Conference Agenda

The rapid arrival of refugees from Ukraine in 2022 compelled many European municipalities to establish temporary introductory provisions and transit-school arrangements at very short notice. Research on refugee education has moved from a focus on access and enrolment to examine safety, belonging, and educational participation, while leadership perspectives remain underexplored compared to those of teachers (Arar & Orucu, 2025; Aleghfeli et al., 2024). This paper addresses this gap by analysing how school leaders translated an under-specified mandate into local practice under crisis conditions, emphasising their focus on safety and inclusion to foster trust and reassurance among stakeholders.

The research question examines how Norwegian school leaders translate national expectations into local practices, while acknowledging that contextual factors, such as Norway's educational policies and refugee demographics, influence leadership approaches that may vary across settings.

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has the potential to contribute to positive transformations in society through its focus on global societal issues and values such as ethics, peace, solidarity, hope, equality, sustainability, and interculturality (Bourn, 2025; Cho & Mosselson, 2018; Le & Duong, 2023; Tarozzi, 2023; The United Nations, 2015). At the same time, there is consensus in GCE scholarship that the GCE discourse is dominated by Western and neoliberal hegemony, which focuses on people’s capacity to be productive and efficient members of society. On the other hand, many cultures and knowledges of the world are left out of the GCE discourse. In this vein, many scholars, including Pashby et al. (2020), Pashby and da Costa (2021) and Osler (2015), have argued that the GCE discourse should be decolonised, and that GCE should encompass pluralist approaches (Bosio and Waghid, 2023).

Many scholars also claim that GCE should consider culturally diverse civic youth identities, for such education to be inclusive, more relevant and epistemically just. This study offers a view on how engaging with culturally diverse and migrant youth in GCE scholarship can illuminate young people’s understanding of citizenship, global citizenship, their aspirations for civic participation, and education about citizenship and global citizenship. The research question relevant to this paper is: How can culturally diverse young people’s lived experiences and knowledges contribute to a more pluralistic GCE through educational research?

To answer this research question, this study followed the transformative paradigm (Hurtado, 2015; Mertens, 2025), informed by decoloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), to engage with culturally diverse youth, and enquire about their lived experiences and perspectives of citizenship, global citizenship and GCE. The transformative paradigm (Hurtado, 2015; Mertens, 2025) focuses on engaging with marginalised communities and people in nondominant cultural groups, challenging power structures, and advocating for social justice and positive social change. Decoloniality, mostly as discussed by Mignolo and Walsh (2018), informed the theoretical framework of the study, as it centres on the goals of epistemic reconstitution (Mignolo, 2021), or re-establishing justice and equality in the world’s knowledge systems. This theoretical framework supports the study’s intention to better understand culturally diverse young people’s views and lived experiences, which can enrich the education about citizenship and global citizenship, and make it more relevant to all students.

This paper includes the findings from the study that involved thirty-three culturally diverse and migrant young people between 15 and 25 years of age, mostly from Europe and Asia, and residing in Australia at the time of participating in the study. The findings offer rich insights into young people’s lived experiences of cultural and epistemic diversity, in relation to (global) citizenship identities and participation. Thus, it is argued in the paper that including young people in educational research is significant, as it can help to better understand their values, experiences, and aspirations. This improved understanding of culturally diverse young people’s civic identities and practices can contribute to creating a GCE that is more pluralistic, just and relevant to all students.

In recent years, border regions in Germany have increasingly attracted scholarly attention in educational research (Budde et al., forthcoming; Perlinger & Wischmann, 2025). This growing interest is evident both in debates on transnational European education in the context of school and curriculum development (Busch et al., 2025) and in linguistic research on multilingualism, language practices, and language policies in border contexts (Höder & Krämer, 2025). Borders and border regions are thus no longer merely treated as peripheral spaces, but as dynamic social and educational arenas in which migration, mobility, and transnationality intersect in specific ways (Gerrard & Sriprakash, 2018). The proximity to national borders can be framed as a pedagogical resource that enables cross-border cooperation, multilingual education, and European citizenship education. However, less attention has been paid to how such border proximity is interpreted, valued, and enacted in everyday school practice by teachers in border regions themselves (Rosen, forthcoming). This paper addresses this gap by focusing on schools located in the Franco-German border region and by examining teachers’ biographical perspectives on the relevance of the border (region) in their professional practice.

The guiding research question is: How is the Franco-German border region narratively made relevant—or rendered invisible—by teachers when reflecting on their everyday school practice, and what does this reveal about the possible formation of transnational(ised) educational spaces?

Conceptually, the paper draws on perspectives from transnational studies, also known as cross-border studies (Levitt & Khagram, 2008; Amelina et al., 2012), and migration studies in education (Gogolin & Pries, 2004). These perspectives typically aim to overcome the methodological nationalism inherent in educational research (Dale & Robertson, 2009) and to denaturalize the idea that school/ing in the context of globalisation and cross-border mobility can still be exclusively understood in a national frame. Schools and schooling in border regions appear as obvious choices for such denaturalizing work inspired from broader migration studies (see Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002). However, they are not to be understood as naturally transnational spaces simply because they are located in an area where border-crossings are a quasi-natural feature of social life. Instead, they are seen as socially and institutionally produced educational spaces whose relevance in relation to the border (crossing) depends primarily on in situ actors’ interpretations and practices (see also Kesper-Biermann, 2016, p. 93). The “transnationality” of educational spaces is not taken for granted or attributed from above, but becomes an empirical question. Its answer will depend on how, and in relation to what units and levels of analysis, “the transnational” is defined in the first place (Szakacs-Behling, 2022). In contrast to original conceptualisations of “transnational educational spaces” that consider only private cross-border educational offers (such as IB schools, or schools abroad) as genuinely “transnational” (e.g. Adick, 2018; Hornberg, 2014), we turn our analytical gaze to public schools located in a border region and examine them through a transnational lens. Beyond their organisational, structural and financial aspects (meso-level), we focus instead on the micro-level of interactions and investigate how participants in the everyday of schooling make sense of practices, symbols and artefacts making up the transnational social spaces opened by the border region (Pries, 2008) and thereby we fill the existing gaps in the literature on transnational education spaces with an emic perspective, emerging from the participants in social life themselves (Szakacs-Behling, forthcoming).

By focusing on teachers’ biographical sense-making, the paper highlights how transnational educational spaces—understood in their emic sense—are actively constructed, relativized, or selectively activated within schools, thereby contributing to ongoing debates on internationalization, social justice, and educational inequality in European border contexts.

This paper presents an ongoing biographical study on the school experiences of young adults of Chinese origin who grew up between China and Italy. My presentation will display the theoretical framework, the research design, and the first insights of such a study. The research focuses on individuals who experienced a transnational childhood, spending significant periods of their early childhood in Zhejiang Province, cared for by grandparents or by the extended family, before reuniting with their parents in Italy during childhood or early adolescence. These trajectories — marked by family separation, reunification, and by the educational and linguistic transitions — are subsequently analyzed through dynamics experienced within the Italian school system, where such prior transitions are re-elaborated and negotiated (Ardizzoni & Omodeo, 2022; Costantini, 2023; Marsden, 2015; Paciocco & Baldassar, 2017; Paciocco, 2018). The theoretical framework of this study is situated within the literature about transnational childhoods and youth (Baldassar et al., 2007; Bohr & Tse, 2009; Gao & Sacchetto, 2024; Fresnoza-Flot & Nagasaka, 2015; Lamas-Abraira, 2019, 2023; Liu et al., 2017; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2002), which highlights how mobility, separation, and family reunification contribute to redefining emotional relationships, identities, and educational pathways. Within this framework, school emerges as a crucial institutional space, as it represents the first space of encounter with the host society and of renegotiation of one’s own identity (Demetrio, Favaro, 1992; Moro, 2001; Fiorucci, 2020; Gobbo, 2000. Existing research on students of Chinese origin in Italy has highlighted dynamics of exclusion and othering, often interpreted through deficit-based frameworks (Cologna & Breveglieri, 2003; Ghisalberti, 2008; Paciocco, 2021; Omodeo, 2002; Scolaro, 2025; Segatto, 2023). The present contribution seeks to move beyond such interpretations by giving voice to and focusing on young people’s subjective narratives and the ways in which they attribute meaning to their school experiences over time. From an empirical perspective, the study is based on semi-structured biographical interviews (Bertaux, 2003; Bichi, 2022; Merrill & West, 2009) with young adults (18–31 years old) of Chinese origin who have experienced family reunification and who currently live in Italy. The biographical approach allows to explore educational trajectories from a retrospective point of view, empathizing moments of discontinuity such as migration, entry into or re-entry into the Italian school system, language learning, and the construction of relationships with peers and teachers. The analysis pays particular attention to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, peer relationships, processes of language learning, and the negotiation of cultural and linguistic identities in both formal and informal educational contexts. Moreover, the paper discusses the methodological choices guiding this specific research, grounded in a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus, 1995) as well as in the integration of digital materials drawn from online spaces frequented by the Chinese diaspora in Italy. This design opens to access spaces of interaction that, due to the exclusive use of the Chinese language, would otherwise remain unexplored. On the basis of the literature review, this contribution argues for the need to move beyond deficit-based readings of the school experiences of young people of Chinese origin, rather valuing transnational resources, adaptive capacities, and forms of agency that may emerge along their life trajectories. Finally, the contribution aims to open a broader reflection on how school systems can respond in a more inclusive and informed way to the complexity of transnational biographies. It acknowledges that schools often do not have access to the lived meanings of these trajectories and, therefore, struggle to adequately respond to their unique needs. By foregrounding young people’s voices, the research suggests that creating spaces of listening can be a key step in enabling schools and teachers to develop more aware practices.