Conference Agenda

While higher education has expanded, concerns have been raised regarding grade inflation, suggesting that higher education qualifications have been devalued in the labor market (Xing et al., 2021). Even if disadvantaged students manage to obtain these credentials, it may not necessarily contribute to their social mobility in the labor market (Wu et al., 2020), potentially exacerbating inequalities (Mok & Wu, 2016). Similar concerns have been raised in the UK, where graduates from selective institutions tend to experience significantly higher educational returns (Britton et al., 2016). Widening participation in education can create an "opportunity trap," leading to an oversupply of graduates and consequently decreased salaries for all except the elite (Budd, 2017). Consequently, social mobility may depend less on academic qualifications and more on elite social skills and family resources, highlighting the need for additional support for disadvantaged students when competing in the labor market.

This study will utilize Bourdieu's theory, including the concepts of capital, habitus, and field, to shed light on this phenomenon of social reproduction. Within the realm of research on the graduate labor market, these concepts allow for a comprehensive understanding of the enduring impact of social backgrounds in a changing graduate labor market. Different social groups acquire distinct manners and consumption habits based on their economic and socio-educational environments (Ingram, 2014). Disadvantaged students often lack the linguistic habits and skills that are considered "desirable" or "normal" for their more advantaged peers (Wilkin & Burke, 2013). By examining capital, it becomes evident that individuals from disadvantaged family backgrounds often struggle to accumulate the same levels of economic, cultural, and social capital as their privileged counterparts, even if they experience upward social mobility (Friedman, 2016). The literature consistently highlights the importance of resources, such as financial support and informal assistance from family, in helping graduates succeed in their careers. Those lacking these resources may encounter greater obstacles in their career paths. Habitus, in turn, aids in understanding the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. The differing outcomes in the labor market among students from diverse social backgrounds can be attributed to their class-based habitus and the levels and types of capital possessed by both the students and their families, resulting in distinct modal pathways for each social class.

Empirical studies conducted in both the UK and China highlight inequalities in graduate employment and career trajectories. UK economists have found differences in graduates' earnings based on family backgrounds (Britton et al., 2019; Dearden et al., 2021), while sociologists indicate that individuals from more advantaged backgrounds have higher chances of entering professional positions and experiencing greater earnings growth as they age, owing to their enriched capital and resources (Friedman et al., 2015). In the Chinese context, differences in graduates' career plans in the labor market have been linked to their rural/urban household registration (Niu et al., 2020), parental occupation (Li et al., 2012), and parental involvement (Liu, 2021).

While existing research examines the influence of family backgrounds on graduates' career trajectories and employment, it is evident that parental influence and involvement play a significant role in students' education and employment. However, there is a lack of understanding and perspectives from parents on how they transmit their resources to their children to alleviate uncertainties and insecurities in their career paths and help them achieve their goals. This study aims to address this research gap by focusing on the qualitative socio-economic causes and effects of family backgrounds. It explores how graduates from different social groups and their families plan their career trajectories to achieve upward social mobility or maintain their social status.

Language is both a medium to reach subject-specific learning goals and it is also a learning goal within the subject itself. Learners need to use language to participate in school communication, to understand relevant content or to work on given tasks. Thus, they are required to learn school- and subject-specific language to participate in institutionalized learning environments. The dual role that language plays in subject learning might pose challenges for all learners. However, emerging multilingual learners (EML), whose skills in everyday and academic language are yet to develop, are likely to encounter even greater difficulties (Warren & Miller, 2015). Regarding these impediments in linguistically diverse settings, teachers face the need to respond to learners´ challenges or learning needs.

Although there is a growing body of research on language-inclusive approaches in multilingual mathematics lessons, most of these studies focus on the design-level of teaching (Götze & Baiker, 2021; Prediger, 2019; Wilkinson, 2018). This means that during lesson planning teachers identify language elements, which might impede learners´ understanding of the subject, and seek for ways to make them comprehensible for learners. However, little is known about how teachers adapt language requirements during classroom interaction, when learners cannot comply with linguistic expectations or when teachers realize a language learning opportunity and use it. Erath et al. (2021) differentiate between design level and teaching practices level for instruction that creates language learning opportunities in mathematics in multilingual contexts. What we know about language adaptations on the teaching practices level mainly comes from two areas: 1- studies conducted by Heller and Morek (Morek & Heller, 2020; Quasthoff et al., 2022), which mainly focus on fostering discursive skills such as arguing and explaining 2- scaffolding approaches (Gibbons, 2015).

This study investigates micro-interactional adaptations on the teaching practices level with a specific focus on so-called divergences in interaction. Throughout this paper, the term microinteractional adaptations will refer to teachers´ spontaneous adjustments in the learning environment in order to help learners meet linguistic demands in content or to challenge them by increasing the demands. The definition of a divergence is twofold in this study: first, divergences are defined as discrepancies between learners´ actions and teacher´s expectations. Second, they are defined as teachers´ actions which deviate from their initial aim and evolve into a new learning goal. In this regard, divergences can be initiated by learners as well as teachers. The reason why the study focuses on divergences is that teachers´ practices to resolve divergences enable researchers “to decipher certain implicit norms that unfold in the teacher’s and the students’ joint actions” (Ligozat et al., 2018). Although the main research interest is on teachers´ language-related adaptations in classroom interaction, the study takes a holistic approach and investigate learner´s actions and the evolvement of the content as well. Gruson and Sensevy (2013) state that in order to understand teachers´ actions, learners´ actions and “knowledge structure and function” need to be taken into account. Another reason for adopting a holistic approach is the assumption that language adaptations in subject teaching might not necessarily appear in the form of explicit language feedbacks but instead in actions through little changes with respect to the arrangement of tasks or classroom interaction (e.g giving the right to speak to another student). The following research questions will guide the study:

1)What kinds of divergences can be observed in classroom communication in the moments of new knowledge construction by learners and teacher?

2a) Which micro-interactional adaptations do teachers make to navigate learners towards the learning goal in the case of divergences?

2b) To what extent do these practices foster language-inclusiveness?

The concept of quality burst into the school world in the 1990s with the continuously interlinked ideas of innovation and educational and didactic improvement. From then on, schools have increasingly felt invested by an urgent and pervasive demand for quality: an articulated demand, coming in different tones from the various components of the school system. We could call it a cultural challenge involving not only those who are directly part of the school world but the entire community. This is especially so if we understand knowledge and learning as indispensable prerequisites for living in post-modern society. This process culminated in the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2015) and its Goal 4 which requires us to look at the future of schools from the perspective of ensuring quality, inclusive and equitable education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. This objective encourages us to look at the future of the school in a transformative and concrete perspective.

Therefore, in asking ourselves how we can achieve a school that is both of quality and constantly growing and improving, we consider it essential to take a step back and start from the data that shows what today's school is like. The picture is as clear as it is dramatic. Among the many, the most critical data: according to data provided by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2021), in the world, there are still more than 63 million children under the age of 11 who do not attend school. According to the UNICEF report (2021), this number has risen to 168 million during the year in which the pandemic peaked.

Aware of this, we must turn our gaze to the construction of a vision of tomorrow's school that can consider the fundamental elements on which today's school rests, including its cracks, even the ones from the post-pandemic era that has overturned not only its ways of doing things but also its very objectives.

The main objective of this research is to identify perspectives and guidelines for action to reform Italian school policies.

The research has involved a three-stage design currently underway.

In the first phase, four participant case studies were carried out involving children, teachers, school leaders, and families from four primary schools around the world. The four schools are based in Italy, the Russian Federation, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. These countries were chosen considering the socio-economic level (according to data provided by the World Bank, 2021) and the percentage of investment of public expenditure - concerning GDP - in primary education.

On the basis of the dimensions that will emerge from the analysis of the data collected in the first phase, steps two and three of the research will be carried out.

Phase two of the research will consist of administering a questionnaire aiming at investigating the opinions on school quality of Italian primary school teachers and school managers.

Finally, during phase three, we will compare the results obtained in the previous step of the research with Sustainable Development Goal 4 of Agenda 2030. We consider it possible to expand the meanings emerging from the objective and sub-objectives of Goal 4, which have been summarized in an outline drawn up by the authors. The data is currently being analyzed with Atlas.ti and will lead to constructing reasoning on the possible theories that the school of tomorrow is called upon to follow to improve in quality, in line with Goal 4 of Agenda 2030.

With the growing importance of digital technologies in learning and teaching environments, various new actors have emerged in the governance of education. While the involvement of big tech corporations and affiliated philanthropies has been raising issues for critical examination for many years now (Selwyn 2014, Cuban 2003), there is a growing field of research that is concerned with the role of “intermediaries” and “boundary brokers” that operate in-between different professional, disciplinary or sectoral systems (Williamson & Hogan 2020). These actors range from policy innovation labs (Williamson 2015) to data mediators (Hartong 2016). They engage in the formulation, dissemination and enactment of (digital) education policies and are consequently considered to be crucial nodes in increasingly networked governance landscapes (Caves & Oswald-Egg 2021).

However, many of the actors that mediate in and between ed-tech networks and discourses are still to be researched in-depth. In particular, little is known about the intermediary role of IT-service and consulting providers and their work as ed-tech consultants for schools and administrations – despite their growing presence in ed-tech procurement and implementation processes (Förschler 2021). Consultants in education systems have been examined as political advisors (Gunter 2017), participants in school improvement processes (Goecke 2018) or well-connected drivers of reform discourses (Player-Koro and Beach 2017), and accordingly, have mostly been analyzed as linking elements between politics and pedagogy. While these studies highlight that consultants are to be understood as “knowledge actors”, who “variously generate, identify, carry and deploy saleable beliefs, ideas, debates and solutions that can be packaged and repackaged” (Gunter 2017: 338), the specific context of IT-related consultancy and technological expertise, however, has only played a minor role.

In order to get a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how technologies are mediated to schools via consultancy, this research project aims to approach IT-service and consulting businesses in the context of their coordinative work between political, pedagogical and technological spheres. Drawing on Bernstein’s notion of “recontextualization” (Bernstein 2000), the work of ed-tech consultants is examined as a relational process of moving and selecting knowledge from one context to another, or more specifically, as a practice of translating policies and technological rationales into something that practitioners can “enact” (Singh et al. 2013). Ed-tech consulting businesses, in this view, are not merely neutral linking elements that lubricate ed-tech related processes, but active agents in the construction of new pedagogical practices and values. Hence, the intermediary position of ed-tech consultants is to be considered as a critical junction that enables them to “structure the potential field of the actions of others” (Foucault 2007: 97), and thus, potentially exert power.

The local focus of this study, namely the German education system, provides a vivid example in which IT-service and consulting companies – driven by recent “school digitalization” reforms in Germany – are increasingly offering schools highly demanded amalgamations of interdisciplinary expertise (Petry et al. 2021). The companies offer comprehensive ed-tech implementation packages that reach from the (pre-)selection of products, integration of hard- and software to pedagogical frameworks (“media concepts”) and professional development (Rednet 2023). These “ed-tech implementation knowledges”, their production and transmission as well as the norms and values attached to it, are to be disentangled in the context of this investigation.

The development of creative skills (UNESCO, 2006) appears to be one of the most urgent challenges in today's complex (Morin, 2017) and 'fluid' (Bauman, 2007) society, characterized by uncertainty and instability.

The concept of creativity has multiple definitions: it is a performative skill, a transformative process (Edwards, Grandini & Forman, 2017; Munari, 2017; Rodari, 2010), an improvisational attitude (Zorzi, 2020), a generative capacity (Tiozzo Brasiola, 2020), a political condition and a dimension of complex thinking (Lipman, 2005). Moreover, creativity is a higher psychic function present in all human beings since childhood (Vygotsky, 2010) and a process historically and culturally mediated. Creativity is a necessary educational condition to imagine otherness, to think in terms of differences, and to welcome the thought of the other (Santi, 2006a) to nurture open and democratic societies. Hence, schools are in charge of cultivating it, so that it becomes a different opportunity to relate with others and with the world.

There are many documents and researches that emphasize the importance of creative education at school and in educational contexts (e.g., NACCCE, 1999; WHO, 1997; European Parliament, 2006, 2018). These documents consider creativity as one of the ten life skills, underlying all the key citizenship competencies. Moreover, it is to be understood as a democratic capacity that can be realized in all fields of human activity and all people.

Hence, the importance of the role of teachers and the learning environment in fostering and supporting each child's creative potential is critical (RIF, 2015). In the Italian context, the documents in which we misrepresent these principles are the Elementary School Programmes (1985), the National Curriculum guidelines (2012, 2018), and, more recently, Legislative Decree No. 60/2017.

From these principles, multiple pedagogical perspectives have emerged. Among them, this research aims to embrace an artistic and philosophical horizon.

One of these is the philosophical research community. It is considered by Lipman (1988, 2005) to be the cradle of the development of creative thinking, understood as one of the three components of complex thinking. According to the author, creativity is the transformation of what is given into something radically different, thus emphasizing the generative value of creativity itself. The development of complex thinking in children finds expression in Philosophy for Children (P4C), an educational practice characterized by the dialogic-argumentative method and the didactic model of the research community (Santi, 2005). In the literature, there are many researches aimed at investigating creative thinking through P4C (De Puig, 2003; Sátiro, 2006, 2019; Santi, 2007), but no studies highlighting the possible link between generativity and creative thinking in the perspective of complex thinking. Therefore, mobilizing generativity as an interpretative model to read an empirical investigation of creativity promoted through P4C can open a new pedagogical and didactic view of what has already been explored. The research aspires to give a generative reading of creativity, as an object of teaching, by investigating the horizon of generative didactics of creativity through PhilosophArt.

PhilosophArt is an educational-didactic practice that aims to generate creativity through art and dialogue in the community, taking into account the complexity of thought. It combines the dialogical-discursive method and the research community of P4C with the realization of community works of art through graphic signs (Kandinsky, 1968, 2005). P4C develops creative, critical, and free minds in community members so that they can live in a complex and democratic society open to difference. At the same time, artistic semiotics (Peirce, 1980) refers to the trivalence of the sign and to the possibility that the same sign can contain different meanings.

The concept of heteronormativity describes patterns of perception, thoughts and actions based on the assumption of a binary gender system (Degele, 2005). In this context, the two biologically and socially compatible sexes (male and female) relate their sexuality and attraction to each other (Pöge et al., 2020). This assumption of heterosexual gender dichotomy permeates and creates hierarchical relationships in many social and cultural spheres and determines the everyday life of individuals: those who do not conform to heteronormativity are marginalized and discriminated against (Hartmann et al., 2017). Thus, many LGBTIQ+ individuals still experience that their non-heteronormative ways of life are positioned in the socially deviant (Oldemeier, 2017). The acronym LGBTIQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer, and other self-designations beyond the heterosexual and two-gendered norm. According to research, approximately 5-15% of the population is LGBTIQ+ (Dalia Reseach, 2016).

For LGBTIQ+ youth, in addition to age-typical challenges, deviation from heteronormativity poses further challenges (Gaupp & Krell, 2020). This includes becoming aware of their own sexual orientation and/or gender identity, coming out, and dealing with homo-, bi- and transnegativity in school (Gaupp & Krell, 2020; Krell & Oldemeier, 2015). LGBTIQ+ youth at school report experiences of victimization, a lack of supportive school staff and LGBTIQ+ inclusive teaching as well as LGBTIQ+ exclusive infrastructure (Krell & Oldemeier, 2015).

These research findings can be located within the multidimensional construct of school climate under the dimensions of (1) perceived safety, (2) teaching and learning, (3) social relationships, and (4) the institutional environment (Thapa et al., 2013). These four dimensions encompass the characteristics of the school environment that influence students behavioral, cognitive, and psychological development (Thapa et al., 2013).

Negative school experiences, in relation to the National School Climate Council's concept of school climate (National School Climate Council, 2007), can inhibit the psychological well-being of LGBTIQ+ students. For example, qualitative research indicates that LGBTIQ+ students attribute their psychological distress to perceived discrimination and exclusion at school (Watzlawik et al., 2017). Further research from Anglo-Saxon countries indicates a higher prevalence of suicidality, depression, and anxiety disorders compared to non-LGBTIQ+ youth (Russell & Fish, 2016).

In addition, it could be suggested that LGBTIQ+ students have lower levels of student well-being than non-LGBTIQ+ students (Krell & Oldemeier, 2015). Student well-being is defined by Hascher (2004) as the prevalence of positive emotions and cognitions toward school, school members, and the school environment. Experiences of victimization and exclusion on the part of classmates and teachers, as well as structural discrimination based on LGBTIQ+ identity, could thus reinforce negative emotions and cognitions toward school.

To date, the authors are not aware of any study linking school climate to psychological distress and student well-being. A theoretical foundation for this relationship can be provided by an adapted version of Meyer's (2003) minority stress model. The model conceptualizes the influence of external and internal minority stress factors such as LGBTIQ+ specific harassment or internalized stigma on the well-being of LGBTIQ+ individuals with resilience factors moderating and mediating this relationship.

Accordingly, this study aims to answer the following questions:

• How do LGBTIQ+ students in Switzerland perceive their student well-being and psychological distress?
• How do LGBTIQ+ students in Switzerland perceive their school climate?
• After accounting for control variables, how are LGBTIQ+ specific school climate factors related to participants' student well-being and psychological distress?

For over 4 decades, Life Skills have been explored as a means of preventing health-compromising behaviour, especially with adolescents (Botvin, 1985). In 1993, WHO proposed its own definition of Life Skills as “the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviours that enable individuals to effectively deal with demands and challenges of everyday life” (WHO, 1994).

In the literature, Life Skills are described as a set of “personal and cognitive skills” which derives from “cognitive-behavioural techniques” to develop self-esteem and social skills, resist persuasion, and cope with anxiety (Botvin, 1985). The development of Life Skills in schools is also identified as a lever for promoting pupils’ health and well-being as a health-protection factor (Simar et al., 2020), as a means of preventing risk behaviour (Botvin, 2000; Botvin & Griffin, 2004, 2007), mental health problems (Department of mental health social change and mental health cluster, 1999), as well as violent and risky sexual behaviour (Mangrulkar et al., 2001). Furthermore, the development of Life Skills fosters sociability, positive social interactions, cognitive development, as well as academic and professional achievements (Lamboy et al., 2021). Finally, Life Skills programmes and interventions are more efficient when founded on research, conducted by adults with strong life skills and through regular exposure (Lamboy et al., 2021).

In France, they were developed from the end of the 1990s (Darlington & Masson, 2020) when the notion of competence was integrated into the French education curriculum. Initially known as “compétences émotionnelles et relationnelles” (i.e. emotional and relational skills) (Lamboy et al., 2021), the term “compétences psychosociales” (i.e. “life skills” in French) was truly adopted in 2016 with the introduction of the Parcours Éducatif de Santé (an educational pathway for pupils, focused on the development of various skills towards individual and collective health) (Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, 2017; Lamboy et al., 2021). Recently the “Vademecum de l'École Promotrice de Santé” (Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, 2020) has set out an important framework for the integration of Health Promotion in schools, with a particular focus on the development of pupils’ Life Skills to reinforce positive health behaviours and develop skills useful to the future adults whom pupils will become.

Thus, Life Skills appear to be fundamental. However, in both French and English, different terms are used as synonyms to refer to Life Skills: a semantic clarification is therefore necessary. Moreover, in French, the term adopted in translation of the expression "Life skills" proposed by the WHO in 1993 seems to operate a semantic shift by becoming "compétences psychosociales” (which can be translated as "psychosocial competences"). This illustrates the fact that the notion of “Life Skills” remains rather vague; a global perspective on the terms used and their definitions seems to be required (Simar et al., 2020), in both languages. Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyze the terms and definitions used in French and English to discuss Life Skills, to reach a consensual definition.

This poster will seek to illustrate a qualitative study of six newly-appointed headteachers in Scotland who have recently completed the mandatory qualification of Into Headship. As a course tutor on IH, the study is undertaken as the focus of my doctoral research.

In order to better understand the longer-term influences of the IH programme, I am curious to explore how former participants go on to further develop and apply their knowledge and understanding once appointed as headteachers post-programme. I am also interested in the significant prior learning and experiences participants bring to their IH studies and seek to explore the influence this has on them whilst on programme as well as post-programme.

Though IH is delivered by seven universities across Scotland, Education Scotland, which oversees the programme on behalf of the Scottish Government, collates an annual evaluative report. This report is based on a form of “satisfaction poll” completed by former participants at the point of course completion and is arguably unable to provide insights which deeply analyses or critically reflects upon the multiple influences of the IH programme. For IH, it is significant that only one study (Mowat, 2020) seeks to explore the ongoing development of former IH participants; however no studies were found which explicitly sought to do so over an extended time period or which studied former participants in permanent headship roles. Therefore, I believe it can be argued that there appears to be a clear “gap” in the field of knowledge related to the influence of the Into Headship programme.

Research Question

Taking account of the impact of leading during the COVID-19 global pandemic in Scotland:

In what ways do newly-appointed headteachers in Scotland perceive that their engagement in the Into Headship programme has influenced and continues to influence their leadership development in leading their school community?

1. Which aspects of participants’ leadership growth, sense of identity and related application of this understanding do they recognise to have been influenced /continue to be influenced (directly and/or indirectly) by engaging in the IH programme and in which ways?

2. Which aspects of participants’ leadership growth, sense of identity and related application of this understanding do they feel, have been/ are subject to other influences, contextual factors and other learning and in which ways?

Anticipated Outcomes

Through this study I hope to gain insights into:

• how study participants transfer and apply leadership knowledge & understanding gained in the IH programme in the various contexts they function within across the system.
• how study participants’ sense of identity as a headteacher has developed and continues to develop over time in their role as a newly-appointed headteacher
• what other significant influences study participants identify alongside the experience of engaging in the IH programme
• the part context, social learning, collaboration and engaging in networks/communities of practice plays in study participants’ ongoing development as headteachers

Key concepts are captured in a conceptual framework which has been constructed from the following dimensions:

• “Perceptions of Into Headship influences”, “Other influences” and their entanglement in the enactment of the headship role
• Notions of journeying i.e. personal and professional development over time, “Being, Becoming and Growing as a leader” (GTCS, 2021)
• The development of the professional, situated and personal identities of school leaders (Day et al., 2007)

Since the beginning of the new millennium, great efforts have been made at a European level on the integration of digital in education to overcome the monomediality, frontality, and transmissiveness of teaching-learning processes (e.g., European Commission et al., 2017).

Among the digital devices on the market, iPads, and other similar tablets, stand out for their affordances including portability, easy access to information, multitouch screen, and readiness for collaborative work (e.g., Henderson & Yeow, 2012). This translates into increasing autonomy, commitment, and motivation in learning activities, but also offering multiple opportunities to access the curriculum and a high degree of differentiation of the user's educational experience. Hence, one-to-one (1:1) learning initiatives started to be launched in Europe, especially in the Nordic countries. 1:1 learning initiatives are equipping all students of a given school, class, or age group with portable devices (e.g., laptops, netbooks, tablets, or smartphones) for learning purposes both at school and home (Bocconi et al., 2013).

However, research has long shown how the availability and adoption of digital equipment in the classroom are not automatically related to pupils’ academic performance (e.g., Hattie, 2009, 2015; Higgins et al., 2012, 2016). In other words, it is not the technology itself that makes the difference in achieving positive academic outcomes but how teachers integrate technologies in the classroom to improve and innovate education and training (Redecker & Punie, 2017). Therefore, what plays a significant role in influencing teachers’ behavior in the classroom is their preparation and perceptions of ICT integration (Abel et al., 2022). Unfortunately, most of the studies reveal teachers are not yet digitally competent (Fernández-Batanero et al., 2022). This became even clearer during the Covid-19 pandemic when teachers were revealed to be unprepared to set up forms of digital education (Lucisano, 2020; Ranieri et al., 2020).

It follows how important it is to intensify investment in didactic innovation, especially in terms of digital skills training in teachers (Commissione europea, 2020; European Commission et al., 2021 Ranieri et al., 2020). Teacher digital competence lies in knowing how to effectively integrate and use digital technologies at every stage of teaching and learning activities, considering the different contexts of use (European Commission et al., 2017).

Therefore, the study aimed at investigating the impact of a 1:1 iPad integration pilot project in a elementary school classroom through a professional development (PD) initiative with in-service teachers. PD is critical in enhancing teachers’ technology competence and confidence, thus promoting the successful use of technology in their teaching and students’ academic achievements (Abel et al., 2022). The study lasting one and a half calendar years involved 2 in-service teachers, a total of 23 first-grade (s.y. 2021-2022) pupils (13 female and 10 male), and their parents, of a elementary school in the Veneto Region, Italy. In addition, a control group of 17 students with similar background characteristics was also involved.

The application of a Design-Based Research (DBR) was chosen in the implementation and refinement of the teachers’ PD program. The DBR methodology is characterized by 1) being situated in a real educational context, 2) solving a real problem from the context, 3) focusing on the design and testing of a significant intervention, and 4) involving close collaboration between the researcher and stakeholders and multiple iterations to reach the best design of the intervention (Philippakos et al., 2021). A study on the use of iPad in teaching-learning processes in an Apple Distinguished School abroad was also performed.

At the end of the experimentation, the impact of the project will be determined in terms of teachers' PD and students' learning outcomes achieved thanks to the use of the digital tool.

An increasingly performative culture in higher education has tied the concept of ‘teaching excellence’ to ‘employability’. Consequently, higher education institutions and their academic teaching staff have been encouraged to rethink their approaches to embedding employability in the curriculum by collaborating with industry partners in the provision of ‘real-world learning’ (RWL) opportunities. Indeed, political discourse has positioned a culture of partnership at the forefront of higher education practice, reinforcing the importance of a positive experience of collaboration for all. The review of literature noted a prevalence of studies which have sought to identify and disseminate good practice in the development of real-world learning through collaboration. However, research into how collaborative practices can cultivate learners capable of transferring knowledge to real-world scenarios is in its infancy. Specifically, the lack of investigation into what employability means to students, academic staff and industry practitioners in the context of their experiences of RWL has been noted.

Focusing on the growing trend for collaboration between universities and industry partners in RWL provision and a desire to illuminate the diversity of experiences, this research examined a ‘direct’ model of collaboration (Bolden et al., 2009) involving one UK university and one local industry partner operating in the sport development sector. The resulting programme of RWL was aligned to a subject-specific strand of modules which were offered at the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications Level 4, Level 5 and Level 6 of one undergraduate degree course. Through the RWL programme, academic tutors and industry practitioners jointly supported students in applying subject-specific knowledge and skills to the real-world, via a combination of case studies, live briefs and extra-curricular activities, with the aim of enhancing employability for a career in the sport industry.

Adopting an interpretivist case study design and taking the programme as an illustrative example of RWL in UK higher education, three research questions were posed 1) How do stakeholders conceptualise and orientate to employability? 2) How is RWL experienced by different stakeholders? 3) How are stakeholders’ conceptualisations of employability and experiences of RWL related to the creation and maintenance of an employability culture?

The experiences of nine students, two academic tutors and four industry practitioners involved in the programme were explored via semi-structured interviews. A crystallised approach to analysis highlighted a series of critical incidents in the stakeholder experience of RWL. It is argued that stakeholders’ behavioural responses to such incidents are intertwined with their perception of the various aspects and functions of the RWL programme in which they are engaged and that these perceptions are simultaneously influenced by their beliefs about ‘employability’ in this context. Consequently, tension between stakeholders’ idealised beliefs about ‘employability’ and the reality of the RWL experiences provided through a university-industry collaboration actually presented challenges in the creation of the employability culture that such a programme of RWL demands. I therefore offer a ‘Framework for Establishing a Culture of Employability in RWL’ which is intended for educationalists to consider how the operations of a RWL programme may be manipulated to constrain or reify the occurrence of those critical incidents which will ultimately influence a stakeholder’s perception of the RWL programme and their beliefs or conceptions of ‘employability’.

This research project aims to develop, validate and evaluate a training proposal with a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) approach that promotes creative thinking and teaching skills for the initial training of Primary School pre-service teachers (PST). It aims to contribute to the design of a course elaborated based on the formative proposal and their results, and also elaborate a set of guiding principles for similar formative strategies.

Educating people to achieve future and current needs, demands that we accomplish not only several learning competencies for the 21st century (P21, 2015) but also their impact on society. Science Education (SE) aims to educate citizens to be prepared to their right and duty to make decisions in a conscious and responsible way with the current society and future generations (Galvão et al., 2016).

To consolidate an education that promotes an integrated worldview, it´s crucial to have teachers scientifically prepared and aware of the several kinds of teaching-learning strategies (Rodrigues & Martins, 2018). Therefore, it´s essential that since the beginning of teacher education, teachers are presented to an integrated SE perspective through a Science, Technology and Society (STS) (Vieira et al., 2011) / Science, Technology, Society and Environment (STSE) orientation (Rodrigues, 2011).

STEAM education is an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning, grounded in active learning methodologies and with an emphasis on real-world problem-solving (Shernoff et al., 2017). This approach not only proposes interdisciplinary learning through STEAM areas, but also prepares learners for the professional context by developing skills such as good communication, collaborative work, and the enhancement of interpersonal skills (Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019).

Based on this premise, Challenge Based Learning (CBL) methodology aims to, in a collaborative, multidisciplinary and experiential way, identify, investigate and propose solutions to real problems with an STS orientation (Nichols et al., 2016). From this perspective, the integration of STEAM and CBL has been described as having great potential for the development of 21st-century learning skills (P21, 2015), such as creativity, problem-solving, and others (Sanders, 2019).

The association of these active learning methodologies in SE since the early years, prepares future generations to be real-problem solvers, applying cross-disciplinary concepts coupled with their creative, critical and collaborative skills (Burrows & Slater, 2015). This project highlights the development of creativity throughout learning process. Creativity is a cross-disciplinary skill to produce ideas and strategies, individually or collectively, that are original, critical, plausible and feasible (Beghetto, 2007; Craft, 2009). The educational context should be a driver of human creativity, not a limiting factor (Robinson & Aronica, 2015).

Based on the theoretical background presented, research questions and respective objectives were settled for this research:

General Question: How creative thinking and teaching skills can be promoted for science primary school teaching through a STEAM approach?

Specific Questions:

SQ1. How to develop a proposal for pre-service primary teachers' initial training through a STEAM approach promoting creative thinking?

SQ2. What are the effects of the STEAM formative proposal on developing creative thinking in pre-service primary teachers?

SQ3. What is the relation between the creative thinking level and developing primary science teaching competencies?

Research Goals:

G1. To develop (design, plan, validate, implement and evaluate) a STEAM & Creativity formative proposal that promotes the creative thinking of pre-service teachers.

G2. To evaluate the effects of the STEAM & Creativity formative proposal on the level of creative thinking and its relation to developing teaching skills.

G3. To develop a set of recommendations from the research results for primary school science teacher training.

Teacher Education (TE) study programs play a crucial role in providing efficient preparation to prospective teachers for their teaching career. The quality of teacher preparation determines the effectiveness of classroom instruction which in turn influences the quality of student learning (National Research Council, 2010, in Feuer et al., 2013). Hence, it is important to ensure that prospective teachers receive good preparation. The aims of this study are to identify the structural components of TE programs, to examine the balance between theoretical and practical courses, and to analyze the TE programs in selected universities from Lebanon and United Arab Emirates (UAE) by benchmarking them against the conceptual orientations of the theoretical framework of Feiman-Nemser.

In Lebanon, TE programs are offered by fifteen universities (El-Mouhayar & BouJaoude, 2012). Elementary school teachers are required to receive three years of undergraduate education at the Education Department of any university to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education or in Elementary Education. Furthermore, students holding a bachelor’s degree in any other field who want to become teachers can receive a TD by completing an additional year of study (“Education in Lebanon,” 2018).

The development of TE programs in the UAE has gone through several steps. In 1979, the Ministry of Education founded two-year teacher training colleges. In the mid-1980s, the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), the first public university in the UAE, took over the responsibility of teacher preparation from the government. (Gardner, 1995, in Gallagher, 2019). In 1998, the College of Education at Zayed University initiated TE. Afterwards, UAE’s first teachers’ college, Emirates College for Advanced Education (ECAE), started in-country TE (Gallagher, 2019). Obtaining a Bachelor of Education in the UAE equips graduates to be able to teach students of different ages. For the secondary grades, many schools require a degree in the teacher’s field of expertise in addition to the degree in education. (“Bachelor of Education in the UAE,” n.d.).

The theory of Sharon Feiman-Nemser will be used as a framework. According to this theory, a set of ideas that guides the practical activities in TE programs is known as an “orientation.” Such practical activities can be identified as developing courses, teaching, supervising, assessing, and planning programs. An orientation would identify the goals of TE and the ways of realizing these goals. Views of teaching and learning and theories about learning how to teach make a “conceptual orientation.” Five conceptual orientations have been identified, each having a proposition that features certain aspects of teaching and TE programs: academic, practical, technological, personal, and critical/social orientations (Feiman-Nemser, 1990).

Examining the effectiveness of TE programs may provide insight into how well graduates are prepared and equipped to satisfy the requirements of their workplace (Mayer et al., 2015). Exploring the course offerings, the required hours, practicum policies and hours, and the number of required content courses provides the possibility to make comparisons across different programs. Such types of information are usually accessible on institution websites and catalogs, and hence a researcher who is not an insider may access them and examine them (Feuer et al., 2013).

Based on the theoretical framework, a review of relevant literature, and a survey of the TE program structures of the universities from Lebanon and UAE selected for this study, the following research questions have been identified:

- Which theoretical elements of the conceptual framework of Feiman-Nemser theory are implemented in the TE curricula of universities in Lebanon and the UAE?

- What is the distribution of theoretical and practical courses in the structural frameworks of the TE programs of universities in Lebanon and the UAE?

The democratisation of education has triggered new educational issues related to the advocacy of a school promoting equal opportunities and social justice. The need for education systems to guarantee access and success for all students has put education at the centre of the political and economic space. Thus, there are several political texts that, in the last decades, produce meanings and guidelines for the design of more inclusive educational systems. This has contributed to inclusive education becoming a nominally accepted concept (Nilholm, 2006) and to its assertion as in a global political vision (Pijl, Meijer and Hegarthy, 1997). In Portugal, the Legal Framework for Inclusive Education (decree-law 54/2018, of 6 July) established for the first time in the same legal normative, measures to support learning and inclusion (MSAI) for all students and reinforced the participation of the educational community (teachers, students, guardians and external stakeholders from local communities) for its implementation. This Decree-Law established formal moments for such participation and provided guidelines to create conditions for schools to affirm themselves as more politically democratic contexts (Trindade & Cosme, 2010) in which inclusive education is seen as a purpose for the whole community. Despite the potential changes that this text seems to point towards a more inclusive education policy, we assume that the process of implementation of education policies departs from the social engineering model in which the policy text determines the practices and effects (Stoer and Magalhaes, 2005). In this way we are arguing that the implementation of an educational policy is a process of meaning construction (Spillane, 2004). Having this as a reference, we mobilised for the research the theoretical-methodological approach of the Policy Cycle of Stephen Ball (1994), which assumes the characterisation of the investigated policy with the discussion of historical, legislative, discursive and political-ideological aspects (Ball, Maguire and Braun, 2012) from five contexts: context of influence, context of text production, context of practice, context of effects, and the context of political strategy. This critical and post-structuralist approach refuses the idea that structure is what will define policy and the political process; on the contrary, it argues that policy emerges from the priorities of different interest groups and their network governance (Veiga, 2012) and that it develops with the participation and interaction of groups of people who construct and constitute reality. Thus, according to this approach, the origin of policies is not circumscribed to an isolated moment or to one of the contexts of the policy cycle. In this paper we propose to explore the contexts of influence and text production of the inclusive education policy embodied in decree-law 54/2018, identifying its conditions of production (Pêcheux, 1993), i.e., the influences that collaborated to its placement on the agenda. To access these contexts of the cycle of inclusive education policy we analysed international and national texts, such as declarations, conventions, studies, opinions, reports and legal texts. The research questions that guided this analysis and that we intend to answer in this proposal are: What are the organisations that guide inclusive education policies? What are the ideas that underpin inclusive education policies?

As outright discrimination has largely transformed into covert inequities, “discrimination [has] moved underground” (Massey, 2007). Institutions are increasingly interested in fostering diversity and inclusion [D&I] to counteract these inequities (Brimhall et al., 2017). Although frequently linked, diversity and inclusion are distinct (Mor Barak et al., 2015). Measuring the impact of D&I interventions on diversity involves monitoring workplace demographics. Measuring inclusion is less straightforward (Sherbin & Rashid, 2017). Researchers fail to agree on a single construct of inclusion and lack evidence to do so (Shore et al., 2011). Yet, defining and measuring inclusion is critical in the studying of how social stratification is localised in different contexts, such as in education.

Researchers usually define inclusion as perceptions of uniqueness and belongingness, or alternatively, as participation and contribution. Theories borrowed from social psychology explain how individuals will unconsciously sort themselves into groups based on commonalities, such as gender or race, while group membership influences how they perceive others (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Individuals must feel a sense of belongingness in their groups, while also being sufficiently recognised for their unique characteristics (Shore et al., 2011). These social psychology theories could explain how individuals’ framing of themselves and others manifest into group dynamics. Therefore, social psychology could provide an explanation for patterns of student interaction within a given classroom.

Yet, a purely social psychological framework of inclusion overlooks how inclusion exists beyond individuals’ sentiments. Instead, Roberson (2006) defines inclusion as “the removal of obstacles to the full participation and contribution of [people] in organisations”. This version of inclusion highlights how in- and out-group dynamics dictate who is trusted, who is communicated with, and ultimately, who is embedded in social and collaboration networks (Ridgeway, 2011). Conventional inclusion surveys effectively measure inclusion as uniqueness and belongingness as Shore et al. (2011) defines it, but fail to appropriately measure inclusion in terms of participation and contribution.

To solve this methodological gap in the literature, this research borrows methodologies from the field of data science to revitalise inclusion research, using one university as a case study. The participating university was an elite public higher education institution. It prides itself on the usual interests of most historically white, high-ranking, and well-funded 21st century educational institutions: being research-driven, global, future-oriented, and a leader in higher education and learning. As such, in September 2022, one school at the institution implemented mandatory inclusion training for all tutors. The training had three main goals: to increase awareness and knowledge of what constitutes equality, diversity, and inclusion; to teach tutors tangible ways to alter behaviours to foster inclusion; and to provide a space for tutors to learn from each other to further develop inclusive teaching practices. The study and this resulting paper are a showcase of how one computational social science method, social network analysis, can help measure and analyse inclusion, as participation and contribution, in educational settings. Only a few studies to date have used social network analysis to research patterns of inclusion, such as Karimi & Matous (2018), Collins & Steffen-Fluhr (2019), and Hardcastle et al. (2019). None have employed mixed-methods of social network analysis, survey analysis, and demographic analysis. This innovative mixed-methods, but largely computational, approach is the focus of this paper as it allows educational researchers to monitor changes in students’ experiences of inclusion. A secondary benefit of this method is that it provides evidence, or lack thereof, for D&I interventions as they are implemented. Therefore, using social network analysis to measure inclusion helps ensure all students, regardless of identity, succeed in their education.

The current crisis of the research regarding teachers’ views about inclusive education consists of tension between two problematic camps. On the one hand, the first camp, which can be defined as the psychological school, examines teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge roots from an inherently individualistic and reductionist perspective to determine whether teachers reject or adopt the idea of inclusive education. The second camp, which can be called structuralist tradition, on the other hand, focuses on socio-cultural barriers teachers face when they intend to become active agents for promoting inclusive education.

Even if these two camps seem opposite perspectives, they still fall into the same pitfall by overlooking their hidden assumptions about teacher agency. The former camp looks for the explanation for the failure of THE inclusive education project in the gap between teachers’ beliefs and actions, serving the responsibilisation mechanisms of neoliberalism (Done & Murphy, 2018). Similarly, the structuralist camp- ignores the teacher agency’s transformative capacity and power to change the status quo.

Current explanations point out that neoliberalism has a discursive capacity to demarcate the fields of validity, normativity, and actuality within a particular economic rationality (Grimaldi, 2012). In the education field, we can observe this through either human actions or the products designated to guide these actions, such as policy texts or curricula. However, this does not necessarily mean that all actions are determined by the coercive power of a neoliberal discourse since there would otherwise be little or no autonomy for the agency. Instead, the status of teacher agency remains preserved by conceptualising the neoliberal discourse as a mechanism that imposes limits on what we can say.

The way of dealing with the impact of competitive economic rationale of neoliberalism on education, we need research that presupposes that there is room for a change and a role for teacher agency in making inclusion replace the current dominant educational discourses. From this point forth, this research project formulises its research question as follows; to what extent and in what ways are teachers’ views and actions of inclusive education informed by neo-liberalisation discourses in Scotland?

The concept “diversity” is being used more frequently in today’s globalized world, where cross-cultural communications and interactions have risen. As for higher education, which according to Brubacher (1987) is the engine for the growth of contemporary society, the spirit of diversity is vital for its development in all of its facets, including the improvement and practice of teaching methods, the dissemination and innovation of knowledge, the discovery and cultivation of talent, the renewal of technology and the transmission of civilization, etc. This study intends to examine and analyze the effects of diversity on higher education by looking back to the Jixia Academy in China during the Axial Age (Jaspers, 1949).

The term Axial Age is mentioned in the book The Origin and Goal of History published in 1949, written by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. He thinks that the “axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C.” During this era, both the West and China produced many great philosophers and educators, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as well as Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi. It was also during the Axial period that the prototypes of higher education emerged in both West and East : the Platonic Academy in ancient Greece and Jixia Academy in China.

Jixia Academy is recognized as a prominent institution of higher education in China during the Spring and Autumn era. It was founded during the reign of Tian Wu, the Duke Huan of the Qi State (374-357 B.C.). Jixia was a place where various schools of thought flourished, where many talents nurtured and where excellent teachers were gathered. The masters of Jixia produced works and taught their doctrines, in which we find the sources of almost all Chinese philosophical ideas, such as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, the Yin-Yang school, the Huang-Lao school, etc. Moreover, the scene of ‘hundred schools of thought’ unfolded in Jixia Academy precisely because of the value of diversity, liberty and equality it maintained.

This Ancient Academy came to an end after the defeat of the Qi state against the Qin State in 221 BC. Nevertheless, it had a spectacular existence for more than 150 years. It not only made a significant contribution to the academic and educational research work of the Qi State, but also had a great influence and effect on kingdoms at that time and later generations. In 1982, a national symposium on Jixia Studies was held in Zibo, the former site of this Academy, and the study of Jixia became widespread. After 5 years of archaeological work, the existence of Jixia was officially confirmed at the beginning of 2022. Apart from the historical documents, this discovery objectively proves its glory of the time.

Bai Xi (1989) believes that the success of Jixia Academy lies first and foremost in its spirit of diversity. Indeed, diversity is a powerful agent of change and an imperative that must be embraced if universities are to succeed in a pluralistic and interconnected world (Daryl, 2020). Therefore, how does Jixia Academy embody the spirit of diversity? If we concur that “until today mankind has lived by what happened during the Axial Period, by what was thought and created during that period” and that "the conception of the Axial Period furnishes the questions and standards with which to approach all preceding and subsequent developments” (Jaspers, 1949), then what remains of the Jixia Academy of the Axial Age for us? This research focuses on the effects of Jixia mainly in terms of the diversity of teaching methods and educators (schools of thought).

This doctoral study develops as the diagnostic phase of a fourth-generation formative intervention seeking to understand and catalyse the learning processes at the core of eco-social mobilisations triggered by collective challenges (Heidemann, 2019; Kuk, Tarlau, 2020; Engeström, Sannino 2021). Ever more local communities across Europe strive to resist the existential risks posed by climate change, globalisation, and pandemics by engaging in transformative activities aimed at envisioning alternative futures (Gümüsay, Reinecke, 2022). Plagued by intensifying floods, relentless overtourism, and rampant depopulation, the urban lagoon of Venice has notoriously become one of the most endangered European sites (Pascolo, 2020: 17-26). Therefore, the current research focuses on the critical case of the Venetian civil society, which is struggling to reclaim the vanishing future of its city suffering from an organic crisis akin to those experienced along the Northern Mediterranean region (Dlabaja 2021). Venice’s civil society organisations (CSOs) seem unwilling to surrender to the chronicle of a death foretold: they have recently tried to mobilise together by breaking the historical tensions between environmentalist groups, neighbourhood associations, and trade unions (Chiarin, 2022).

The general research question orienting the fourth-generation formative intervention captures the above problem statement:

How can the Venetian community learn to collectively enact its desirable futures?

Nonetheless, this preliminary stage focuses on diagnosing the conditions, or the lack thereof, for expanding the transformative activities of Venetian CSOs into heterogeneous coalitions seeking to regenerate the futures of the urban lagoon.

In view of its enduring environmental, residential, and economic crises, the diagnostic research questions guiding the present study are as follows:

1) How have Venetian CSOs learnt to coalesce into mobilisation networks dealing with these critical challenges?

2) Have mobilisation networks enacted collective transformative agency (TADS) by producing mediating artefacts sustaining their future-making activities?

3) Which major congruencies and contradictions have emerged between mobilisation networks and multi-level activity systems seeking to shape the futures of Venice?

The corresponding research objectives consist of a) the reconstruction of long-lasting learning processes enabling Venetian CSOs to mobilise more or less effectively; b) the identification of primary, secondary, or tertiary artefacts enabling coalescing CSOs to enact collective TADS; c) the hypothesis of congruencies and contradictions constituting the relationships between Venice’s civil society and its public bodies, educational establishments, and labour market. Besides this practical impact at the community level, the project aims to contribute to the emerging fourth generation of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, first, by conducting and documenting a systematic diagnosis preparatory to multiple Change Laboratories (Sannino, 2022).

Hyperobjects such as climate change, globalisation, and pandemics affect cross-sectoral activities, which in turn call for eco-social transformations of communities and their institutions (Hasse, 2019). The formation of cross-scale coalitions coordinating various actors at local, national, and global levels capable of responding to these challenges becomes both the qualitatively new unit of analysis and intervention goal of 4G Activity Theory. Thus, the diagnostic work must focus on the potential developments of activities across sectoral and hierarchical boundaries by examining the history and configuration of the field (Antti, 2019). For the Venetian case, this entails mapping:

• The timelines of mobilisation and institutional activities responding to the organic crisis of the urban lagoon;
• Their major transformations due to novel mediating artefacts (Venice’s special laws, mobilisation strategies, etc.);
• The germ cells of coalescing mechanisms involving multi-level actors in cross-sectoral campaigns for the city’s infrastructure, sustainability, and degrowth.

Such 4G diagnosis lays the foundation for the operational phases of multiple Change Labs meant to enact the future-making coalition through cross-scale expansive learning cycles.

The emergencies of the last period, the COVID-19 pandemic, the environmental crises, the war in Ukraine, and the resulting socio-economic crisis, have accentuated, in education, the differences already existing among students (Save the Children, 2021; Giorgino, 2020) and produced new ones. These differences are also related to distance education (Ballarino et al, 2020; Torre et al, 2022) due to issues of economic, social, and cultural inequality.

To cope with the situation that has resulted and for a more democratic and equitable school, there are two levers on which to act: on one hand, flexible planning that helps with dealing with the unexpected, and on the other hand, fostering greater student autonomy. It has been studied in the literature how teachers, in order to cope with the unexpected, are forced to make fast decisions (Perrenoud, 1999), and this often favors the reproduction of embodied methods of operation (Magnoler, 2017) that reproduce worn-out patterns that do not fit the current situation and the changes taking place. Linear and instructivist methodologies often prevail, which are only effective in appearance but in essence do not meet the criteria of equity that are essential today. If regulation in action can no longer be based only on the practices incorporated by teachers, it becomes essential to rethink design models and to understand whether it is viable a "design for the unexpected" that can prepare many possibilities and support the teacher in making decisions in action amid unexpected situations. Regulation in action in the past was seen as teacher improvisation. Our hypothesis, on the other hand, sees regulation as a design in action that opts among the various possible paths identified in the design. In other words, we hypothesize that in order to cope with the unexpected and to implement equitable educational practices, it is necessary to both activate implicit intelligence and explicit intelligence (Damasio, 2021) while having to operate at speed.

The research we are describing attempts to answer the previous problems. It started from the analysis of 200 teaching sessions of Primary Education students that made us verify how the unexpected impacts on (1) the spatiotemporal conditions of teaching action and (2) the way pupils respond to the devices proposed by teachers.

Spatiotemporal conditions also result from students' different modes of working and learning. The need to activate multiple channels and engage students on authentic tasks results in different work times for each. The use of technologies to activate different processes introduces new possible sources of uncertainty. Different student responses also result from the increased differences present. Today, each student arrives in the classroom with a personal and multivariate store of knowledge, and this depends not only on the individual cultural background but also on the experiences and vicissitudes he or she has gone through.

"Designing for the unexpected" uses certain strategies: modularity, which is designing self-consistent lessons; redundancy, which is proposing activities that pursue the same objectives with different devices; deviation, that is activities that pursue different objectives but are more adherent to contingent needs; anticipation, that is predicting what will happen in the classroom (Rossi et al., 2021); and hierarchy, that is being clear about which activities are unavoidable and which can be added or changed. Some of the above strategies are derived from Berthoz's (2011) studies on simplexity and how complex systems respond to crises.

Introduction

There has been a plethora of research within physical education that outlines the multiple barriers that young women and girls face to participation (see Flintoff & Scraton, 2006). Importantly, young women and girls are often constructed as the ‘problem’ within physical education settings by being labelled as ‘disengaged’ (Vertinsky, 1992). Yet, this dominant narrative has not held up to scrutiny because of the structural factors including content (Stride & Flintoff, 2018), uniforms and clothing (Fitzpatrick & Enright, 2016), gendered stereotypes (Oliver, 2001), curriculum (Oliver & Kirk, 2015), amongst many others, that work to limit girls’ engagement. Rather than just critiquing physical education, more recently researchers have shifted their focus in order to explore how we can transform physical education to be more equitable toward young women and girls. This paper continues in this line of scholarship.

There have been multiple initiatives in order to transform physical education into a more equitable place for young women and girls. Much of this work has examined how to (re-)engage young women and girls in physical education by actively changing the environment. Within this, Oliver and Kirk (2015) have developed a pedagogical model, the activist approach, to working with girls in physical education. This work has been used across multiple settings (e.g. USA, Brazil, Australia, Scotland). Further, much of this work has examined pre-service teachers experiences of engaging with the Activist approach (Luguetti & Oliver, 2019; 2021; Oliver et al., 2018). To build on this scholarship, it is important to consider the experiences of current in-service teachers that are using this novel approach in school-based physical education settings.

Physical education teachers are part of schools, communities and professional cultures that are steeped in conventional ways of thinking. Within these spaces, there are dominant practices that often limit the pedagogical creativity of teachers as they rely on traditional approaches to physical education (see Kirk, 2010). Physical education teachers, therefore, that undertake transformative approaches are often ‘at the margins’ of the field and struggle to enact new forms of teaching (Fitzpatrick, 2013). In order to empower teachers to experiment with different forms of pedagogies in physical education, it is important to understand the challenges they may face in schools. Of further importance is to understand how these teachers experience these challenges as well as how it affects their ability to enact new pedagogies in physical education.

Purpose and Research Questions

The purpose of this paper was to examine the experiences of an in-service teacher who is engaging with the activist approach in physical education. The purpose was explored using the following research questions:

1. What are some of the challenges that a teacher may face when they are enacting an activist approach in physical education?
2. How do these challenges affect the teacher’s experiences of enacting an activist approach in school-based physical education?

Paradigm

The paper is grounded in a critical and transformative paradigm of qualitative research in physical education (Landi, 2023). Within this paradigm, the goal is to not merely critique social inequitable structures but also to transform them. As such, this paper draws on the Girls Activist Approach of Physical Education in order to transform physical education practices within Scotland to be more equitable for young women and girls. This study’s aim, of understanding a teacher’s journey to become-Activist, was underpinned by an approach to learning that was student-centred, embodied, inquiry-based, and emphasised listening to students (Oliver & Kirk, 2015).

This research focuses on the relationship that student teachers have with mathematics and how this relationship develops and evolves to create their identity as a mathematics educator during their first year of initial teacher training (ITT) at a University in England. The impetus for the research has stemmed from witnessing first hand, as a mathematics lecturer in Initial Teacher training, the relationship that undergraduates have with mathematics as subject that they must study but also one that they must teach. Research has found that teachers with higher levels of self- efficacy are less likely to suffer from burn out and leave the profession early. Less well understood is the development of attitudes towards mathematics in correlation with teaching experiences (Patkin and Greenstein, 2020). Many students entering university may have had 10 or 12 years of learning formalised school-based mathematics, but their subject knowledge is weak. Reasons for this may be that they have disconnected pockets of knowledge and what they perceive to be mathematics bares little correlation with how mathematicians perceive it.

For ITT students who have had a successful past relationship with mathematics and have achieved well in formal school testing such as GCSE and ‘A’ level, it might be assumed that they will have a strong perception of competence and confidence in the subject. However, an erroneous view of the way in which mathematics is presented and viewed as a subject persists amongst these students. This has also been confirmed through Rowland et al., (2009) who have suggested that formal qualifications are not a reliable indicator of sufficient subject knowledge to teach primary mathematics.

There is the suggestion of a cycle from learner through to teacher whereby perceptions of mathematics are formed by a child through cultural, family and social interactions including through their experiences in school. The weak subject knowledge and poor mathematical pedagogical knowledge held by some teachers can reinforce the negative experiences of the learner. As the learner moves through school further disengagement occurs and shallow learning takes place. I argue that the following elements have an impact on their perceptions of mathematics and self-efficacy: The teaching approach of the school, the relationship with the mentor and how the mentor is teaching them, the relationship that the mentor has with mathematics themselves, the experiences the student teacher gains in teaching across the different strands, the academy approach to mathematics and the use of schemes in general.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of Bandura’s (1977) theory of the development of self-efficacy I argue that for many student teachers the understanding of the equal value given to the how and the why of teaching may be problematic for them, as it is a different experience to the one in which they experienced as a learner of mathematics themselves. Traditional teaching practices experienced over formative school years lead to beliefs and attitudes being formed about mathematics and how it should be both taught and experienced (Gainsburg, 2012).

Further to this, the influence of the diversity of teaching approaches of any school-based placement and how decisions regarding the value of mathematical knowledge and the curriculum have an impact on the developing self-efficacy of the student teacher are established. Mentoring also plays a significant role in the student teachers’ developing self-efficacy as does the relationship between the student and the mentor. How this supports or develops positive perceptions of the subject and therefore higher levels of self-efficacy is established.

The importance of education for those who have experienced forced displacement is recognised in international law, human rights doctrines and national education policies (Benhura & Naidu 2021; de Wal Pastoor 2016; Dryden-Peterson 2017;). Education enables forcibly displaced young people to regain a sense of normalcy, develop language competence and relationships in their new contexts and work towards aspirations, all which help short and long term wellbeing (Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019; Keddie 2012; Ratković et al. 2017).

Countries in the global north, such as Sweden, the UK and Australia have grappled with accommodating increasing numbers of young forced migrants. These countries have a range of policies that govern not only how young forced migrants should be treated legally and supported socially and economically but also their education provision. These differ for those on recognised resettlement schemes and those who are not. National and regional education departments and schools have a range of policies which apply to all students, including policies regarding the admissible age of students and pathways through schooling systems and beyond. There are additional policies that specifically relate to recently arrived students regarding access to schooling, language learning support and access to additional supports and resources. This constellation of educational and settlement policies results in a complex landscape for schools and forcibly displaced students particularly those who arrive in their mid- to late teens.

This presentation focuses on people aged 16-21 who have not been granted permission to stay in the host country indefinitely. In Australia they are those on temporary protection, bridging and Safe Haven Enterprise (SHEV) visas, commonly referred to as ‘asylum seekers’ despite their recognition in international law as refugees (Refugee Council of Australia 2020). In the UK they are those who are seeking refugee status but who for different reasons do not have ‘leave to remain’ (https://www.gov.uk/settlement-refugee-or-humanitarian-protection). In Sweden, they are those seeking asylum whose right to education, assistance and accommodation changes at 18. We describe this group of young people as inbetweeners. These young people aged 16-21 who are still awaiting decisions on whether they can stay permanently in the countries they are living across the three national jurisdictions repeatedly fall through policy and service gaps, literally and figuratively falling through gaps in between.

To understand how these students are positioned by the constellation of policies and practices operating on them, we draw together two conceptual ideas. Firstly, the ‘grammar of schooling’ (Tyack & Tobin 1994) which is understood as ‘the regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction…for example, standardized organization practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into “subjects”’ (ibid, p 454). These aspects of schooling are ‘typically taken for granted as just the way schools are’ (ibid, p 454). We identify a range of ‘grammars of schooling’ that are operating to marginalise or exclude inbetween students from schooling, including age-graded classrooms, time progression through school and language use and expectations within schools. We argue that the grammars of schooling are utilised as a tool in the governing of migration control. To augment this,we mobilise the concept of ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018) through which ‘colonial legacies of the construction of the racialized Other are reactivated and wrapped in a racist vocabulary, drawing on a racist imaginary combined with new forms of governing the racialized Other through migration control’ (ibid, pp. 17-18). We argue that through the ‘grammar of schooling’ the structures of schooling which have become internalised and assumed as unchangeable, inbetween students are pushed out, with further implications for migration and settlement outcomes.

In recent years we have been witnessing an unprecedented scale of forced migration, with 89,3 million forcibly displaced people (UNHCR, 2022) of whom almost half were children under the age of 18. However, this group remains overlooked, with pleads by scholars (Suarez-Orozco, 2019) for children to be placed more centrally in the research and policy fields. The present paper will report on a British Academy funded project (2022-2023) that ethnographically documented the lived experiences of Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking children (UASC) in a major host, yet under-researched Southern European country, Greece.

The study aims at shedding light into forced migration through unaccompanied asylum-seeking children’s (UASC) narratives of their lived experiences in Greece. The study’s key objective is to explore unaccompanied minors’ negotiations of agency and structure in their accounts of post-migration experiences.More specifically, it examines their encounters with the host society, their access (or lack thereof) to education and social and health care; their educational and professional aspirations and plans, and how these are affected by their experiences and responses to open-ended waiting.

The paper seeks to contribute to the growing field of refugee education. As other studies have found, refugee children tend to have interrupted learning trajectories, with irregular patterns of educational participation, often both in the country of origin and in the countries of transit and asylum. According to Dryden-Peterson (2016) key to conceptualising refugee education at global, European and national levels, are the conditions of conflict, the types of schools that are available to refugee children (camp-based schools or mainstream) to attend and the rates of access (Dryden-Peterson, 2016). In an attempt to expand this conceptualisation, it will be argued that the impact of the uncertain legal status is also very important, albeit under-researched (see for a notable exception Homuth et al 2020). The state-induced legal liminality and prolonged temporariness provide the backdrop of UASC’s lives, having an impact of their mental health (Giannopoulou et al 2022) and directly or indirectly on their engagement with the educational process.

Over the last few decades an increasing number of countries in the Global North have introduced so called Civic Integration programmes, often referred to as ‘the Civic Turn’ (Joppke, 2007; 2017). These are a form of educational provision that aims to through teaching integrate migrants into what is presented as the country of arrival’s ‘culture’, ‘values’, and laws (Jensen et al, 2017). As such, it is expected that those who take part will internalise a loyalty towards ‘democratic and liberal values’ (Mouritsen et al. 2019). The programmes vary in form, but do not seem to have an observable effect on neither social nor economic integration (Wallace Goodman & Wright, 2015). Therefore, it may rather be understood as a form migration governance (Mouritsen et al. 2019). In Sweden this form of education has been conducted since 2010 (SFS 2010: 1138), and currently involves 100 hours of teaching, and is referred to as Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants. It is offered in migrants’ ‘mother tongues’, and according to policy documents, should be based on dialogue and respect (SFS 2010:1138). Previous research on this has shown that the classes seem to be working to discipline the participants (Abdulla & Risenfors, 2014), in order to change the participants’ views and behaviours (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017; Milani et al. 2021). This is in tension with the expressed aim of Civic Orientation to give participants “ability to shape not only their own lives, but to also take part in the shaping of Swedish society” (SOU 2010:16: 14). However, as argued elsewhere in the Swedish context: “adult education (as education in general) becomes a site for the normalization of students, aiming at adapting individuals into what is deemed desirable in terms of how a citizen should be and act” (Fejes et al. 2018). In a diverse setting such as Civic Orientation, this tension is evermore palpable.

In line with the ‘social justice turn’ in the social sciences and humanities, in this paper we investigate inclusion and participation in the context of classes in civic orientation for adult migrants in Sweden. Theoretically, we draw upon the work of American political philosopher Nancy Fraser, who famously argued that “justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers” (Fraser 1998: 5). Analytically, this means investigating “whether institutionalized patterns of interpretation and valuation impede parity of participation in social life” (Fraser 1998: 4). We apply Fraser’s theoretical ideas to an analysis of interviews with “key actors” involved in civic orientation, ethnographic data collected in 6 civic orientation classes (3 in English and 3 in Arabic) in three large Swedish municipalities, as well as focus group interviews with former participants. More specifically, we illustrate a tension between a genuine commitment on the part of the Swedish state to create multilingual and multicultural spaces for dialogue and reflection about Swedish society, on the one hand, and problematic monolithic views about how migrants are expected to behave in order to ‘fit in’, on the other. Ultimately the question is: on whose terms are migrants expected to integrate and participate in Swedish society?

Educational institutions such as schools and Early Childhood Education and Care-institutions are important meeting places for children, families, and adults from different backgrounds. Yet, the parents are the children's most important caregivers. Parents are also the schools´ most significant partners in the work to ensure children's education and development. The home-school relationship is considered important by educators, teachers, parents, and researchers. Parents' involvement is one of the most important predictors not only for academic achievement but also for the whole child's development. Thus, parental involvement has become the center of attention of teachers, researchers, and policymakers. Earlier research points out that it is difficult to establish a good home-school relationship, particularly in schools serving newly arrived immigrant children (Lea, 2012; Sibley and Brabeck, 2017). In the face of the constantly increasing number of immigrant children, newcomer parents’ perceptions and experiences are exceptionally important to take into account for a successful and holistic education of immigrant children. Newcomer parents want their children to become well-educated as they see education as a way to a successful life in a new society (Lea, 2012; Sibley and Brabeck, 2017; Norozi, 2022). Newly arrived immigrant parents grapple with challenges related to a new language, and culture, and adjusting to a new and different lifestyle and society. It appears that newcomer parents are dubious about the values in the schools, especially regarding religion as part of their identity and culture (Barry, 2001; Vogt, 2016; Spernes, 2018). Newly arrived immigrant parents´ perceptions and experiences of collaboration with schools are under-researched in the Norwegian context. This study aims to get insights into newcomer parents’ perceptions and experiences of collaboration with schools in the Norwegian context. Thus, the two guiding questions are: How do newly arrived immigrant parents perceive and experience collaborating with schools in the Norwegian context? And what kind of support and challenges do newly arrived immigrant parents face in their involvement in children´s education? The theoretical framework is based on theories on inclusive education; Biesta (2011) states that inclusion is a central – if not the most important – value in democracy. On another level, we address how newcomer parents, and school staff, apply different strategies to develop a relationship with each other (Ericsson & Larsen, 2000; Sand, 2020; Essahli Vik, 2022). The relationship between parents and schools is dependent on many factors. For example, how parents are invited and involved in their children's schooling. Yet, it is significant to understand how both parents and staff's strategies affect the relationship between the school and the newcomer parents.

This paper concerns children and families in Sweden whose application for asylum has been rejected but who are not eligible for deportation, and who remain in the country for an indefinite time with formal status neither as asylum-seekers, refugees, irregular or residents. In the international literature this group is sometimes referred to as Non removed rejected asylum seekers (NRAS), a term that will used hence forward (Atac, 2019). While there is a body of important critical research on refugee children’s political rights, agency (or lack thereof) and vulnerabilities in regard to/produced by Swedish asylum politics (c.f. Josefsson, 2017; Karlsson, 2019; Wahlström Smith, 2021; Lind, 2019; Lundberg, 2020), an initial review of literature showed that NRAS, and particularly children in families, is a group that has received little attention in migration-research, both in a European and a Swedish context. The latter was noted also by experts that we talked with at the Swedish Migration Agency (SMA) and DELMI (the Delegation for Migration studies). Rejected asylum seekers are however often targeted in the migration-critical political discourse of the new right wing coalition that came into power in Sweden in October 2022, supported by a far right radical ethno-nationalist party (cf. Rothstein, 2023). Recent policy propositions include that rejected asylum-seekers should be detained and closely surveilled until deportation. In this context, investigating how deportability affect NRAS children is urgent from the perspective of children’s human rights as declared in the UN Child Rights Convention (CRC), which was made Swedish law 2020-01-01. As children’s rights and agency are tightly connected to the situation of the family and to parents’ capacities to see to their needs, and as for NRAS parents these capacities are constrained by extreme legal and economic vulnerability (Samzelius, 2023), the study will also highlight parenthood and family-life in the context of deportability.

Research questions

• What is known about NRAS children in Sweden and their situation
  • through statistics from the Migration Agency, e.g. their age, country of origin, time in Sweden, household, housing?
  • by experts in authorities (e.g. Migration Agency) and civil society know about the situation of NRRA children and their families?
  • through research (also international research and NRAS children generally)
  • How are childhood and parenthood enacted in the context of deportability for NRAS families in Sweden, and how do children and parents understand and cope with deportability, as a part of their every day-lives?
  • How does deportability affect NRAS children’s agency and rights directly, as well as indirectly through the parents’ positions as NRAS?

Objective

The objective of the study is to highlight the situation of NRAS children in Sweden, and how deportability affects their everyday lives, rights and agency, both directly in regard to e.g. education, well-being and relations, and indirectly, through their parents’ positions as NRAS. We thus want to contribute to the critical discussion of asylum-politics and their effects on children in regard to CRC and social justice from the perspective of NRAS, but also to sensitizing institutional practice to children’s and parents’ perspectives on their situation and needs in their position as NRAS.

Theoretical and conceptual framework

The study will combine theories and concepts from different fields, mainly from sociology of childhood and migration studies, but also policy studies may be relevant as part of the theoretical framework. Central concepts include agency, children’s rights, lived rights, deportability, migration regimes and vulnerabilities.

Broken relationships – a story of a boy who has lived in Norway for 7 years without residence permit.

In a narrative research project, I have followed a family who came to Norway as refugees in 2015. The family of four have two children who has been attending school since they arrived in Norway. Kalib, the oldest son, was 9 years old when he came to Norway. After a few months he started in 3rd grade. In the school year 2021/22, Kalib was in 9th grade in a new place, still without a residence permit. It was the 7th school he started at since 2015. He has moved school in the middle of the year 4 times, because the receptions center has been closed. Kalib has difficulty keeping up with school, struggles academically, and has challenges making new friends.

The paper will present a positioning analysis of the narratives. That means that the analysis seeks to look after connections between the narrator, the social context in which the activity is made, and relevant aspects of the master narrative, the wider social world.

The narrative activity can be analyzed in three different levels. The position level 1 focuses on the what in the story, how the characters are positioned to one another. The position level 2 focuses on the how in the story, the interactions between the actors int the actual situation of interactions. How do the storyteller position themselves to the audience, and how does the storyteller address the question “Who are you?”. The position level 3 focuses on how the storyteller position themselves to a wider discourse, to social and cultural processes in the situation of interactions

By analysing this family’s stories by using positioning analysis, I will seek to understand Kalib and his families’ possibilities and rights in Norway. This can give us important information about refugee children without residence permit rights in Norway. What impact can it have on a young boy’s life situation with all this changes in his life, with all those broken relationships?

This paper reports on the findings from an evaluation study conducted in Greece in 2022. The focus of the evaluation was the project Schools for All which aims to assist the educational inclusion of Newly Arrived Migrant and Refugee Students (NAMRS) in Greek schools. Conceptually, the project’s approach to inclusion is based on the close association of inclusive to democratic education. This approach attributes great significance to students’ active participation, avoids targeting specific groups of students who are to be ‘included’ (migrant and refugee students in this case) and involves the total of the school community in the process of inclusion (Slee & Allan, 2001; Slee, 2010; Meziou, 2016; Kricke & Neubert, 2020). Methodologically, the project is based on the training of school staff in the development and implementation for inclusive education action plans which engage the whole school community and promote a whole—school approach to inclusion (Due, 2021).

The Greek schools which provide the context for this project operate within a heavily centralised system in which the Ministry of Education has the control of the curriculum, of the appointment of staff and it dictates to a large extent the school policies (Theotokatou, 2022). In terms of the educational provision to NAMRS, the Ministry of Education appoints teachers in temporary contracts to those schools that have sufficient number of NAMRS. These teachers staff reception classes which operate alongside the mainstream ones and follow a two-zone model of educational provision. The objective of classes in the first zone is the teaching of Greek language at basic level while the second zone is open to students who already have basic skills in Greek language. Students studying in reception classes attend some school subjects in mainstream classes, regardless of their skills in Greek language. This is particularly the case for the second-zone students who are usually registered by the schools to attend all mainstream classes that do not clash with the reception classes timetable.

Reports have already highlighted that two key issues in educational inclusion of refugee students globally are their access to National education systems (UNHCR, 2022) and the quality of provision by trained staff (Thomas, 2017). Both issues are particularly relevant in the case of migrant and refugee students in Greece, a country which has been at the forefront of the refugee crisis and the educational system of which is not easily adaptable to new realities and new challenges, (Kazamias and Roussakis, 2003). Moreover, its ethnocentric curriculum (Kakos and Palaiologou, 2014) and the lack of relevant a quality teacher training programmes (Sotiropoulou and Polymenakou, 2022) pose further challenges in the efforts to develop effective educational interventions for educational inclusion of NAMRS.

Schools participating in the programme Schools for All had responded to a relevant call by the programme team. Their selection was based on the number of NAMRS registered and on the training needs of the teaching staff as identified by the school management team. A team comprised by a member of staff (usually a teacher of NAMRS receptions classes) and a member of the management team was responsible for the development and for the coordination of implementation of an Educational Action Plan aiming to support the educational inclusion of NAMRS. In a small number of schools, the coordinating team included also a parent. The attempt by some schools to recruit students’ representatives (members of students’ councils and NAMRS) was unsuccessful.

Due to the war in Ukraine, societies and school systems across Europe witnessed a sudden and large influx of refugee families in 2022 from March onwards. On a European level the situation gave rise to an unseen shared willingness to help and find common European solutions on this new ‘refugee crisis’. Denmark was no exception in this regard and special legislation was put in place to ensure the best opportunities possible for welcoming and accommodating the Ukrainian refugees, and, as a very concrete and visible sign of the solidarity, Ukrainian flags were soon to flow from official buildings.

This paper present preliminary findings from an exploratory case study on a reception class for Ukrainian children in a Danish school. Particularly, the paper discusses, critically, the pedagogies of nation, which occurred in the reception class. The discussion rests on the assumption that reception classes can be considered arenas saturated in pedagogies of nation, given that enrolling newcomers into the national cultural of the receiving society is part of the raison d'être of reception classes.

The paper adopts Zsuzsa Milleis notion of pedagogy of nation, which is an educational form of everyday nationalism that ‘recounts the continuity of the everyday re/production of national frameworks through countless situated activities’ (Millei 2019: 84). In educational research, nationalism in schools can be approached in a top-down perspective, where focus is on how learning about the nation and nationalism occur in the official and taught curriculum, and in a bottom-up perspective, where focus is how the nation and nationalism is impeded in everyday practices in formal and informal settings in the school (Mavroudi and Holt 2015). Focus is both on pedagogies of nation where the Danish nation or the Ukrainian nation occur in formal teacher initiated teaching activities and teaching materials and in the everyday practices in the reception classes among the children and teachers.

Using reception classes for Ukrainian children and youth as a case, the paper considers reception classes as an arena, where national sentiments and narratives are being (re)enforced and negotiated in high degree. When perceiving reception classes in a critical pedagogical perspective (McLaren 2017), the discussion rests on the presumption that reception classes are places where categorization revolving the nation prevail at the expense of other identity categories such as gender, class, religion etc., offering to children and youth a restricted site of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006) with less opportunities for positive identification and a delimited set of social locations available.

Thus, the paper addresses the following research questions:

1. How are ‘Denmark’ and ‘Ukraine’ discursively constructed in formal teaching activities and everyday practices in the reception classes?
2. What characterizes the pedagogies of nation in the reception classes?
3. What narratives of identification and positionality (Anthias 2002) are offered in the reception classes, understood as an arena for the pedagogies of nation?

Internationally, the global movement of people resulting from conflict, climate crises and political upheaval continues to be ongoing issue. Education plays an important role in the successful settlement and lifelong outcomes of young people who are displaced and become refugees or have refugee-like experience. Because of this, research into young people from refugee backgrounds in education systems tends to focus on examples of ‘good practice’ in terms of how these young people experience education. Research on ‘good practice’ for educating students from refugee backgrounds has tended to focus on three specific approaches, namely welcoming and non-racist environments, support of students in terms of psychosocial needs and trauma, and English language acquisition (Rutter 2006; Sidhu et al., 2011). Much research on ‘good practice’ in schools promotes homogenising discourses which fail to account for how refugee background young people come to school with a range of experiences pre-and-post-migration. In addition, examples of ‘good practice’ in refugee education commonly fail to consider how schools engage in particular practices in very different contexts. This paper contributes to the study of refugee education by drawing attention to the ways that school contexts influence how schools enact ‘good practice’ in differing ways.

Researchers in a range of fields have been increasingly focused on the importance of context in understanding people’s lives (Bolling et al., 2018; Bösch & Su, 2021; Gu & Johansson, 2013; Harris & Jones, 2018; Rendón, 2014; Thrupp & Lupton, 2006). In this paper, we explore how contextual factors affect how schools respond to the needs of students from refugee backgrounds. By contextual factors we mean, in the broadest sense, school characteristics (e.g., school type, ethos, history, size, complexity, staffing profile, curriculum), and student characteristics (e.g., race, class, gender, wealth, language, sexual orientation, ability, geographic mobility) (Gu & Johansson, 2013). In particular, we are interested in how school leaders recognise and respond to the different contextual influences that shape their responses to the educational needs of these students. Our central argument is that current research on ‘good practice’ in refugee education does not give due consideration to the role of school contexts, and in turn the development of policy and funding relating to refugee education also does not consider the importance of school contexts.

An analytical framework to consider school context was developed by Braun et al., (2011) to identify the contextual factors which influence policy enactment. Described as an heuristic device, the intention of their framework is to reveal how the “rational, organisational, political, symbolic and normative are messily intertwined in ‘policy work’ in schools” (Braun et al., 2011, p. 587). As Slee et al., (1998) and Sellar and Lingard (2014) highlight, the ‘bracketing out’ of contexts and school performance reveals flaws in policy analyses which neglect the objective features of school contexts – for example, analyses of school organisation and pedagogy which ignore material contexts. Braun et al.’s framework considers context in terms of objective and subjective resources across four overlapping and interweaving contextual dimensions (Braun et al., 2011, p. 588):

• Situated contexts (such as locale, school histories, intakes and settings).
• Professional contexts (such as values, teacher commitments and experiences, and ‘policy management’ in schools).
• Material contexts (e.g. staffing, budget, buildings, technology and infrastructure).
• External contexts (e.g. degree and quality of local authority support, pressures and expectations from broader policy context, such as Ofsted ratings, league table positions, legal requirements and responsibilities).

Our analysis illustrates the ways that situated, professional and material contexts, in particular, shape the ways schools seek to address the educational needs of students from refugee backgrounds.

While mobility and migration is praised as part of successful EU-integration, the migration of human beings that are not EU-citizens are met with restrictive policies and vast reservations (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019). Within the national welfare states, asylum seekers and refugees are increasingly promoted only as assets for the host states, who invests in refugees’ human capital to stimulate growth and employment in industries and occupations in demand of labour power. Welfare workers in Denmark, such as social workers, social educators, nurses and schoolteachers, have since the 1970’s engaged in stimulating the refugee with reference to the welfare state’s social-liberal norms concerning self-sufficiency and the achievement of life quality, aiming to integrate and form the refugee within the existing capitalistic welfare society (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022b, 100–127). Recently, Heba Gowayed, has constructed a theory of state-structured human capital (2022, 4) to study how Syrian refugees’ human capital “is augmented, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation polices” in the US, Canada and Germany. But while Gowayed focuses on how different national policies either recognises and/or invests in one group of newcomers across three states, I will focus on how municipal integration workers have sought to transform and potentialize refugees in local communities and its different economies.

Integration work is predominantly about helping the refugees to become self-supporting, useful to society and independent of the municipality, and different policies, strategies and action plans are launched to make that happen. In this paper, I investigate how municipal integration workers engage with refugees in the name of integration and mandated by a range of policies within employment, social work, social education, schooling, youth activities, etc. I consider integration work as educational work with the intent of forming refugees as integrated citizens within the welfare nation state. The purpose of the paper is to gain knowledge about how the persons labelled as refugees are casted between refugeedom and being human in the host society (Gatrell 2016; Mandić 2022; Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022a).

The theoretical framework is based on refugee studies as well as anthropological history and post-migrant and post-human perspectives. From refugee studies, I recruit concepts of labelling and categorising practices which have proven fruitful to uncover how modes of ordering the refugee are complex and shifting and related to the institutions (e.g., NGOs, or governments) regulating the realities of the refugees in a space of legal, bureaucratic and social categories (Zetter 2007; Janmyr and Mourad 2018). From anthropological history, I borrow Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of interior frontiers to illuminate how the incorporation processes that the refugee go through takes place within interior frontiers (re)establishing social relations of inequality: subordination and superordination, insiders and outsiders, in evaluative and affective spaces through multiple attributes and sensibilities (Stoler 2022). Finally, I also include post-migrant and post-human perspectives from cultural studies and educational studies to challenge the hierarchical relations between insiders and outsiders to the Western nation state. Post-migrant perspectives seek to transcend the logic of a “migrantology” accounting for refugees and migrants perspectives and emphasise a post-migrant condition (Römhild 2017), while post-human perspectives also challenges the internal borders of what it means to be human by including epistemic disobedience to the category of the human and humanity (McKittrick 2015; Wynter 2003), and to Western Man and its foundation on “European colonisation, racialisation, and the dehumanisation of native and African peoples” (Zembylas 2022, 336).

The research question underpinning this paper is: How is the refugee potentialized within local communities’ integration practices, and how is the human casted within this affectively charged political rationality?

Current movements of forced migration to the European Union resulting from global crises and conflicts, e.g. the war in Ukraine, pose major challenges to schools in many European countries: As cross-border educational trajectories irritate the (still) primarily nation-state oriented school systems, students moving between school systems are likely to experience exclusion and marginalization (Massumi 2019). This applies in particular to students who have experienced forced migration (Schroeder/Seukwa 2018; Subasi Singh/Jovanović/Proyer 2023; Thoma/Langer 2022).

Although in Germany, as in other European countries, the presence of refugee students in the education system is not a new phenomenon, the presence of newly arrived children from war zones such as Syria and Afghanistan in the 2015/16 school year was predominantly met in the mode of “chronic surprise” (Castro Varela/Mecheril 2010: 37) in the education system.

With regard to current forced migration movements from Ukraine, practices, policies and administrative measures taken by EU member states to ensure inclusion and educational participation of children and youth differ to some extent from those in response to other and former forced migrations (European Commission 2022a, b). In Germany, as in other EU states, new measures include efforts to reduce bureaucratic obstacles for recruiting Ukrainian teachers, as well as providing opportunities for cross-border digital distance learning based on the Ukrainian curriculum (KMK 2022). Due to EU-regulations, residence status and mobility rules are also less restrictive for (most) refugees from Ukraine than for people from other non-EU Member States seeking refuge in the EU (Council Implementing Decision 2022).

These developments suggest that new natio-ethno-cultural demarcations are emerging in the context of the new forced migration from Ukraine to the EU, which may be linked with different opportunities and risks of educational participation for students, depending on their country of origin and (forced) migration history. Against this backdrop, we examine how schools in Germany currently respond to forced migration and which (new) forms of inclusion and exclusion are associated with this.

In our paper, we draw on preliminary results of our ongoing qualitative study which is currently carried out in ten secondary schools in two German federal states (Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt). The study examines the approaches taken in these schools to accompany and support the educational trajectories of refugee children, against the backdrop of current political frameworks and state regulations. Moreover, it explores how (current and former) refugee movements are negotiated in schools, which practices of othering and differentiation become visible, and how education professionals reflect on diversified forms of schooling and different educational opportunities for refugee students.

In our paper, we present first findings from the analyses of guided qualitative interviews with school principals, teachers and social workers, focusing on the question of how secondary schools in Germany respond to current forced migration in the context of educational policies, and which (new) distinctions and inequalities emerge in this context.

Following on from existing studies that have revealed various structures and practices of institutionalized discrimination along various natio-ethno-cultural demarcations in schools, resulting from institutional routines, unquestioned expectations of normality, and professional cultural knowledge (e.g. Steinbach 2015), we aim to identify (old and new) patterns of differential participation and exclusion of students and associated natio-ethno-cultural demarcations in the context of forced migration. Moreover, we aim to highlight changes in school practice that have taken place since the refugee movements to Germany in 2015/16, as well as learning processes on the side of education professionals in schools, with regard to supporting educational transitions of (diverse) refugee students.

Northern Ireland has a deeply divided education system with demarcation most notable along ethno/religious and social class lines. The former is largely attributable to the historical organization of the schools estate based on religion, and the latter is associated with a system of academic selection that filters children into Grammar and non-selective post-primary schools according to their performance in tests taken during the final year of primary school. Academic selection, and the grammar school system that underpins it, has come under some considerable scrutiny, with much of the research evidence pointing to a negative relationship between the selective system and equality of opportunity in education. The suitability of this system in a transitioning society that has become more ethnically diverse in post conflict years has, however, received less attention. Drawing on social cohesion theory, we reflect on the grammar school system to argue that the cross-community class interests animating it not only perpetuate inequalities within respective communities but may also present a significant barrier to peacebuilding efforts in education, and ultimately impede progress towards a more socially cohesive society.

The paper will present and discuss findings from an interdisciplinary research project “Ukrainian children in Danish schools” exploring how the reception of the Ukrainian refugee children in Denmark takes place in a unique historical context characterized by immense media interest and public and political support. In Denmark, a new special legislation furthermore has created completely new conditions for reception of refugee students in elementary school. Hence, it is underlined that children from Ukraine should be able to attend Danish schools ‘without renouncing their attachment to Ukrainian language, culture and identity’ (Børne- og Undervisningsministeriet, 2022) which contrasts with the usual monoculturally and monolingually oriented Danish policy on reception classes.

Theoretically informed by the concept of postmigration, the Ukrainian refugee situation is approached from a broader perspective on the conflicts, ambivalences and negotiations existing in a society characterized by migration as an ongoing condition (Petersen & Schramm, 2017, Foroutan, 2019, Römhild, 2017), which is underlined by focusing on children’s multilingual and transnational everyday practices and how those are handled by welfare professionals.

The main empirical material made the subject of analysis are field notes from a single day of observation in a Danish reception class for children from Ukraine. The reception class can be seen as an organized cultural encounter (Galal & Hvenegård-Lassen, 2020) between the Ukrainian children and the Danish school. The cultural encounter appears exceptional, as the children are placed in the reception class and not in general classes at the school. Reception classes offering "basic education" in Danish for newly arrived children, spending up to two years there until they are deemed ready to mainstream classes, is a well-known phenomenon in Denmark. But this reception class differs from others in that it is exclusively for children from Ukraine, which makes the school’s efforts for facilitating the cultural encounter more visible in terms of promoting national cultures.

Drawing on theoretical approaches from the post-migrant paradigm (Foroutan, 2019, Römhild 2017, Vitting-Seerup, 2017, Petersen & Schramm, 2017), the paper argues that by moving the focus from the ‘migrant minority’ in the cultural encounter to its inherent power dynamics new insights will be produced. Hence, the object of analysis in the post-migrant perspective is not migrants and how they can be ‘integrated’ (Rytter, 2019) as in a ‘migrantology’ approach (Römhild, 2017) but rather the organised cultural encounter’s inherent negotiations about normality. It will therefore center the majority position as the focus of the analytical attention and explore how this position, represented by the Danish school and its professionals, sets standards for what is normal and problematic.

The paper will present three analysis excerpts, focusing on (a) negotiations on educational technologies such as school-parent cooperation and homework, (b) negotiations on linguistic expressions and repertories in the classroom (mainly Ukrainian, Russian, Danish and English) and (c) cultural expressions of national symbols and youth culture mainly related to music. In the analysis, these observations will be related to considerations on how the educational problematisations of newly arrived children as not-yet-ready for mainstream classes can be de-migrantised (Foroutan, 2019) and related to broader societal and structural power conflicts on, among others, national identities, gender, class and race. Thus, the paper aims at answering the research question: How can barriers and opportunities for newly arrived Ukrainian students' education in the Danish school system be explored through a postmigration perspective?

The number of immigrant background students in the Spanish educational system, as in other European countries, has undergone significant growth in the last three decades, modifying the demographics of students present in schools. According to the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional, 2020) the students of foreign origin in Primary Education account for 40.90% and 11.58% of the total school population. The above is more evident in public schools with 12.0 % of immigrant students in the Community of Andalusia (context of the study), reaching up to 15.5 % in the province of Almería. Moreover, 95.6% of immigrant background students are enrolled in public schools.

The study of educational trajectories is a crucial issue both for the future of immigrant background students and for society in general, since their success to some extent, can be the precursor of social inclusion (Cutmore, 2018). Literature shows that most of the scientific evidence has developed models that tends to blame students who do not manage to go through their basic schooling in the time and form established by the educational system (Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2017). However, there is not much evidence on the educational trajectory that immigrant background students go through once they entered the system, there is thus very little data about the critical moments in which their educational trajectory is broken or the variables that affect their paths. Without such information it will be impossible to implement programs that help achieve the success of these students when the learning of immigrant background students will be affected in part by how well schools understand the cultures and unique experiences of these students.

Against this backdrop, the study has a double purpose: to analyse the educational trajectories of immigrant background students and to determine to what ex­tent some sociodemographic variables (gender, origin, length of stay in Spain or home language) affect these careers. The sample was constituted by 172 students (52.3 % female, 47.6 % male) aged be­tween 6 and 16 years (M= 12.6; SD = .79). Four aspects were analysed: 1) the mobility of the schools through which these students navigated, 2) the grade in which they have been enrolled and its relationship with chronological age, 3) the repetition rate, and 4) the graduation rate or the higher educational level they achieved in their schooling (Paris & Alim, 2017).

With this work we are interested in documenting this gap in the scientific literature by exploring which sorts of variables enhance students’ successful schooling of immigrant background students and gaining more insight in the extent to successfully navigate the Spanish educational system. Such information might have broad practical implications for policymakers and teachers involved in supporting the effectiveness of programs among students in vulnerable conditions.

The findings confirmed that participants seemed to have followed very complex, diverse routes through Spanish education although there are differences in terms of gender and mother tongue. Women in the sample exhibit trajectories more in line with the traditional paths, since their repetition rate is lower. Whereas the school mobility is particularly high in the case of students with a language different from the school’s vehicular language. In a previous study (Rodríguez-Izquierdo y Darmody, 2019; Rodríguez-Izquierdo, 2018) it was noted that the linguistic competence report is not always available at the time of incorporation at the new school so that the start of linguistic support is delayed or interrupted. This high mobility of schools does not facilitate neither the follow-up that would especially be beneficial for these students nor the inherently complicated socialization process in adolescence (Rodríguez-Izquierdo, González-Falcón and Goenechea, 2020).

School leaders have a responsibility to work against racism. However, research indicates that there is a lack of both knowledge about and interest in racism among school leaders (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019; Miller, 2021). Even where social justice is said to be a priority, work against racism seems to meet challenges of being truly included in this notion (Gorski, 2019).

In this paper, I present a study that explores educational leadership and racism through the perspectives of Norwegian principals. Norway is an interesting case to study in this context, as school leaders have a long history of social justice engagement through deeply rooted policies of inclusion that marks the Norwegian social democracy. However, "race" and racism have not been seen as a relevant focus in the schools' work for social justice – despite the fact that Norway has five national minorities and almost 20% of the population is "immigrant". In recent years, the focus on racism in society has grown and shifted towards more openness to the experiences of minorities (Døving, 2022). At the same time, anti-immigration and far-right politics that uphold different kinds of nationalism also play a role in the Norwegian society. All of this affects the work that goes on in schools. Hence, it is important to broaden our understanding about what principals do to counteract racism in their local school context.

The aim of the study is to provide a deeper understanding into how principals counteract racism. I draw on the practices of 15 principals in the Norwegian primary and secondary governmental school system, who, in different ways, work to counteract racism. The following research questions have been asked: (1)What manifestations of racism do they target, and (2) what anti-racism actions do they focus on?

In order to understand the variety of the principals’ perceptions of manifestations of racism and strategies used in work against racism, I build on a wide understanding of the concept: racism is understood as exclusionary or discriminatory practices based in a variable of shifting assumptions, logics and ideational constructs that manifest on individual, social and structural levels (Balibar 1991; Goldberg 2015). In the analysis I use theories of anti-oppressive education (Kumashiro, 2000) and theoretical frameworks of denial of racism (Goldberg, 2015; Van Djik, 1992). I also build on existing litterature on racism and school leadership to discuss the results.

Exiting research continues to emphasise the importance of diversity in the curriculum for students of colour (Chetty, 2014; Harris and Reynolds, 2014), but also for the benefit of all students in developing a critical understanding of history, political and social life (Diversi and Moreira, 2013). Diversity in the school curriculum is noted not just for the benefits of self-actualisation and agency of minoritized ethnic students, but to also challenge stereotypes, foster more critical perspectives and redistribute power (Bishop, 1990; Borowski, 2012). However, traditional multicultural approaches to diversity in the curriculum can fall back on an understanding that connects diversity as something principally connected to ‘visible’ minorities and the performative celebration of ‘others’, as opposed to a deeper pursuit of developing critical knowledge and anti-racist practice (Troyna, 1987, Maylor, 2010). Such approaches to ‘diversity’ in curriculum practice, may reinscribe stereotypes and perceptions of cultural ‘difference’ in which minorities are presented as ‘fixed’ or group entities (Amanti, 2005). While the celebrating may be well-intentioned and at least recognise the cultural diversity of students, often these forms of practice become the default, as they do not threaten whiteness (Warmington, 2020). The effect of this, leads to the reproduction of white supremacy, which compromises more transformative modes of learning and teaching (Lander, 2014). Instead, a sharper lens needs to be held-up to knowledge and pedagogical practices that are valued in the mainstream school curriculums.

In light of these issues, the aim of my research was to explore what spaces exist in the curriculum for interventions that can incorporate and draw on different sources of knowledge for curricular use (Bernal, 2002; Zipin, 2013). Through this, I hoped to move beyond multicultural recognition and identify how we can redistribute and challenge what we currently value as ‘academic’ knowledge in the curriculum. Furthermore, a key interest guiding this paper, is in understanding how critical social theory on the curriculum can be translated, and applied in schools whilst being responsive to the performative constraints schools and teachers experience.

The Council of the European Union has set a target for countries to limit school dropout to 9% by 2030. To this end, national contexts must promote strategies for educational success linked to a comprehensive whole-school approach with an inclusive vision of education, allowing institutions and staff to innovate. Each member state must transpose this resolution into its educational system. However, in France, the dominance of the principle of meritocracy over the education and training system’s organisation does not favour a move towards greater inclusion (Verdier, 2001). The guidance system in particular reinforces the primacy of this conception: it puts into practice the competition between secondary school pupils, distributing them between more or less elitist tracks according to their academic results. Thus, at the end of middle school, young people with learning difficulties, often from modest backgrounds, tend to be oriented by default into the least attractive training courses. This constitutes a motive for dropping out (Bernard & Michaut, 2016). However, a high school’s climate can retroactively diminish the sense of constraint in orientation, and promote the perseverance of these students, by fostering their sense of belonging and focusing on educational success (Bell, 2021).

This can be difficult to implement in training courses that are in low demand, in which pupils have entered essentially due to poor grades. Staff tends to be caught between injunctions stemming from European resolutions to make educational and pedagogical practices more inclusive; and a meritocratic principle that permeates the French education system, including courses whose students are usually unable to live up to demanding academic expectations. Nevertheless, said practices seem to favour the perseverance of pupils when staff find a compromise between two logics (Derouet & Dutercq, 1997): pursuing performance, based on an industrial logic, while promoting proximity and the personalisation of relationships within the institution, powered by a community logic (Bell, 2019).

Whereas the industrial logic can be materialised by actors’ focus on the closeness or distance of their students’ behaviours and performances in relation to academic expectations, a community logic allows them to take into account the various difficulties faced by certain pupils. This observation is similar to that of Lantheaume & Urbanski (2023): some students in disadvantaged middle schools may ask for religious exemptions while they are in school, in spite of the principle of secularism applied to the French education system, which does not easily grant such exemptions (Levinson, 2002; Joppke, 2017).

In these situations, when staff compromise on the principle of justice to be applied, between absolute respect for the secular rule and maintenance of the bond of trust and closeness with the pupil, their attitude tends to favour behaviour evolution of said pupils towards a stronger suitability for the principle of secularism, therefore fostering their perseverance. This is related to religious but also cultural and ethnical differences which tend to be ignored for the sake of civic equality, but are recognized in specific contexts. Hence it is possible to say that multiculturalism is not as “un-French” as it might seem (Guérard de Latour, 2013). Certainly, in the current context of the 2004 law prohibiting the wearing of ostentatious signs of religious affiliation in schools, and the repeated terrorist attacks of the 2010’s, French society is experiencing tensions with regard to the respect of the principle of secularism in public institutions. Political discourse tends towards a perfectionist republicanism, advocating, in the interest of inclusion, a strict interpretation of this principle and an intransigence towards breaches. The question is whether or not, applied to the school environment, this inflexibility promotes the inclusion of all students and, by extension, their school perseverance.

In the fall of 2020, amidst widespread pandemic closures and ongoing international protests in response to racialized police violence, a public conversation emerged about whether and how teachers ought to teach students about race and racism. The conversation was propelled by a political messaging campaign, which involved the intentionally decontextualized repurposing of the term “critical race theory” (CRT) as a “shock phrase” (Bartolomé & Macedo, 1997, p. 237) with considerable political utility that suggested radical indoctrination by educators. By February of 2021, in a pattern reflecting national trends in political polarization, 36 U.S. states had undertaken legislative efforts or executive actions to “restrict education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics” while 17 states had seen efforts to expand the same; seven states witnessed efforts in both directions (Stout & Wilburn, 2021). In states where restrictive legislation or executive orders were enacted, the chief mechanism for enforcement was the threat of legal action against schools and districts as well as disciplinary action against individual teachers alleged to have taught “divisive concepts.”

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the experiences of five white educators with self-identified commitments to social justice education as they navigate teaching in New Hampshire (NH), a state in the US that at the time of data collection, had recently enacted a law prohibiting the teaching of “divisive concepts.” The paper is guided by two research questions: 1.) How do teachers and administrators in one predominantly white school district describe their work in the context of the recent passage of divisive concepts legislation? 2.) How do these educators see legislation prohibiting the teaching of divisive concepts as shaping their practice and leadership?

Like many teachers, those we include in this analysis cited moral commitments to the well-being of young people and to improving the world for future generations as central reasons for their decision to enter the profession. The strong thread of moral concern that runs through the accounts of the teachers highlighted in this study bears many similarities to the concerns expressed in Santoro’s (2018) study of teachers’ demoralization. We draw on Santoro’s theoretical framework which defines teacher demoralization as a loss of access to the moral rewards of the work. Teachers experience demoralization when they are confronted with moral concerns they cannot resolve or avoid. These fall into two broad categories: concerns relating to harm to students and those relating to the degradation of their profession. First, demoralization may arise from demands that teachers engage in practices they suspect are “developmentally inappropriate, pedagogically ill-advised, or damaging to students’ social-emotional well-being" (Santoro, 2018, p. 62). Second, teachers may become demoralized when conditions in the school and the broader community make them accomplices in processes that degrade the profession of teaching.

While demoralization is primarily an effect of the conditions of teaching and not, as is often suggested about burnout, a consequence of insufficient or systematically depleted internal resources of the teacher, Santoro (2018) argues that teachers may find means with which to prevent or rebound from demoralization. Santoro presents five categories of strategies observed among teachers striving to re-moralize their teaching practice: professional community, voice/writing, activism, teacher leadership, and student-centered action. Together, demoralization and re-moralization situate our understanding of the experiences and actions of the educators in this study. While our study is situated within a US context, it has relevance abroad as schools throughout Europe consider how to teach topics related to race and colonial histories.

The UK currently hosts around 605,130 international higher education students in the 2020/21 academic year, hitting its 600,000 target a decade earlier than hoped (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2022). Of the international students in the UK in 2020/21, almost 25% were recorded as EU students, while the rest of 75% were from non-EU countries.

How are we coping with the growth of international students? To respond to this growing demand and preparing our students as global citizens, what can be done to improve the student experience of both international and home students?

Recent studies indicate that academic and social integration of international students in the destination country often plays a major role in their academic performance, employability outcomes and integration into the wider community (Spencer-Oatey et al, 2017). Alongside the overall strategy to achieve a continual upward trajectory in international student numbers, it is important to build a diverse, culturally rich and engaged community where both international and home students benefit from the presence and integration of international students in the community.

Research has shown that there are cultural differences in teaching and learning of staff and students from a diverse range of ethnicities and nationalities (Montgomery, 2010; Trahar and Hyland, 2011). This paper intends to investigate these issues in depth, aiming to improve understanding of the international students’ academic, well-being and sociocultural adaptation. At the same time, it is also essential not to compromise the needs of home students.

Aims and Objectives:

• Foster cohesion and enhance understanding between international and domestic students
• Consider social, cultural and education impacts of international students on domestic students
• Enhance interaction and integration between international students and host communities
• Implement strategies and activities to promote intercultural integration and intercultural competence
• Improve academic staff’s ability to interact with students from culturally diverse background

Western society values free will, equal chances, and self-expression, especially when there is economic prosperity [1]. Choice is essential to free will, but more choices make a decision more substantial, leading to more risk, and more responsibility. This makes choosing a study field a big step in someone’s identity development. It is part of who they will become and how other people will see them [2].

When people have the freedom to pursue their dreams, they conform more easily to gender stereotypes in their study choices. They search for a sense of belonging, by following their gender identity [1]. A society where academic fields come with stereotypes of who belongs and who does not, impacts someone’s choice according to their gender or background. Looking at engineering for example, white males dominate the field [3]. This can influence the feeling of belonging to engineering for someone that does not identify as white or male. It is likely that they will choose a different study field, or have more difficulties with persisting once entered [4].

The sense of belonging is defined as ‘one’s personal belief that one is an accepted member of an academic community whose presence and contributions are valued’ [5, p. 701]. Having a strong sense of belonging is related to higher motivation, more academic self-confidence, higher engagement, and higher achievement [5]. When someone does not see themselves represented in a study domain, or do not conform to the stereotypical image that society has of that domain, it decreases the chances of a positive identification with this domain [6]. In some cases, it entails modifying their identity or narrative to fit it. For example, some women described themselves becoming less feminine during their STEM education. Archer et al. [7, p. 23] theorize that this is partially out of a need to be taken seriously in their field of study that has a strong link with masculine traits. When the identity that is needed to belong in the study field diverges too far from the own identity, this can lead to drop out [8].

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the discipline-specific identity is related with the feeling of belonging with the related study programme. The focus is on the field of engineering that is typically dominated by (white) men [3]. For example, of all the new students enrolled in the Bachelor Engineering Technology at the KU Leuven (Belgium), 10% is female, and 8% have a migration background [9].

Looking at Belgium, we see that female students and students with a migration background face different barriers. While intake for students with a migration background is low, they are already underrepresented in secondary education tracks that prepare for engineering programmes in university [10]. After completing these secondary education tracks, they face less hurdles in choosing engineering. Conversely, female students are not underrepresented in secondary education tracks, but do not make their way to engineering [11]. However, once they enter the program, students with a migration background struggle more with persistence than students without a migration background. For female students, we see that they often do better than male students [12], something we do not see in several other university, for example in Germany [13] and the US [14].

Although they face different barriers, both female students and students with a migration background, seem to have difficulties to identify with engineering. This study asks how engineering identity is related with the feeling of belonging for first-year students of engineering programmes, and how this relationship is different according to their gender or migration background.

The topic of this research is the dissemination of cultural capital theory and research from academic communities to school staff. It explores what it means to be a research-informed teacher, most especially with respect to educational inequalities regarding class and cultural background. This is both an empirical study (drawing from interviews with members of school staff), as well as a theoretical one (considering issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science). It explores the following:

(1) what teachers (especially school leaders) mean by ‘cultural capital’ (in particular, how this is revealed in their justifications of school practices);

(2) how the current meaning and use of ‘cultural capital’ in schools relates to Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of social reproduction; and

(3) how the current meaning and use of ‘cultural capital’ in schools relates to the research evidence regarding cultural capital that has accumulated in the last 50 years.

The study has European significance because it raises questions regarding the transfer of theoretical concepts from one national context to another. Academics’ use of the term capital culturel is charted through studies across Northern Europe (Breinholt & Jaeger, 2020; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Jaeger & Breen, 2016; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Sieben & Lechner, 2019). Some political conditions that are exacerbating the challenges of research dissemination in this case are highlighted, but the challenges are not specific to the UK.

In order to compare the viewpoints of practitioners with those of academics, I draw on theoretical frameworks of cultural capital associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990), including the interpretations of John Goldthorpe (2007) and Lareau and Weininger (2003). I also turn to the work of Saul Kripke (1981) and Mark Wilson (2008) to reflect on how the meaning of terms is transmitted between people and to examine the appropriateness of our everyday conceptual frameworks regarding evidence and research dissemination in the field of education.

I will share some of the uses and meaning of ‘cultural capital’ in schools in England and reflect on how these compare with Bourdieu and Passeron’s use of the term capital culturel (1990). The purpose will be to make some suggestions regarding the challenges to using research evidence in practice: the different meaning of terms, the lack of detail in research messaging, the vagueness of research summaries, the requirement (in England) to demonstrate that money spent to reduce educational inequalities is supported by evidence (DfE, 2019). The study raises concerns about the feasibility of usefully transmitting research messages to teachers. I do not propose that teachers are at fault in their use of ‘cultural capital’, but that we need to accommodate the natural ways in which language transfers ideas in our conceptualisations of evidence and research dissemination. I present the findings and hypotheses that resulted from the study in order to ignite further discussion with the audience.

In Australia, Indigenous peoples continue to fight against coloniality, and education remains a crucial theatre in the war for sovereignty and self-determination.  For well over a decade, despite reinvigorated educational and Indigenous social welfare policies, the creation of federal agencies, a national curriculum and a standardised literacy and numeracy assessment program, Indigenous learners remain behind Australian learners (Fahey, 2021). After iterations of exclusionary legislations were repealed at the state levels enabling Indigenous learners to attend white classrooms (Kerwin and Van Issum, 2013), education, and to a greater extent literacy, continued, as Rogers and Mosley (2006, p. 462) notes, “to function as a replacement of property as a means of preserving the rights of citizenship for whites”.  Politically determined intimacies between property rights, rights to become literate and social inclusion, have functioned, as “a set of socio-economic assets available only to those who have been certified as white by major economic, legal, and cultural institutions” (Harris, 1993, p. 1707). The intersection between education, whiteness and property has been discussed for some time by Gloria Ladson-Billings (2003, p. xi), observing, “literacy represents a form of property. It is property that was traditionally owned and used by whites in the society”.   Whiteness then is endowed the privilege to possess education as institutional and psychological entitlement, which from micro-cultural practices within classrooms, excites, so to maintain, racial hierarchies necessary to reify multi-level coloniality projects. Aboriginal scholar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2016, p. 112), ascribes within the context of Australia, “Racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct difference in bodily attributes and to designate them as markers of hierarchical social categorisations within discourse”. 

Health and physical education (HPE) is a discursively white, Western learning space (Flintoff, 2018). Classrooms are managed by practitioners who are mostly white, despite an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-lingual student body (Flintoff and Dowling, 2019). Within HPE, orthodoxy is derived from scientism, heteronormativity and gender disparity (Azzarito and Solomon, 2005), body image, classism, racism, and competitive and elite sports, surreptitiously silences student diversity, and seeds quotidian racism and microaggression in learning encounters (Blackshear and Culp, 2021; Clark, 2019). Despite minor disruptions to orthodoxy through radical scholarship, such as critical whiteness (Matias and Boucher, 2021), queer and anti-racism scholarship (Clark, 2020), and the implementation of curricular devices promoting inclusion and diversity, such as the cross-curriculum priorities in the Australian Curriculum and Yulunga: Indigenous Games (Edwards and Meston, 2007), much work within the discipline remains.   

As curricular encounters occur upon stolen Aboriginal lands and the congealed blood of ongoing racially constructed conflict; unreconciled histories, Indigenous languages, and Indigenous Knowledges (IK) have a fundamental role to play in the continued disruption.  However, IK remains largely invalidated by Western science, as such, distinct languages, protocols, ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies, conflict how non-Indigenous practitioners can approach these complex systems as tools of curriculum and pedagogy.  Given Australian educational institutions are yet to move beyond defensive, racist, assimilationist and authoritarian postures relative to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson, 2016), as the early work of Nakata (2002) reminds, one cannot essentialise the relocation of living, community-familial centric IK, by simply dropping IK into the contested mires of Western institutions.  For advocates to lean into Indigenous cultural tropes as tools of healing and disruption, it is necessary to properly grapple with the terse reality of the historically contingent, socio-political Indigenous present (Moreton-Robinson, 2020).  In this paper, we engage the complexity of invoking IK within the discursive landscapes of Australian educational institutions, and guide educators toward the need for building, progressive, non-linear racial literacy, so to better unlock the disruptive qualities of IK in HPE.  

Quantitative research continues to receive outsized attention in educational research, policy, and practice arenas (Garcia, et al., 2018). This is due, in part, to calls for rigorous large-scale research that has the capacity to make causal claims, and reduce large amounts of numerical data to trends and averages for large samples and subgroups. Further, quantitative research is commonly perceived as “objective,” based on seemingly neutral data that can lead to increased accountability and successful educational reform (Gillborn, et al. 2018).

However, scholars from around the globe have long-critiqued how numbers, categories, codes, and statistical approaches have been used as tools of oppression that perpetuate inequities (e.g., Arrellano, 2022). The decisions that policy makers and researchers make about what data to collect, how to analyze data, and how to interpret and report results are never neutral, as when researchers try to attribute the effects of racism to inherent qualities of particular racial and ethnic groups (Gillborn et al., 2018). Scholars argue that quantitative research has failed to adequately address questions related to diversity, including individuals’ complex and intersectional identities, leading to damaging outcomes for minoritized groups (e.g., Keenan, 2022; Sablan, 2019; Viano & Baker, 2020).

To address these concerns, over the past fifteen years, researchers have developed frameworks for conducting critical and quantitative research in education that explicitly aim to offer nuance on labels and categories, shed light on inequitable opportunities, advance social justice, and disrupt oppressive educational practices (e.g., Gillborn et al., 2018; Viano & Baker, 2020). These frameworks include critical quantitative methods (Stage, 2007); critical race quantitative intersectionality (Covarrubias et al., 2017); and QuantCrit [Quantitative Critical Race Theory] (Gillborn et al., 2018). Along these lines, quantitative researchers have also adapted frameworks traditionally used in qualitative research to better understand the experiences of specific groups or the effects of particular types of categorization, including TribalCrit (Sabzalian et al., 2021), LatCrit (Covarrubias & Lara, 2014), DisCrit (Cruz et al., 2021), and Queer Theory (Curley, 2019). As a result, there is a growing body of research that applies principles and frameworks in critical and quantitative research in education.

In this review of the literature, we synthesize 62 empirical peer-reviewed publications, published between 2008 - 2022, that are framed by critical and quantitative perspectives. Specifically, we apply Banks’s (2006) “characteristics of multicultural (transformative” research,” to analyze the ways in which critical and quantitative frameworks have been operationalized, the methodological decisions that aim to shed light on educational inequities when conducting research on diversity, and the tensions that arise when conducting critical and quantitative research in education. The following questions guide this review:

• How does critical and quantitative research address questions that are of concern to historically marginalized and minoritized groups?

• What methodological decisions do critical and quantitative researchers make as they attempt to describe the experiences, values, and perspectives of marginalized groups in accurate, valid, and sensitive ways?

• What are the intended and unintended consequences of critical and quantitative research in education?

Drawing on Banks’s (2006) questions for multicultural and transformative research, in the full paper, we address tensions that arise at every stage of the research process, from collecting and accessing data, to analyzing and reporting data. Due to space limitations, we describe tensions related to collecting and accessing quantitative data in this proposal, and ways in which researchers used critical and quantitative frameworks to try to address those tensions.

As a group of international scholars with experience in diverse international contexts across both the global south and north, we have become concerned about the increasingly rapid flow and (re)circulation of problematic, summative literacy assessments and international efficiency narratives. Our concerns, in part, are about how these assessments imagine children and their learning. In this presentation, we will examine the implementation of summative literacy assessments and accompanying data–driven instruction in elementary/primary classrooms around the globe. Specifically, we ask epistemological questions about the nature of summative assessment, by analysing examples of summative literacy assessments from across diverse international contexts, to see how those assessments imagine and represent children and childhood. We then turn our attention to formative assessments and explore how formative literacy assessment practices might be utilised to re-envision children and childhood while revealing promising instructional practices that have the potential to support student learning as well.

The circulation of summative literacy assessments across international contexts not only promotes problematic views of children, childhood and learning; but it also privileges Eurocentric, English dominant, colonialising, and narrow notions of literacy education and becoming literate, denying diversity and multiplicity which are two important principles of understanding literacy as a social practice. This we argue, is counter to equitable literacy teaching and learning. Commercial interests, the testing industry, and the commodification of testing, have contributed to the circulation of these assessments, and neoliberal ideologies have contributed to the proliferation of assessment practices across diverse international contexts without any heed paid to local social and cultural literacy understandings.

As scholars who have worked in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States, we have individually and collectively encountered both summative and formative literacy assessment practices. These assessment practices often have global talons originating in other parts of the world and promote policy practices that entail global policy borrowing. Significantly, we are all employed by universities, teach in mid-sized or large urban areas, and engage with communities and schools where the dominant language is English. While each context brings its own set of challenges, policies and resources, we share a commitment to children who have been historically underserved in schools. We are particularly interested in how assessment practices have evolved in our respective systems and countries and how summative literacy assessments position children that schooling has historically failed to serve.

In this presentation, we open with two compelling views of childhood. Both situate children as capable of learning and knowing; however, one places the onus on leading, directing, and controlling children’s learning. The goal from this way of thinking is to measure and evaluate learning in relation to narrow, linear, and pre-determined learning progressions (Apple, 2011; Ball, 2021; Carnoy, 2015; Ravitch, 2013). The other (Gandini, 1993; Montessori, 2013) views learning as idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and stunningly contingent on each child’s vision of the world, particular interests and experiences, and their communities. We briefly review each perspective and reveal critical epistemological differences that operate below the surface of these perspectives as we conceptualise literacy learning for young children.

Our understandings of these theoretical differences led us to consider the international flow of literacy assessments –both summative and formative. Specifically, we ask what circulates, for what purposes, and what do these global flows mean for children and their becoming literate. We then introduce readers to a range of summative literacy assessments and the policies and purposes surrounding their use.

Professional ethics applies to a particular profession and focuses on protecting the interests of the individuals served. A professional code of ethics defines shared fundamental principles (based on values) specific to a particular group for practice, research, and education (Chabon & Ulrich, 2006). The code guides professionals' behavior concerning their interactions with clients, colleagues, and employers (Wesley & Buyesse, 2006). It supports self-reflection and public accountability and recognizes individuals as a community of professionals with distinct privileges and obligations. Furthermore, a professional code of ethics involves principles that a specific profession has established to judge the best action to take when facing ethical dilemmas that call for decision-making.

The relevance of ethics to the daily experience of healthcare professionals is highly acknowledged, and each healthcare association has formulated its code of ethics that is taught as part of professional training. Healthcare professionals (e.g., psychologists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists) providing direct therapy to children in special education act in a unique situation where ethical dilemmas are examined according to the principles that reflect their values as professionals and establish expectations for their clinical practice. Given that special education is abundant with ethical problems and dilemmas, well-intentioned professionals must learn and apply the relevant ethical standards appropriate to this specific setting. Thus, the question is, how does a multidisciplinary team in special education school resolve cases when a conflict arises between definitions of an ethical dilemma?

Speech and language therapists (SLTs) are employed in various settings, including medical and educational. This study focuses on the unique circumstances associated with providing school-based services in special education and the challenge of applying SLTs' professional code of ethics in special education-based practice.

During training and development as healthcare professionals throughout their careers, SLTs devote much of their time and effort to assimilating theoretical and technical knowledge with professional and clinical skills. Nevertheless, only a small amount of time is dedicated to considering the substantial ethical implications of what they are learning to do.

Given that SLTs often significantly influence the special education programs and services provided for children with disabilities, the role of SLTs in special education has been insufficiently examined regarding the complex ethical dilemmas they are likely to face.

The aims of the present study were as follows:

(1) to explore how SLTs in special education identify ethical dilemmas and examine the ethical perspectives that influence their decision-making.

(2) to examine whether SLTs’ professional code of ethics provides comprehensive guidance to address ethical dilemmas in special education.

(3) to examine what SLTs claim are the significant sources of ethical dilemmas in special education schools.

(4) to explore whether and how often SLTs in special education are involved in ethical deliberations with multidisciplinary staff, and whether they recall cases when these lead to competing interests and controversies.

In this symposium, we discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share our mutual relatings which have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices. We then share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures (Kemmis et al, 2014). The research questions underscoring the 4 papers presented in this symposium include:

1) What is considered to be an educational equity or social justice problem across international or cross-cultural sites?

2) What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity or injustice in its diverse forms in different sites?

3) How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity or injustice, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project?

Building healthy connections is a key premise of the double purpose of education, that is, “to prepare people to live well in a world worth living in” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 27). However, what constitutes living well in a world worth living in is highly contested and subject to much debate. We illuminate the roles that educational researchers play in contributing to these debates, particularly in a global environment riven by heightened economic, social, and environmental precarities and volatilities. We also highlight the responsibilities we bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and the world (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 26) that foster this double purpose of education.

In this paper, we present two examples of research projects aimed at amplifying voices that are often silenced in research: those of children and/or youth from refugee backgrounds. Refugees are often excluded from research for both ethical and practical reasons: because of their assumed vulnerability as well as the challenges related to language or access. In the research projects presented, we aimed to employ methods that suited these groups of children and youth to understand their experiences in ways that they wanted to express them, and in situ. We argue that starting from, and finishing with, the point of view of the knowledge holders illustrates one means (although not exclusively so) by which to amplify their voices and knowledge to counter epistemic injustice in educational research. 45 refugee background students studying in Finnish (20) and Australian (25) primary and secondary schools participated in a modified, child-led version of critical incident procedure (Woods, 1993). In these interviews, the children drew and talked about their learning journey from the time they started school in their counties of origin and/or their transit to the present in Finland or Australia. The children were further instructed to mark on their drawings any key moments when they remember feeling that they had succeeded in something. Researchers and students then explored the drawings together, with students answering clarifying questions such as: What happened here? What were you doing? How did it make you feel? Who helped you here? What did you learn in this situation? This discussion illustrated what the children themselves saw as important in their school journeys. It also gave the researchers the possibility of teasing out some of the less visible arrangements that had enabled or constrained the children’s feelings of success. Moreover, 25 teachers and 10 educational leaders who worked in multicultural schools in Finland and Australia were invited to share their views on how they could support students from refugee backgrounds in their work. In a later stage of the same study, small groups of younger children (13 in Australia, 8 in Finland) collected videos of their educational practices. The aim of this stage of the study was to get a child’s view footage of educational practices as they happen, and to analyse this audiovisual material together with the children. The complete data collection was complemented by praxiographical observations (Bueger & Gadinger, 2014) in selected schools.

Bueger, C., & Gadinger, F. (2014). Towards praxiography: Research strategies and techniques. In International practice theory: New perspectives (pp. 76-96). London: Palgrave Pivot. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Hardy, I. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Woods, P. 1993. Critical events in education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14(4), 355–371. doi:10.1080/0142569930140401

In this paper we interrogate our dialogic research practices through the theory of practice architectures, attending to the onto-epistemological base that underpins them. This is a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: firstly, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; secondly, we engage in our own discovery about our research practices. Focusing on research projects in two different countries (Canada and Norway), our initial centring question for this chapter is: How do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: What onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) attends to the nexus of sayings, doings, and relatings that keep practices in place; site ontologies teach us that practices are shaped by particular locations, contexts, and moments. With this in mind, our epistemic approach has been to develop research methods that engage in site-specific conversations about aspects of education. In different ways we, as researchers or participants, personally take part in conversations for knowledge production. For us, the process of discovery is as important as the product. This was true for the initial studies—our PhD work—that we are reporting on here; it is also true for research conducted for this paper. Transparency, by giving information and time to participants and researchers to be familiar with the topicality, relevance, needs, intentions, and applicability, as driving forces for conducting the research, increases the integrity of all parties. It supports how peace methodologies have long argued that our values need to be present in our processes (Bretherton & Law, 2015; Toews & Zehr, 2003).

Bretherton, D., & Law, S. F. (Eds.). (2015). Methodologies in peace psychology: Peace research by peaceful means. Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Hardy, I. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Toews, B., & Zehr, H. (2003). Ways of knowing for a restorative worldview. In E. G. M. Weitekamp & H.-J. Kerner (Eds.), Restorative justice in context (pp. 257–271). Willan Publishing.

This paper focuses upon how we as a research team drew upon what Wendy Brady (1992), Lester Irabinna Rigney (1999, and Karen Martin (2008) variously have described as “Indigenist” research traditions or practices. Indigenist research is a term made popular in Australian Indigenous research literature by Rigney (1999), who proposed that Indigenist research approaches would be grounded in Indigenous standpoint and knowledges, would privilege the voices of Indigenous peoples, and would be unashamedly political. We drew connections between these Indigenist research traditions, Indigenous standpoint, and cultural interface theory (Nakata, 2007a, 2007b) and tenets of critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Milner, 2007) emerging from Black scholarship in the USA. We did this to align the theory-method coherence of a university learning and teaching project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous, pre-service teachers on their final practicums and internships prior to graduating. We employed a phenomenological approach guided by Brown and Gilligan (1992) and Van Manen (2007), shaped by core Indigenist principles of “yarning” (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010; Fredericks, 2007) which privileged Indigenous peoples’ narratives and voices through facilitated dialogue, particularly in assessment cycles with practicum supervising teachers. We explain our positioning as Islander and non-Indigenous researchers and how we are connected to the field of pedagogy and praxis. We explain how we saw our research roles in what Kemmis and colleagues (2014) have described as “risky times” for education—an era of neo-managerialism in schooling and university education (Wrigley, Lingard & Thompson, 2012) as well as an ongoing, colonising experience for Indigenous university students. The attention to the onto-epistemological requirements of an Indigenist approach enabled us to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students against the backdrop of Australian tertiary education where White, hegemonic social-political and cultural-discursive relations (Kemmis et al., 2014) often constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. We conclude with key points for educational researchers, highlighting that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular, hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not only the seemingly uninvested, or detached, or “logical” (cf. Gordon, 2000) crafting of the praxis research problem.

Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bessarab, D., & Ng'andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in Indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer Science & Business Media. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 7-24. Martin, K. (2008). Please knock before you enter. Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for researchers. Teneriffe, Australia: Post Pressed. Nakata, M. N. (2007a). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press. Nakata, M. (2007b). The cultural interface. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36(Suppl.), 6–13. Rigney, L. I. (1999). Internationalization of an Indigenous anticolonial cultural critique of research methodologies: A guide to Indigenist research methodology and its principles. Wicazo Sa Review, 14(2), 109-121. Van Manen, M. (2007). Phenomenology of practice. Phenomenology & Practice, (1), 11-30.

For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment of operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as ‘cultural genocide’. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015, p. 1) In this paper, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing (Martin, 2008) and the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al, 2014) are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing (Wilson, 2008) collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer Science & Business Media. Martin, K. L. (2008). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for research. Brisbane, Australia: Post Pressed. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Retrieved from https://nctr.ca/about/history-of-the-trc/trc-website/ Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Halifax & Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood.

Introduction and research interest

In the course of global migration, the group of minors is a large and often inadequately considered group. The estimated number of people aged 19 or younger living in a country other than the one where they were born increased to 40.9 million in 2020 (IOM, 2021, 48). In 2019 children and adolescents under the age of 18 make up 12 percent of all international migrants (2020: 14,6 percent, UN DESA, 2020), but account for 50 per cent of refugees and 42 per cent of internally displaced persons in 2019 (IDAC, 2020).

The conditions of youth migration differ widely in terms of the reason for migration, the legal conditions, the economic circumstances, the educational qualifications, the time periods as well as the place of origin and destination of migration. In the symposium, the educational trajectories of young people will be examined with special focus on the intersections between (forced) migration and further social group categorisation in the context of school. The three contributions chose a critical perspective on the multidimensional social inequality arising from this.

The symposium on youth and (forced) migration brings together research from the three Western European countries England (Julie Wharton), Germany (Henrike Terhart) and Austria (Seyda Subasi Singh et al.) as central destinations of migration towards Europe. The contributions are discussed by Anke Wischmann, Germany. The symposium is chaired by Rory Mc Daid, Ireland.

Theoretical framework

The term "youth" as an independent phase of life is closely linked to the emergence of modernity (Roth 1983). Over time and depending on the geographical context, the understanding of youth is subject to processes of social change. Political developments, social systems and their institutions shape the lives of young people over time as well as young people's voices and action influence society (Clarke et al., 1979). In this context, the phase of youth defined along the social category of age cannot be considered separately from other relevant social categories: Gender, socio-economic status, disabilities, nationality, migration religious affiliation etc. have an influence on the socially unequal experience of youth (Center of Intersectional Justice, n.d.).

Therefore, in the symposium the contributions focus on the intersection of youth and (forced) migration also taking further socially relevant categories into account. In order to use the potential of an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989), the interconnection of youth, migration, disability, socio-economic status as well as nationality and the respective migration regime is taken into account. In doing so transnational inequality relations, postcolonial structures and dependencies between countries and regions must be taken into account in order to be able to grasp in the lifes of many young people in Europe (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). The contributions critically examine the asymmetries of the power interests involved and question a Eurocentric understanding of the migration of youth (Hummrich, 2020).

Methodologies

Based on the respective research interest presented in the contributions, different methodological approaches of qualitative interview research are used. These range from visual mapping and interview techniques, to a dialogue orientated interview setting to cross-border interview case studies.

Outcomes

The outcome of the symposiums on youth and (forced) migration in an intersectional perspective are to

1. broaden the perspective on youth migration in its variety and reveal the similarities and differences in the experiences of migrated youth under the conditions of social inequality.
2. use the approach of intersectionality as a sensitising concept to examine and theorise the conditions of educational trajectories of young migrated people.
3. provide a space for discussing different methodological approaches of interview analysis to analyse the migration paths regarding education of young people migrating to Europe.

Welcoming a young person who is seeking sanctuary into an educational setting requires teachers to consider how they might remove barriers to learning and participation, where labels such as ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘refugee’ may ‘form markers of separation, markers of not belonging’ (Slee, 2019, 910). If a young person seeking sanctuary also has an impairment or other additional need, teachers are also required to consider how include this young person under the requirements of United Kingdom’s The Equality Act 2010, in which ‘disability’, another label, is a protected characteristic. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2019) warns that attitudes and beliefs about disability can lead to social exclusion for people seeking asylum and offers guidance as to how to overcome this. In a series of dialogic interviews with teachers based on the work of Buber (1999), this research explores the way in which teachers endeavour to provide a welcoming and supportive environment for new arrivals who are seeking sanctuary and also have an impairment or additional need. There is an exploration of the reasonable adjustments that are needed to create an inclusive environment for young people with intersecting needs. The themes of emotional wellbeing, language needs and the attitudes of the young people, their families and the teachers are explored. There is also a consideration of the ‘SENitizing’ (Migliarini, Stinson and D’Alessio, 2019) of young people by their teachers. A discussion about the categorisation of young people as having ‘Social, Emotional and Mental Health’ needs (DfE and DoH, 2015) as a result of their experiences as a young person who has been forced to migrate is advanced. This research proposes that educators should be supported to understand ways in which the intersectionality of disability and being a refugee might have on a young person’s sense of identity and inclusion or exclusion in their educational community (Bešić, Paleczek and Gasteiger-Klicpera, 2020). This research has implications for policy makers and teacher educators.

Bešić, E., Paleczek, L. and Gasteiger-Klicpera, B. (2020). Don’t forget about us: attitudes towards the inclusion of refugee children with(out) disabilities, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 24:2, 202-217. Buber, M (1999 [1923]). I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark. Department of Education (DfE) and Department of Health (DoH) (2015). The Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0-25. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-code-of-practice-0-to-25 [accessed 28.01.23]. Migliarini, V., Stinson, C, and D’Alessio, S. (2019). ‘SENitizing’ migrant children in inclusive settings: exploring the impact of the Salamanca Statement thinking in Italy and the United States, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23 (7-8), 754-767. Slee, R. (2019). Belonging in an age of exclusion, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(9), 909-922. The Equality Act (2010). Available at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents [accessed 28.01.23]. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2019). Working with Persons with Disabilities in Forced Displacement: Need to Know Guidance. Available at https://www.unhcr.org/publications/manuals/4ec3c81c9/working-persons-disabilities-forced-displacement.html [accessed 28.01.23].

Transnational references in the lives of young migrated people are (made) relevant in educational institutions in different ways (Fürstenau & Niedrig, 2007). The appreciation of cross-border mobility by young people varies greatly and often depends on whether the respective migration is seen as a (economical) burden or a gain. With a special focus on the intersection of youth, migration and socio-economic status the contribution focusses on youth from abroad who attend private boarding high schools in Germany for several years with the aim of completing the Geman university entrance examination (Abitur) (Terhart, 2022). This international students mobility is regarded as a phenomenon of the increasingly global school choice of internationally oriented families (Ball & Nikita, 2014), and at the same time private boarding schools benefit from a wealthy client group (Kenway & Fahey, 2014; Brooks & Waters, 2015). But how do the young people themselves experience the change to another national school system, everyday life at a German boarding school and contact with their family, which usually lives far away? As part of a Grounded Theory-Interview study including case studies of students, parents and school representatives’ perspectives (Strauss/Corbin, 1996; Stake, 2003, S. 136ff.; Fatke, 2013) the contribution focusses on the young migrated students experiences attending private boarding schools in Germany. As a phenomenon of privileged educational migration the growing up in transnational contexts against the background of family expectations of an internationally prestigious school education in Germany is examined. In the analysis of ten interviews with students, it becomes clear that the young people have to get used to the new conditions during the transition to the German school system. In most cases, reference is made to the advantages of attending school in German boarding schools with regard to the resulting further educational and professional opportunities in the global startification structure of the global educational market. The (social) price paid by the students and their families for this option is estimated differently. As they navigate their transnational educational experiences, gendered arguments become just as apparent as the othering process they are subjected to as migrants.

Ball, S. J., & Nikita, D. P. (2014). The global middle class and school choice: A cosmopolitan sociology. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 17(3), 81-93. Fatke, R. (2013). Fallstudien in der Erziehungswissenschaft [Case studies in educational science]. In B. Friebertshäuser, A. Langer, & A. Prengel (Hrsg.), Handbuch Qualitative Forschungsmethoden in der Erziehungswissenschaft (4. rev. Ed., p. 159-172). Beltz Juventa. Fürstenau, S., & Niedrig, H. (2007). Jugend in transnationalen Räumen. Bildungslaufbahnen von Migrantenjugendlichen mit unterschiedlichem Rechtsstatus [Youth in transnational spaces. Educational trajectories of migrated youth with different legal status]. In T. Geisen & C. Riegel (Hrsg.), Jugend, Partizipation und Migration [Youth, partizipation and migration] (p. 239–259). Wiesbaden: VS. Kenway, J., & Fahey, J. (2014). Staying ahead of the game: The globalizing practices of elite schools. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12(2), 177-195. Strauss, Anselm L., & Juliet Corbin (1996). Grounded Theory: Grundlagen qualitativer Sozialforschung [Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory procedures and techniques] Beltz. Stake, R. E. (2003). Qualitative case studies. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Strategies of qualitative inquiry (p. 134-164). Sage. Terhart, H. (2022). Transnationale Bildungsverläufe zwischen globaler Bildungsorientierung und nationalem Schulsystem [Transnational trajectories between global educational orientation ans national school system]. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 66/3, 401-420.

Refugee youth’s access to formal and non-formal education provisions in times of crisis plays an important role in achieving normality and a feeling of safety for all but especially young children. In 2022, in a very short period of time, millions of people needed to move out from Ukraine and crossed the border to EU countries. In this paper, we rely on data collected through mapping and accompanying interviews with youth residing in Austria. By using the Journey Maps method (Howard, 2014), the aim is to compare the response given to the acute need for education of refugees who arrived from Middle Eastern or African countries in 2015 and experiences of those arriving during the Ukraine conflict. At least two maps from the two periods will be initially analyzed using thematic analyses. Thus four participants have been invited to map their educational journeys and comment on these in the course of accompanying interviews, either in a current or retrospect perspective. How EU- level and national Austrian policy responded to accommodate students affected by the biggest conflicts in the last decade is analyzed by relying on refugee students’ visualisation of their journey to school after arriving in Austria. Language-related barriers, public acceptance, recognition of previous education, involvement of parents as well as non-formal education provisions are the experiences to be compared. The preliminary results show that the educational response was in line with the solidarity and quick response given to the Ukrainian crisis in Europe. However, this approach illustrates a politicized humanitarian approach that perpetuates the historically-rooted oppression against marginalized groups in Europe (Esposito, 2022). The continuation of national education in Ukraine remotely, the quick recruitment of Ukrainian teachers and the lack of identification of Ukrainian children who are school age were some of the challenging areas identified. On the other hand, the interviews revealed that the inclusion of Ukrainian children in the Austrian school system has been more smoothly compared to that of peers from Syria, Afghanistan or other Middle Eastern or African countries. The high level of othering, racial prejudice, and negative media coverage against refugees who arrived in Austria upon conflict in the Middle East starting in 2015 have not been experienced in the context of Ukrainian children.

Esposito, A. (2022). The limitations of humanity: differential refugee treatment in the EU. Retrieved from https://hir.harvard.edu/the-limitations-of-humanity-differential-refugee-treatment-in-the-eu/ [accessed 28.01.23]. Howard, T. (2014). Journey mapping: A brief overview. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2(3), 10-13. UNHCR. (2022). Education in emergencies. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/education/emergencies [accessed 28.01.23].

The interdependence between social and educational inclusion is a well-established argument in research literature (Sparkes 1999; Slee & Allan,2001; Hills, Grand and Bartlett, 2002; Byrne, 2005; among others). In the case of Newly Arrived Migrant and Refugee Students (NAMRS) educational inclusion is considered as one of the key routes to social integration (Dobson et al, 2021). Also known is that their experiences outside the school often hinder the effectiveness of efforts to integrate them in their new educational environments and to respond effectively to their educational needs. Research has already revealed the array of such experiences and circumstances which have a direct effect on educational inclusion of NAMRS. These include the new roles and responsibilities that NAMRS need to assume within their families (Suarez-Orozco, 2001), the uncertainty about their legal status (Essomba, 2017), the availability and access to mental health support (Fazel et al, 2012), etc.

On the basis of the above, there is a demand for the development and implementation of holistic approaches to educational inclusion of which respond to the needs of these students and transcend policies and practices in various sectors that affect their lives (Pinson and Arnot, 2010, Kakos and Teklemariam, 2020).

In this symposium researchers from SIRIUS Policy Network on Migrant Education will present the results of their research on key issues related to educational inclusion of NAMRS and will engage in a dialogue about the possibilities, opportunities and challenges in the development and implementation of holistic approaches in educational policy and practice. SIRIUS a European network of researchers, practitioners and representatives of migrant communities which has been conducting research and provides tailored policy advice at European and National levels for over 10 years.

The papers included in this symposium represent a selection of key projects conducted by SIRIUS. In their paper Tomislav Tudjman and Katja van der Schans will present the findings from their study on the use of multilingual books in educational inclusion of NAMRS. They will also discuss multilingualism as a condition to inclusion.

Hanna Siarova and Loes van der Graaf will discuss the key findings from a 4-year long policy analysis project which focused on educational policies across Europe that relate to educational inclusion of NAMRS. The paper will specifically zoom in into synergies between formal and non-formal education to better support inclusion of NAMRS in Europe and what makes such partnerships for inclusions successful and sustainable.

The paper by Darmody and Kakos draws on a study that focused on migrant parents’ engagement in the education of their children. Taking a comparative case study approach it discusses the experiences of two primary schools in England and in Ireland both of which have developed innovative policies and practices to encourage migrant and refugee parents’ involvement in education of their children.

Kakos’ paper brings together findings from research literature, including research conducted by SIRIUS members. The synthesis of these findings guides a conceptualisation of holistic approaches to educational inclusion which takes into account the diversity and complexity of NAMRS’ needs and offers practical guidance for the development of inclusive policies and practices.

By exploring the diversity and complexity of NAMRS ‘needs and of the implementation of holistic approaches, the symposium will attempt to answer to the following questions:

1. What are the possibilities and challenges in the efforts for the educational inclusion of NAMRS in formal education?

2. How can NAMRS and their families be empowered so that they are in position to effectively guide policies and practices that concern their social and educational integration?

AVIOR was an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership aimed to reduce the achievement gap between native and non-native pupils in Europe. European partners worked together to make bilingual literacy and numeracy materials for pupils aged 4-8 years available to primary schools and to share best practices among teacher trainers and school leaders on how to create inclusive multilingual classrooms. Schools across Europe are seeing an increasing number of children who are either born in another country or whose parents are immigrants and who do not speak the school language at home (Cummins, 2014). This presents a challenge as schools are expected to deliver quality education for all children, regardless of their ethnic background or linguistic abilities. Research shows: Children learn best in their mother tongue. Children’s ability to learn a second (official) language does not suffer. In fact literacy in a mother tongue lays the cognitive and linguistic foundation for learning new languages (OECD, 2015). Learning in their mother tongue during primary and secondary school allows children to become literate in the official language quickly, emerging as fully bi/multilingual learners in secondary school. More importantly, their self-confidence grows, they remain interested in learning, and they stay in school longer, and stand a greater chance of fulfilling their educational potential, enabling them to make greater contributions to the society in which they live (Duarte, 2016; Agirdag & Kambel, 2018). Multilingualism is not at all common practice in schools around Europe. The costs involved and a lack of awareness among policy makers about the benefits of mother tongue learning explain why few EU countries provide mother tongue support for migrant children (Agirdag & Kambel, 2018). Impact of the Erasmus+ project The outcome for primary school children between 4-8 years with migrant backgrounds who speak a different language at home than the school language was that they felt more meaningful in school and that it matters who they are. Also parents got more involved since ‘their’ language had a place in school. Our bilingual materials in numeracy and literacy learning are available online as open educational resources.

Agirdag, O., & Vanlaar, G. (2018). Does more exposure to the language of instruction lead to higher academic achievement? A cross-national examination. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(1), 123-137. Agirdag, O. & Kambel, E.R. (2018). Meertaligheid en Onderwijs. Boom: Amsterdam Cummins, J. (2014). Language and identity in Multilingual Schools: Constructing Evidence-Based Instructional Policies. In D. Little, C. Leung & P. Van Avermaet (Eds.), Managing Diversity in Education: Languages, Policies, Pedagogies. Bristol-Buffalo-Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 3-26. Duarte, J. (2016). Translanguaging in mainstream education: a sociocultural approach. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-15. OECD (2015). Immigrant Students at School: Easing the Journey towards Integration. Paris: OECD Publishing. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1787/9789264249509-en.

The whole-school approach and the horizontal inter-connectedness of schools is identified in the literature as one of the key factors ensuring inclusion and equity in education. Several recent EU-level and national strategies have highlighted the important role of non-formal learning in integrating children of migrant backgrounds (Burlacu, 2012; European Commission, 2015). This is especially important, given the fact that children spend around 85% of their active time outside school (Medrich, 1982). Cooperation between non-formal education actors and schools can therefore provide an extra dimension to traditional education practices, strengthening the capacity of schools to address the individual needs of newly arriving migrant learners (Malcolm et al, 2003; Spieß, 2016; UNESCO, 2017). Although the benefits of such cooperation upon children’s holistic development are widely recognised in literature and policy strategies, as yet no systematic approach exists in practice. Neither does there appear to be a clear understanding among many education stakeholders of the need for synergies between different types of education providers, and of the mechanisms by which such partnerships could function in a sustainable and continuous way for the benefit of all children, and migrant children in particular. Nevertheless, SIRIUS research (Lipnickienė, Siarova and van der Graaf, 2018) suggests that numerous examples of ad hoc projects and practices exist across Member States, implemented by various civil society actors and individual schools to facilitate the inclusion of migrant and refugee children into education process. This paper offers an analysis of these practices, looking into how schools and non-formal education actors can work together to create safe and inclusive offline and online learning spaces, and proposes a vision of how they can be mainstreamed and upscaled.

Burlacu, Alina-Gabriela (2012), The importance of non-formal education and the role of NGO’s in its promotion, Article for the 7th edition of the International Conference ‘European Integration Realities and Perspectives’ – Academic Excellence Workshop. European Commission (2015), Youth work and non-formal learning in Europe’s education landscape, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2015. Malcolm, J., Hodkinson, P., & Colley, H. (2003). The interrelationships between informal and formal learning. Journal of Workplace Learning, 15(7/8), 313–318. Medrich, E. A., Roizen, J., Rubin, V., & Buckley, S. (1982), The serious business of growing up: A study of children's lives outside school, Berkeley: University of California Press. Spieß K., Westermaier F., and Marcus J. (2016), Children and adolescents with refugee background less likely to participate in voluntary educational programs—with exception of extracurricular school activities, DIW Economic Bulletin No 34+35. Lipnickienė, K., Siarova, H. and van der Graaf, L. (2018), Role of non-formal education in migrant children inclusion: links with schools. SIRIUS Watch monitoring report, 2018. The report will be available soon at: http://www.sirius-migrationeducation.org. UNESCO (2017), Preventing violent extremism through education: A guide for policy makers, Published by UNESCO, Paris.

Parents’ engagement with schools plays an important role in students’ attitudes to school and their educational outcomes (Rah et al, 2009; LaRocque et.al, 2011). Much of the research focusses on the family-school contact, that tends to vary by social class, gender, but also by migrant background (Liu, et al, 2017). More recently, parental engagement research has moved on to research that recognises the impact of cultural discontinuities between home and school, and the significance of school cultures in addressing the needs of individuals from the diverse range of identities and cultures. Schools tend to differ regarding the level of engagement they take with parents, ranging from those that seek to empower parents as co-educators of their children, to those that promote a distinct ‘expert’ and teacher-led approach. This paper draws on data collected for a broader European study on the topic of migrant parents’ engagement with their children’s education. In particular, the study focussed on the necessary conditions for the interaction between schools and parents to facilitate migrant parents’ engagement in the school-based education of their children in the host country. It sought to answer the following questions: • How engaged and interested are migrant parents in the school-based education of their children? • How informed are migrant parents about their rights? • How informed and interested are migrant parents about the opportunities in being involved in the community of the school? • How interested are migrant parents in being involved in the school-based education of their children? • How do schools encourage migrant parents to be involved in the school-based education of their children and in the community of the school? The qualitative explorative study involved interviews with school staff and migrant-origin parents. This paper draws on interviews with school principals from 2016 that was followed up in 2023 to explore whether any changes have taken place in the case study schools. One primary school is located in an ‘old’ migrant receiving country (UK), while the other is situated in Ireland, that can be considered as a relatively new migrant receiving country. The topics explored include: principals’ understanding regarding parental involvement and parental engagement; vision with regard to engagement of parents/guardians; approaches taken regarding promoting participation by parents/guardians; level of the engagement of parents in the school. Both schools were chosen based on a high proportion of migrant children in the school and schools’ innovative practices in parental engagement.

LaRocque, M., Kleiman, I. & Darling, S. M. (2011) Parental Involvement: The Missing Link in School Achievement. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 55:3, 115–122. Liu, Z. & White, M. J. (2017) Education Outcomes of Immigrant Youth: The Role of Parental Engagement. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 674:1, 27–58. Rah, Y., Choi, S. & Nguyẽn, T. S. T. (2009) Building Bridges between Refugee Parents and Schools. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 12:4, 347–365.

For the last twelve years SIRIUS network has led or been involved in multiple projects in the area of educational inclusion of refugee and migrant students in Europe. Taking into consideration the recommendations in the outputs of key SIRIUS projects and the key findings from studies conducted by the network, this paper responds to calls for integrated approaches to inclusion (Pinson and Arnot, 2010) and brings forward a conceptual framework for a holistic understanding of the process of educational inclusion of Newly Arrived Migrant and Refugee Students (NAMRS). The development of this framework is grounded on the premise that the right to education is the right of individuals to appropriate support for the development of their own personal pathway to learning. The knowledge and skills that define this learning reflect the individuals’ interests and needs and enable their constructive, sustainable and justice-orientated participation in societies. From this angle, education is an empowering process in which citizens are supported, encouraged and motivated to engage in a constant dialogue with themselves and with the societies that shapes them both. Moreover, the inclusion in education Is not just the inclusion of all but it is also the inclusion of the whole person. Consequently, the learning needs that educational inclusion should be addressing are complex, personal and as such they are usually best (if not only) detectable by the learners themselves. The holistic framework for educational inclusion discussed in this paper integrates the key areas of the learning needs of NAMRS evidenced in SIRIUS studies and acknowledges that educational inclusion should involve learners’ constant evaluation of their own needs. The framework also acknowledges the significance of students’ experiences from outside education on their educational engagement and inclusion. The right to education as described above; the complex, personal and ongoing process of recognition of learning needs; the connection between education and social integration; and the impact of experiences outside education on students’ educational engagement are the four key dimensions of educational inclusion and the building blocks of this model and describes the holistic framework. The discussion explores some implications of the adoption of such framework for educational practice, research and policy making.

Pinson, H. & Arnot, M. (2010) Local conceptualisations of the education of asylum‐seeking and refugee students: from hostile to holistic models, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 14:3, 247-267.

The recent research on displaced/refugee children has focused on their immediate suffering and needs (Eide, 2020; Hirvonen, 2013). Receiving nations have become more restrictive in preventing the migration of children (Waters, 2007). Additionally, newcomers, both refugee children and those in asylum-seeking phases, are regarded as temporal visitors (Derluyn & Broekaert, 2008; Kalisha, 2020) on the threshold of society, waiting indefinitely for inclusion. In some instances, there is a tendency to have them included as excluded (Hilt, 2015), allowed to enjoy some privileges of inclusion like schooling and housing temporarily. The situation is even dire for those living in protracted refugee situations. Education is offered as an immediate help to order their daily lives, as Pastoor (de Wal Pastoor, 2016) claims.

What, in this context, is the role of education? Shall education be narrowly conceived as preparing them for the future- with skills to help them upon return to their countries or offering it for its own sake? What would be the teacher's response(ability) in encountering newcomers new to a nation, culture, and language? How is it possible to conjure an environment where both the newcomer and natives share responsibility for their common world? How do we conceptualize education to encounter them in their realities of being both strange, new, neighbor, and temporal, and yet also address them as worth of address and as political beings? These questions have no direct answers, and their exploration is tentative in this symposium.

In this symposium, we explore whether education, as developed for immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seeking children, can help create communities in which both natives- those born in the place and newcomers share the responsibility for their commonplace (and the world) in the face of climate change. Can multicultural education be conceived of in the Anthropocene? Additionally, another paper sees the presence of migrant children as reflecting the "struggle of the world"; therefore, their education and those children themselves must be seen as "belonging to the world" and not elsewhere. Two examples further complicate this; one that interrogates what education means for young persons who have lived in protracted refugee situations where educational policies are tailored to exclude them. Moreover, an empirical illustration of whether teaching understood as "pointing" allows for bypassing linguistic barriers in education for newcomers.

Rather than educating the youth about the Anthropocene, educators must conceive their task as educating in the Anthropocene (Wallenhorst and Pierron, 2019). As such, education cannot only be conceived as an existential issue of striving to live well and at peace in current conflictual societies. Instead, it must be radically transformed as climate change represents an ultimate existential threat concerning the future survival of (non)-humankind (Bonneuil, 2022; Sæverot, 2022). A fundamental question thus is about what earth we want to leave for our children and what children we want to leave for our planet (Rhabi, 2010). Unfortunately, the gravity of this question often leaves pedagogues empty-handed. Where to begin and where to go; what to hope for in the Anthropocene era (Straume, 2019)? However, it also must be stated that emergent eco-cultural activities at school are flourishing in many places (see, for instance, "Profs en transition," a national teacher network for outdoor education in France). For exploring the notion of existential education in the Anthropocene (Wallenhorst and Pierron, 2019), we suggest in this contribution discussing a specific experience of creating community with nature, looking at the concrete work of planting trees. Based on the pedagogical innovation from the French NGO LIKEN, we discuss educational experiences of resonance with trees (Rosa, 2022; Wallenhorst, 2021) and convivialist community upbuilding (Convivialist International (2020). LIKEN located in Pau southwest of France has been a charity for environmental preservation since 2015. Their associative projects link art, nature, and education with participants of different ages and social backgrounds. One key mission is to restore urbanized areas with trees re-inhabiting Pau's schoolyards, public space, and University campuses. The small data collection consists of interviewing students and volunteers through anonymous questionnaires conducted during the school year of 2023. The respondents are both new-coming and returnee participants in LIKEN's planting project. The study is in progress, and the contribution will highlight respondents' personal experiences. However, the data collected through the study only can show glimpses of resonance and convivialist education as existential education cannot be comprehended once and for all, keeping its foundational openness. The abstract further explores doing community with trees in higher education (Brossard Børhaug & Meunier Kjetland, under publication). In the present contribution, we expand our theoretical focus for reflecting on existential convivialist and resonance education by doing community with trees through respondents' perceptions.

Bonneuil, C. (2022). Terre. In D. Fassin (Ed), La société qui vient (pp. 37-54). Seuil. Brossard Børhaug, F. & Kjetland M. C. (under publication). Community. In N. Wallenhorst & C. Wulf (Eds.). Handbook of the Anthropocene. Springer Nature. Convivialist International (2020). THE SECOND CONVIVIALIST MANIFESTO: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World. Civic Sociology, 1(1), 12721. https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.12721 LIKEN Association. LIKEN. Retrieved from 29.01.2023 www.liken.fr Profs en transition. Profs en transition ̶ Agir ensemble vers une pédagogie écoresponsable, solidaire et citoyenne. Retrieved from 29.01.23 Profs en transition - Agir ensemble vers une pédagogie écoresponsable, solidaire et citoyenne Rhabi, P. (2010). Vers la sobriété heureuse. Babel. Rosa, H. (2022). Pédagogie de la résonance: Entretiens avec Wolfgang Endres (Traduit de l’allemand). Le Pommier. Sæverot, H. (Ed.) (2022). Meeting the challenges of existential threats through education innovation: A proposal for an expanded curriculum. Routledge. Straume, I. (2019). What may we hope for? Education in times of climate change. Constellations, 27(3), 540–552. 10.1111/1467-8675.12445 Wallenhorst, N., & Pierron, J.-P. (Eds.) (2019). Éduquer en anthropocène. Editions au bord de l’eau. Wallenhorst, N. (2021). Apprendre la résonance. In N. Wallenhorst (Ed.), Résistance, résonance: Apprendre à changer le monde avec Harmunt Rosa (pp. 63-84). Le Pommier.

Gibran's poem On Children (1923) directs our attention to the intricacies in addressing the issue of children's belonging, a fundamental need of every human being and a matter of recognitional and associational justice. However, although children want and need to belong, Gibran cautions that children do not belong to and are not owned by anybody. This raises the issue of the responsibilities of adults for their educational upbringing as not being overly constrained by specific expectations to be and feel at home. The question of children's belonging becomes more pronounced where the education of migrant children is concerned. Immigrant children's bonding to the school is crucial to their educational development and economic independence (Bondy et al. 2019, Janta & Harle 2016). Parents of children with backgrounds of migration who experience themselves as "guests" within schools are often grateful for education despite its assimilative tendencies and are fundamentally concerned with making a good living. Nevertheless, the price they pay for assimilating into ways of life prevalent to their new home country cannot be underestimated, considering the fraught experiences of living in borderlands, in between differing cultures pertaining to their original home and new home (Ahmed 1999, Anzaldua 2017, Winer 2021). Educators, even those committed to integrating children socially, politically, and culturally are challenged by their obligations to nurture children's freedom of thought, expression, association, and action. Because of the increasingly interconnected being in the world (due to globalization, technological advances, war, disease, ecological destruction and climate change) this paper argues that rather than considering children as belonging to particular homes, their education should aim for their belonging to the world ( Biesta 2021). This entails the decentralization of the seemingly universal conceptions of what it means to be human in the world (Heidegger 2011) combined with a paradigm shift in education that accentuates the uncertainties of belonging to the world rather than the world belonging to human beings (Braidotti 2013, Snaza 2014) and the future responsibilities of being in the world with and next to human and non-human others. To borrow Gibran's metaphors what does it take for educators to be the 'stable bows' for children to belong to 'life's longing for itself' ( Gibran 1923)

Ahmed S. (1999) Home and Away. Narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2(3). 329–347. Anzaldua G. (198r) Borderlands/ La Frontera, United States Aunt Lute Books. Bondy, J. M. et al (2019). The Children of Immigrants' Bonding to School: Examining the Roles of Assimilation, Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Social Bonds. Urban Education, 54(4), 592–62. Biesta G. ( 2021) World-Centred Education. A View for the Present New York, Routledge. Delpit L. (2006) Other people's children. Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, New Press. Braidotti R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge, Polity Press Gibran K. (1923) The Prophet, New York, Knopf. Heidegger, M. (2011b). Letter on humanism. Basic Writings. Oxon: Routledge. Janta B. & Harle E. (2016) Education of Migrant Children. Cambridge, California. Rand Europe. Snaza N. (2014. "Toward a Posthuman Education." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30 (2): 39-55. Winer N. (2021) "A Home of My Own": The Experience of Children of International Migrants" Clinical Social Work Journal 49:325–335.

During the 2015 "migration crisis" in Europe, Nesta Devine responded by urging that we ought to "instill some courage in our politicians in order for them to work faster to reintroduce education" for migrant children (Devine, 2015, p. 1376). Unfortunately, the sense of agency she advocates for is, at best univocal (Papastephanou, 2017, p. 5). It does not state the purpose of education other than the heightened call for being hospitable by host nations and offering a 'safe' space to be integrated and socialized in the new environment. Their teachers decide what they will learn, yet their length of stay in school remains unclarified. What is interesting, for example, about teaching unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Norway is that the curriculum focuses on their integration into Norwegian society (Valenta, 2015). Recently, the Norwegian government released a strategy paper that shifted focus to unaccompanied teenagers' teachers' competencies. A strategy, Competence for Diversity 2013-2017, was developed to prepare teachers to teach Norwegian as a second language and equip them with multicultural skills and skills on how to combat radicalization in schools (Lødding, Rønsen, & Wollscheid, 2018). Cross-cultural education and the relevant skills teachers need in the changing dynamics of schooling become only relevant because of the continuous availability of asylum-seeking and refugee children. To be competent as a teacher, by implication, means understanding "difference" and providing relevant "educative" solutions that eventually lead to a reduction of difference and assimilation into existing acceptable categories like minority language pupils (Kalisha, 2021) I use teachers (from interviews with teachers and observations in two high schools on the west coast of Norway) experiences in this contribution that point to frustrations with unaccompanied teenagers (15-18 of age) misunderstanding during a Norwegian language class. Sometimes, it leads the teachers to let them "dwell" with some pictures and use them to re-tell a story in a language of their understanding. This, letting dwell with pictures, allows the students to recreate their own stories, some in simplified, basic Norwegian and others in English, and re-tell them to others. Could this be a possibility to rethink teaching in Ranciere's (1991) terms as an act of an ignorant teacher teaching an ignorant student? The paper points out to the idea of ignoring the immediate temporality of the newcomers and thinking on the feet about what is possible when one is called to study (Bingham et al., 2010).

Biesta, G. (2022). World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge. Bingham, C., Biesta, G. J. J., & Rancière, J. (2010). Jacques Ranciere : education, truth, emancipation. Continuum. Kalisha, W. (2021). "You have to wait.": a hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of unaccompanied minors waiting for asylum response in Norway University of Oslo]. Oslo. Kalisha, W., & Sævi, T. (2021). Educational failure as a potential opening to real teaching – The case of teaching unaccompanied minors in Norway. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 21(1). Kohli, R. K. S. (2014). Protecting Asylum Seeking Children on the Move. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 30(1), 83-104. Papastephanou, M. (2017). Cosmopolitan dice recast. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1338-1350. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1278675 Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster : five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford University Press. Valenta, M. (2015). Tjenestetilbudets innvirkning på asylsøkende barns levekår. In B. B. K. R. Tronstad (Ed.), Levekår for barn i asylsøkerfasen. NTNU Samfunnsforskning. https://samforsk.no/Publikasjoner/Laevekar_2015_WEB.pdf. Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of Practice. Left Coast Press. Zeus, B. (2011). Exploring Barriers to Higher Education in Protracted Refugee Situations: The case of Burmese Refugees in Thailand. Journal of Refugee Studies, 24(2), 256-276. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fer011

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