07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Paper
Adolescent Asylum-seeking Students Caught Inbetween: when the Grammar of Schooling Intersects with the Coloniality of Migration
Melanie Baak1, Joanna McIntyre2, Sinikka Neuhaus3
1University of South Australia; 2University of Nottingham; 3Lund University
Presenting Author: Baak, Melanie;
McIntyre, Joanna
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.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe authors met at the 2019 ECER conference, where we were presenting on schooling opportunities and barriers for refugee background students and how policies shape these. In our conversations, we realised that there were significant opportunities to learn from and with each other about the schooling context in each country. While this paper does not stem from a shared research project, it results from many hours of discussion and online collaboration which enabled us to bring together data from three different research projects to consider cross-national similarities in educational experience and access for asylum seeking students who find themselves ‘in-between’ policy gaps. The three projects on which the data draws are all qualitative studies with a brief overview presented below of each project.
In the English context, data is drawn from empirical work underpinning a study of policy and practice of inclusion for refugee and asylum-seeking learners in English schools and colleges (McIntyre and Abrams 2021) and on data from the Art of Belonging project (2022). This comparative place-based study of creative programmes for newly arrived teenagers in England and Sweden observed the various challenges faced by this cohort as they navigated the bureaucracies of life in their new context.
The Swedish data are also drawn from the Art of Belonging project and from an ongoing interview project with teachers working with students from refugee backgrounds with various legal status depending on age.
The Australian data is taken from The Refugee Student Resilience Study (RSRS), a large, multi-staged Australian Research Council Linkage study, conducted across two Australian states from 2018-2022. The data in this paper is drawn from Phase 2 of the study which interviewed school leaders and staff in seven secondary schools across two Australian states about the ways that these schools interacted with, developed and enacted policies and practices to promote resilience and positive outcomes for refugee-background students. A significant number of these schools reflected on the unique challenges of education and future planning for young people entering schools in their mid- to late teens after prolonged periods of forced migration and educational disruption.
We utilise case studies from each country to identify the ways in which the grammar of schooling intersect with the coloniality of migration for young asylum seeking students, who get caught in between various policy gaps in relation to schooling.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe case studies from UK, Sweden and Australia illustrate the ways in which the grammar of schooling operate to constrain education access and experiences for young asylum seeking students. The case study from the UK centres the experience and outcomes of schooling access from the perspective of a young asylum seeking student, Alan. Alan’s experience demonstrates how age-based classrooms, testing and time related progress in schools alongside migration policies which move unaccompanied asylum seeking youth to different regions of the UK ultimately limited Alan’s education options. The Swedish case study presents the perspective of a teacher who struggles with the constraints to supporting asylum seeking adolescent students. This case illustrates how education and the schooling is deeply affected and reproduces, or at least risks reproducing, a simplistic view on migration and education. A composite narrative combined from two schools in Australia (to assist with ensuring the anonymity of these schools and staff) illustrates the strategies school staff were using to overcome barriers that were very specific to this cohort of ‘in-between’ students but also emphasises the sometimes powerlessness they felt and the limited options post-schooling available for these students. The Australian context illustrates how the migration policies and education policies sometimes intersected to push asylum seeking students out of formal schooling systems, but this narrative also illustrated the agency of school staff in seeking ways to circumvent these policies.
ReferencesBenhura, AR & Naidu, M 2021, 'Delineating caveats for (quality) education during displacement: Critiquing the impact of forced migration on access to education', Migration Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 260-78.
de Wal Pastoor, L 2016, 'Rethinking refugee education: Principles, policies and practice from a European perspective', Annual review of comparative and international education 2016.
Dryden-Peterson, S 2017, 'Refugee education: Education for an unknowable future', Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 14-24.
Dryden-Peterson, S, Adelman, E, Bellino, MJ & Chopra, V 2019, 'The purposes of refugee education: Policy and practice of including refugees in national education systems', Sociology of Education, vol. 92, no. 4, pp. 346-66.
Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E 2018, 'The coloniality of migration and the “refugee crisis”: On the asylum-migration nexus, the transatlantic white European settler colonialism-migration and racial capitalism', Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees/Refuge: revue canadienne sur les réfugiés, vol. 34, no. 1.
Keddie, A 2012, 'Refugee education and justice issues of representation, redistribution and recognition', Cambridge journal of education, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 197-212.
McIntyre, J. and Abrams, F. 2021. Refugee Education: Theorising practice in schools. Abingdon: Routledge
McIntyre, J., Neuhaus, S. Blennow, K. 2022. The Art of Belonging: Social interacration of young migrants in urban contexts through cultural place-making. (Final Report). Available at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cracl/documents/art-of-belonging.pdf
Ratković, S, Kovačević, D, Brewer, C, Ellis, C, Ahmed, N & Baptiste-Brady, J 2017, 'Supporting refugee students in Canada: Building on what we have learned in the past 20 years', Ottawa, Canada: Social Sciences and Humanities.
Tyack, D & Tobin, W 1994, 'The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change?', American educational research journal, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 453-79.
07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Paper
Refugee Education for all? Lessons from ethnographic research with Unaccompanied Minors in Greece
Eugenia Katartzi
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Katartzi, Eugenia
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.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedAn ethnographic design has been employed that involved two phases of intensive fieldwork in reception centres with high numbers of UASC in Northern Greece. Further, the study, placing at its core UASC as co-creators of knowledge, utilised a child-centred methodology that included observations, in-depth interviews, focus groups with 60 children living in two Shelters for Unaccompanied Minors.
Mindful of the ethical tensions and complexities inherent in the empirical study with UASC, the overall research process was conducted with sensitivity, tactfulness and in the best interests of the children involved (Alderson&Morrow, 2020) . In addition to the principles of ‘no harm and distress’, informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality, utmost attention was paid to overcoming distrust and suspicion, with which the research with refugees is fraught (White&Bushin, 2011). This necessitated flexibility and malleability in the research process, whilst enabling the UASC to participate via opting for the methods in the research framework that they felt more comfortable with (Hopkins, 2008).
Interpreters who worked in the Shelters where the participants lived and had a close day-to-day relationship with the children were recruited to translate from their native languages. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify the narrative-discursive themes permeating the data.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsIn exploring the role of education in the lives of unaccompanied minors the presentation will unpack how UASC narrate their educational experiences in Greece. Although access to public education for all children irrespectively of legal status is enshrined in Greek Law, in practice the educational integration of UASC is hindered by number of barriers. First, due to institutional, financial and cultural factors the reception of these children in Greek schools has been jeopardized by the chronic lack of funding, under-stuffing and bureaucratic inertia, along with an often anti-immigrant, hostile attitudes and responses by the local communities where reception classes were allowed to operate. A further hindrance to the participation in the educational process is the language barrier, with the vast majority of asylum-seeking children not being able to communicate in Greek, along with the limited opportunities for structured language instruction and the almost non-existent second language education (Crul et al 2019). These findings are keeping with other studies (Dreyden-Peterson 2016) that have documented refugee children’s educational experiences in countries of first asylum and reported the role of language barriers and discrimination in school settings. Yet an additional important barrier that the current study identified is the impact of UASC’s uncertain legal status and the ambivalence it seems to generate towards education. Participants expressed how much they valued education, yet living in legal limbo, awaiting their asylum decisions and being ‘trapped’ in a country, city and a reception facility they did not choose to be make them feel less inclined to invest in the educational process that in turn requires investment in learning the host society’s language. It is argued that further research is needed to explore the educational trajectories of refugee and the effects of their uncertain legal status on their educational outcomes (see also Homuth et al 2020).
ReferencesAlderson, P. and Morrow, V. (2020) The ethics of research with children and young people: A practical handbook. Sage.
Crul, M., Lelie, F., Biner, Ö., Bunar, N., Keskiner, E., Kokkali, I., ... & Shuayb, M. (2019). How the different policies and school systems affect the inclusion of Syrian refugee children in Sweden, Germany, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 1-20.
Dryden-Peterson, S. (2016). Refugee education in countries of first asylum: Breaking
open the black box of pre-resettlement experiences. Theory and Research in
Education, 14(2), 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878515622703
Giannopoulou, I., Mourloukou, L., Efstathiou, V., Douzenis, A., & Ferentinos, P. (2022). Mental health of unaccompanied refugee minors in Greece living “in limbo”. Psychiatriki [ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΨΥΧΙΑΤΡΙΚΗ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑ] 33(3), 219.
Homuth, C., Welker, J., Will, G., & von Maurice, J. (2020). The impact of legal status on different schooling aspects of adolescents in Germany. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 36(2), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40715
Hopkins, P. (2008). Ethical issues in research with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Children's Geographies, 6(1), 37-48.
Stalford, H., & Lundy, L. (2022). Children’s rights and research ethics. The International Journal of Children’s Rights, 30(4), 891-893.
Suarez-Orozco, M. (Ed.). (2019). Humanitarianism and mass migration: Confronting the world crisis. Univ of California Press.
White, A., & Bushin, N. (2011). More than methods: Learning from research with children seeking asylum in Ireland. Population, Space and Place, 17(4), 326-337
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