Many may not know but Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and lacks domestic legal frameworks recognizing refugee status. Refugee rights in Malaysia are almost non-existent, refugees have no formal right to legal employment, public education, or statutory protection, leaving them vulnerable to arrest and detention. Even the right to drive a car is one not afforded to those with Refugee status in Malaysia, with the acquisition of a UNHCR card not protecting them from arrest or detention. 

With interrupted schooling and a lack of stability, educational provisions are limited to say the least. Fugee school is one of the only formal institutions that offers actual education and formal academic qualifications to refugees that enable them to do more, be more, and not be limited by a country that labels them in a way that determines their identity. Fugee students deserve to develop their soft skills alongside the hard ones the curriculum provides. 

Having studied formal logic, argument structures, and being familiar with argumentation and debate, I realise how incredibly important these soft skills are to both have and develop. The structures of arguments. How they’re formed. How the premises lead to the conclusion. Once your skills of pattern recognition are honed you start to see this everywhere. Politicians and their attempts to make you vote for them. The delivery of news. Even in daily conversations. You start to see the structure of arguments and it is actually through that you can start to deconstruct and challenge them. The development of these skills should not be limited to a certain few but to everyone, especially to students whose right to exist is constantly challenged or questioned in a country that will never fully accept them. 

To help develop these life skills, I am delivering a series of workshops across 6 weeks for Years 7,8 and 9, on argumentation and debate, completing this programme by organising the first ever Model UN event Fugee School has done. 

I had arrived with lesson plans for the six weeks but actually, the best decision I made was to spend the first week just shadowing lessons, collecting data, and familiarizing myself with the context of the school, country, and the students. The information from this first week was invaluable. By learning what worked with the students, and allowing them to familiarise themselves with me, I was able to adapt my lesson plans to be more effective and was better received as a teacher- given they had seen me a few times before. Week 2 was the first lessons, the adapted lesson plans encouraging engagement and ultimately were more effective than if adaptations weren’t made. 

The ultimate thing that has guided me throughout this whole experience, 3000 miles away from everything I’ve ever known, in a part of the world I am more than unfamiliar with is- ‘it isn’t difficult it’s just new.’. It truly isn’t hard, it’s unfamiliar. Unknown. That’s what’s most terrifying about it, any experience. Especially when doubts linger or start to cloud your judgement. ‘Will I succeed?’. ‘Will this work?’. ‘Am I capable of doing this?’. What you are scared of is the unknown, not necessarily the difficulty. So, amongst these reflections, I will leave with one last quote that has quite honestly stuck with me. Almost a mantra if you will, that’s been repeated myself the past two weeks, and I foresee this pattern continuing for the next few weeks. It comes from the classic (Oscar deserving) movie ‘Cars’. When Lightning McQueen was asked, ‘How did you know you could do it?’his one and only response was, 

‘I don’t know,

I just never thought I couldn’t.’