Refugee education is often framed in terms of access, infrastructure, and policy – but for children who grow up inside camps, meaningful learning begins long before they enter a classroom. It unfolds in everyday camp life: in caregiving roles, improvised survival strategies, and the small responsibilities that accelerate emotional maturity and practical skill. Imagination, resilience, and daily contribution form an “invisible curriculum” that shapes identity, agency, and social belonging, strengths that formal schooling in many crisis contexts can fail to acknowledge.
In this post, the first in our new series “Delivering for people in an evolving humanitarian landscape”, education specialist Sara Aleisseh draws on personal experience and years of professional work in humanitarian education to illustrate that the “invisible curriculum” carried by children in conflict settings is not a deficit to be corrected but a form of knowledge that demands recognition. She calls for education systems that listen to children’s realities, link learning content to those realities, protect their dignity, and build learning models rooted in healing, identity, and belonging.
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