Conference Agenda

Across Europe, the growing number of pupils with immigrant backgrounds has increased the need to examine multilingual learners’ school experiences beyond academic outcomes, including the social and emotional dimensions shaping educational equality (Immigrant Students and the Effectiveness of Basic Education 2025). In Finland, as elsewhere in Europe, this requires understanding how belonging and recognition develop in everyday school life.

This study investigates immigrant pupils’ life narratives and experiences of being heard in Finnish comprehensive schools, drawing on culturally responsive pedagogy. These perspectives resonate across Europe, where belonging is a shared concern and diversity is viewed as a resource. Pedagogical practices aim to challenge structures that reproduce inequality while supporting learning and belonging (Ladson-Billings 1995; Lucas & Villegas 2013; Abdulhameh et al., 2024; Alisaari et al. 2025b).

Belonging has become central in diverse societies (Cummins 2021; Kauhanen et al. 2024; Tiermas et al. 2025). Yuval-Davis (2006) describes it as an emotional attachment shaped by ethical and political values, while Berry’s (1997) acculturation theory highlights the importance of maintaining cultural heritage alongside integration—an idea relevant to European integration debates.

Finnish research has focused mainly on language‑aware pedagogy (Alisaari et al., 2022; 2025a), leaving pupils’ own accounts of recognition and support during school transitions underexplored (Abdulhameh et al., 2024; Bruhn et al., 2023; Juutinen, 2018; Kilpi-Jakonen et al., 2022). Similar gaps appear in European studies. While ethnic diversity may be valued, other identities, such as gender and sexual diversity, can be less accepted (Alisaari et al., 2025a). These findings highlight the need to understand how inclusion ideals intersect with experiences of racism, homophobia, and exclusion.

The study aims to promote educational equity by strengthening pupils’ sense of belonging and agency. Research shows that immigrant‑background pupils often lack equal opportunities for academic success (Pulkkinen et al., 2024), underscoring the need to support wellbeing, learning, and participation across Europe.

This study focuses on two research questions:

1. What kinds of life stories and experiences do immigrant pupils share about their home countries and Finnish schools?

1. What experiences of being heard do they describe?

By foregrounding pupils’ narratives, the study examines how belonging is negotiated through school practices, peer relations, and societal discourses, aligning with European goals to strengthen learner voice and inclusion.

Situated at the intersection of policy, pedagogy, and multilingual classroom realities, the study emphasises children’s rights and the importance of listening to their perspectives. Although belonging and participation are linked to wellbeing, these connections remain insufficiently explored in European contexts (Anderson & Graham, 2016). As the EU prioritises inclusion and equity, understanding how these principles materialise in daily school life is essential. This study contributes insights into how immigrant pupils narrate recognition, safety, and participation, informing efforts toward more inclusive and socially just education across Europe.

Educational engagement among students of refugee background continues to be shaped by deficit-oriented discourses that frame these young people through lenses of vulnerability, risk, and remediation. While often justified through institutional imperatives of inclusion and safeguarding, such framings can obscure students’ strengths, silence their voices, and reproduce inequitable schooling practices. This paper presents a research proposal for a Critical Engaging Participatory Action Research (CEPAR) study conducted with second-generation African-Australian students attending a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. The study seeks to foreground students’ lived experiences of engagement and disengagement in schooling and to explore how dialogic and participatory processes can foster more critical and transformative forms of educational engagement.

The overarching objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to develop an understanding of the multifaceted factors that constrain and enable African-Australian students’ engagement in schooling from their own perspectives. Second, it seeks to co-create, with students, communicative spaces for reflection and action that can inform more just and responsive educational practices. In contrast to top-down approaches that define students’ needs through externally imposed prescriptions, this study positions students as epistemic and political agents capable of articulating their own experiences, priorities, and aspirations (Noddings, 2005; Veck, 2013). The paper is guided by two interconnected research questions: From the perspectives of second-generation African-Australian students, what practice architectures help and hinder their engagement in schooling? How can communicative spaces for reflection and co-creation contribute to critical and transformative engagement for this group of students?

Conceptually, the paper is informed by Nancy Fraser’s (Fraser) theory of social justice, which conceptualises injustice across three analytically distinct yet interconnected dimensions: redistribution (economic), recognition (United Nations Educational & Organization), and representation (political). This framework provides a macro-level lens for theorising educational engagement and disengagement as socially and politically situated phenomena rather than as individual deficits. For African-Australian students, cultural injustices often emerge through dominant discourses and hierarchical patterns of value that contribute to misrecognition, including experiences of othering, stereotyping, and systemic racism within schools (Abur, 2012; Baak, 2019; Edgeworth, 2015). Economic injustices are linked to the maldistribution of resources within neoliberal education systems, while political injustices arise when students and their families are denied parity of participation and meaningful voice in decision-making processes, leading to misrepresentation or misframing (Fraser, 2008; Keddie, 2012). More recent research on student engagement suggests that, although these macro-levels of engagement are considered in educational studies, the political nature of this phenomenon is often overlooked (Vallee, 2017).

The paper also draws on the Theory of Practice Architectures (TPA) (Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014) as a complementary analytical and transformative framework. TPA conceptualises educational practices as constituted by interconnected sayings, doings, and relatings, which are enabled and constrained by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. In this study, TPA is used to analyse how everyday schooling practices shape students’ trajectories of engagement and disengagement, and to identify how these practices may appear unreasonable, unproductive, or unjust in encounters with African-Australian students and their communities (Wilkinson & Kaukko, 2020).

Building on this justice-oriented lens, the study conceptualises student engagement as a critical and transformative practice. Engagement is understood not as compliance or participation within existing structures, but as a dialogic process through which students critically reflect on their conditions, name experiences of injustice, and participate in transforming them (Freire, 1998). Fostering communicative spaces for students’ engagement provided an opportunity to encounter, in face-to-face spaces, participants’ voices and find those common concerns and issues that could guide ways forward in terms of their engagement in schooling.

Recent interviews conducted with members of Finland’s Jewish community reveal a profound gap between international guidelines on antisemitism education and the realities experienced by Jewish individuals in Finnish society. Although the 2024 interview study by Czimbalmos and Pataricza shows that Finland, like many other European countries, has not implemented a systematic or context‑responsive approach to teaching about antisemitism, Judaism, and Jewish life. Interviewees described daily consequences of these gaps: misconceptions about Jewish culture, limited awareness of the diversity of Jewish life, and insufficient understanding of antisemitism as both a historical and contemporary European phenomenon. These findings mirror research from Sweden, Germany, and Norway, where Jewish communities similarly report that educational shortcomings contribute to stereotypes and social exclusion.

This proposal addresses the research question: What kind of antisemitism education does Finland need today, and how can art‑based pedagogies, particularly Forum Theatre, respond to these needs? The study aims to identify key educational needs expressed by Finnish Jews regarding how antisemitism should be addressed in formal and informal settings, and to examine the potential of Forum Theatre, a method within Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, as an embodied, participatory, and narrative‑based approach aligned with UNESCO’s guidelines and the needs articulated in the interviews.

The theoretical framework integrates four interlinked components.
1. Narrative Pedagogy: Interviewees emphasized the importance of personal stories, lived experiences, and cultural visibility in countering stereotypes. This aligns with UNESCO’s emphasis on authentic narratives to humanize learning and promote self‑reflection. Jewish communities across Europe report similar issues of misrecognition; thus, narrative pedagogy offers a strategy suited for diverse European classrooms and helps combat epistemic and affective injustice.

2. Cultural Encounter and Normalization: Respondents highlighted that personal encounters with Jewish individuals reduce prejudice. This need for visibility and normalization echoes findings from other European contexts with small Jewish populations. Encounters grounded in cultural practice, storytelling, and open dialogue were seen as essential to reducing social distance and dismantling othering processes.

3. Practice‑Based and Embodied Pedagogy: Interviewees stressed that education must move beyond knowledge and empathy to equip learners with the skills and confidence to intervene. They linked this to democratic participation, noting that antisemitism (and racism) requires active resistance. While UNESCO acknowledges behavioural competencies, its guidelines remain largely discussion‑based. Forum Theatre, by contrast, offers a practical way to rehearse real‑life interventions, shifting learners from passive spectators to active “spect‑actors.”

4. Holocaust Education: Although central in Finland, Holocaust education is widely critiqued by interviewees and researchers as limited, overly focused on victimhood, and disconnected from contemporary antisemitism. Many students appear desensitized or perceive the Holocaust as distant. UNESCO recommends grounding Holocaust education in personal narratives and societal context while highlighting antisemitism beyond the Second World War.

Both the interviews and wider European scholarship underline the need to integrate cognitive, emotional, embodied, and behavioural learning domains. While UNESCO promotes interactive and experiential approaches, such methods remain underdeveloped in many European systems.

Forum Theatre offers an interactive structure in which participants move from observers to “spect‑actors,” rehearsing interventions into discriminatory scenarios. Boal’s concepts of metaxis, embodied reflection, and collective problem‑solving make the method particularly suitable for addressing sensitive topics such as antisemitism. Bárbara Santos’ feminist expansion further emphasizes relational and intersectional elements relevant across European contexts.

Taken together, this study proposes that Forum Theatre can serve as a critical pedagogical bridge, responding to the educational needs identified in Finland and offering a transferable model for other European countries. With its emphasis on embodied rehearsal and learner agency, Forum Theatre holds particular promise for shifting students from passive empathy toward active responsibility.

School choice is often analyzed through the lens of neoliberal policy or class strategy. However, for indigenous minorities in conflict-ridden societies, the choice of a hegemonic school system creates a profound dissonance between the desire for social mobility and the imperative of cultural preservation. This paper examines the unique case of middle-class Palestinian citizens of Israel who have migrated from Arab localities in the north to Jewish-majority towns in the southern periphery ("Emerging Mixed Cities"). We conceptualize these parents as "Immigrants in their Homeland": internal migrants who cross invisible but rigid ethno-national borders for employment and education, and find themselves navigating a "Double Periphery" - geographically distant from their cultural centers and socially alienated from the local population.

Drawing on critical sociology of education, the study asks: How do these parents navigate the tension between the neoliberal aspiration for success and the national need for survival?
The findings reveal a complex dialectic of integration and resistance, organized around four key themes: (1) The Trap of "No Choice": Contrary to the "rational choice" discourse, parents frame the enrollment in Jewish schools not as an ideological preference but as a default choice born of distress. The local Arab education system in the south is perceived as "catastrophic" and failing. Thus, the Jewish school becomes the "least bad option" to escape educational marginalization. (2) Education as a Weapon: Parents view academic success in the Jewish system as a "ticket" to admission into Israeli society. Education is metaphorically described as "our only weapon." It is perceived as the sole mechanism available for a minority to overcome structural exclusion and achieve personal security and class mobility. (3) The Hidden Cost: The pursuit of mobility extracts a heavy socio-emotional and cultural price. Children in Jewish schools face micro-aggressions, racism, and "symbolic violence" (e.g., facing national narratives on Independence Day). Parents report a deep heartbreak regarding their children's experiences of alienation ("I don't want to be an Arab") and the dissonance between the school's Zionist curriculum and their Palestinian identity. (4) The Home as a Space of Resistance: To mitigate the "identity cost", parents transform the domestic sphere into a site of active "identity repair". They employ strategies of "Narrative Inoculation": teaching Palestinian history (Nakba) to counter school erasure, supporting the acquisition of Arabic language at home, and creating religious and cultural anchors.

Ultimately, the paper argues that these parents bear a "Double Burden." They function simultaneously as agents of neoliberal social mobility (pushing for academic excellence in Hebrew) and as agents of national resilience (preserving Palestinian identity at home). Their story illustrates that for minorities in conflict zones, school choice is a "Faustian bargain," where the home must constantly compensate for the erasures of the school.