge. This is particularly important for international education. Our schools often speak the language of global citizenship, intercultural understanding, sustainability, and human flourishing. Yet we must ask whether our curricula genuinely disturbs inherited hierarchies of knowledge, or whether they merely add diversity to a fundamentally Western frame. Do students learn that knowledge lives in many languages, landscapes, bodies, histories, and relationships? Or do they learn that some knowledge is universal while other knowledge is “context”?

Perhaps the real learning from the Anthropocene is not only that humans have damaged the Earth. It is that certain ways of living on this planet have been made dominant at great cost. For me, the most powerful question emerging from the conference was not simply, how do we educate for flourishing in the Anthropocene? It was: who gets to define flourishing, and for whom?

If the answer is still shaped primarily by those historically positioned as the definers of knowledge, then we have not gone far enough. To speak ethically about colonized histories, educators and institutions, the colonized cannot remain the subject of reform. They must be co-creators, critics, theorists, leaders, and designers of the educational futures being imagined.

My understanding through some insightful discussions with colleagues leads me to think that the Anthropocene asks us to confront planetary crisis; decoloniality asks us to confront historical and epistemic injustice; humanistic education asks us to hold onto hope, dignity, and possibility.

The work ahead is not to let the language of decolonization become another performance of institutional virtue, another woke word. It is to create educational spaces where those most affected by colonial histories are not merely remembered, referenced, or researched, but genuinely heard, trusted, and followed. Irony is that we have not even begun to have frameworks for listening, trusting or following, because the solution is always offered not co created. Only then can flourishing become more than a theme. Only then can education begin to repair what it has helped to reproduce. Only then can we ask, with honesty, not just what we learned from the Anthropocene, but what kind of humans we are willing to become first and shape later.