This study sets out to explore how efforts of social inclusion of Syrian refugees in school settings get interrupted and blocked by social, economic and cultural clashes between Turkish kids and Syrians. Towards this aim, schools were taken as sites for social friction while trying to understand how such friction were transferred from outside the school. While doing this, this study also probes the ways of which teachers, principals and parents negotiate between/across identities and conditions.

There are more than 3.4 million Syrian refugees, of which 1.5 million are school aged kids, living in Turkey. This is the biggest immigration phenomenon happened in such a short time throughout the entire human history. Syrian Refugees and their civic status in Turkey have been highly controversial. The involunteer migration of refugees from their home country could be temporary or permanent. After all, the changes in social fabric lead up to both inclusion and exclusion (He, Bettez & Levin 2017). Social exclusion means conflicts within the society, however social inclusion results in a new social order. Developing social order is possible with providing social inclusion of diverse groups. It can be asserted that social inclusion could be ensured both with policies of government and individual attempts of refugees and natives.

Refugees face several problems through educational processes such as language diversity, insufficiency of economic and cultural resources and frequently exclusion. While schools play a significant role in creating respectful, welcoming environments where holistic approaches to inclusion can be fostered and developed (Keddie 2011; Matthews 2008 cited in Uptin, Wright & Harwood, 2016), according to the latest statistics, 350 thousand migrant kids are still out of school (UNICEF, 2017). The Government of Turkey leads the overall crisis response in-country, and remains the largest provider of aid to Syrians. Nevertheless, Turkey and Turkish education system were not ready for such a huge number of people.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are mostly poor people, immigrated from the northern part of the Syria, the poorest part of the country. When they arrived Turkey, they had almost no money with them whatsoever and were entirely dependent on governmental aids. Only small percent of them (288.384) were able to stay in temporary shelters provided for them while more than 3 million are living outside the government run temporary shelters. Because of extreme poverty condition, their settlement patterns are formed correspondingly. In other words, most of the Syrians settled in rundown parts of the cities where many social, economic, infrastructural and political problems are already big issues. On the other side, where Syrians settled unemployment rates were extremely high and as local people living in those parts of the cities occupied jobs that require no skills at all. Most of the Syrians were also looking for jobs in unskilled labor market (Yıldırımalp, İslamoğlu & İyem, 2017; Çetin, 2016). And, this was the first, if not the biggest, clash between the local people and Syrians. Because, finding a job where unemployment rate is extremely high is not easy task. Syrians, thus, were began to seen as a threat. When Syrian kids were sent to schools, they were together with the kids whose parents are already in aggressive competition to get a job. Turkish families thought that existence of Syrian migrants in their neighborhood violated their rights in both educational and public sphere (Seydi, 2014). Turkish families did not want Syrian kids to attend the same school with their kids, and within their protests distinction and exclusion towards the migrants began to emerge in many parts of the country (Sönmez & Adıgüzel, 2017; Uzun & Özcan, 2017; Topkaya & Akdağ, 2016).

This research is designed as a case study research. This is because, case study design is particularly helpful when researchers want to develop holistic and in-depth understanding of certain phenomenon and where the boundaries of case and the context cannot be easily distinguished (Yin, 2009; Creswell, 2007). In this study, convenient sampling strategy were adopted as a sampling strategy (Frankel & Wallen, 2012). Therefore, schools in which Syrian refugees’ attending rates are higher than the other schools have been selected as a site for research. Schools are chosen conferring to data obtained from Ministry of National Education. Five middle schools located in Ankara, capital city of Turkey, were determined to conduct study. In total, five school principals, twelve teachers and ten parents were interviewed. Teachers whose classrooms have the highest number of Syrian refugees are chosen for interviews. Accordingly, parents of Turkish students were chosen from these classrooms. In addition to interviews, classroom and school observations were also conducted. To achieve this, each school was visited five times during the period of three months. A semi-structured interview forms were developed for teachers, principals and parents in full collaboration of the research team, pilot interviews were conducted for each group and analysed jointly by the research team in order to ensure that the data collection is trustworthy. After the necessary permissions were taken from the Ministry of National Education, interviews were conducted by three researchers. The interviews were recorded with the permission of the participants and the recordings were transcribed verbatim. Observations were made through an unstructured approach however; the themes were determined before going to the research site. Each visit bares different aspects of interaction between Syrian kids and Turkish kids. Data conducted from interviews were analysed through inductive coding in two coding cycles. In the first cycle; structural coding, descriptive coding and thematic coding strategies were employed. In the second cycle, (this cycle has not been done yet) pattern coding will be used to create themes for final report. In the second phase of the analysis, observation data and field notes were also coded. All data will be brought together for final analysis.

As the Syrian refugees are generally very poor and thus, have a very small budget, they have to find a place to live where they can effort at least the basic costs for survival. Not surprisingly, refugees are mostly located into the parts of cities where social, economic, political and infrastructural problems are the norms of daily life. In these parts of the cities unemployment rates are much higher than the other segments. Schools in these districts also take their share from such problems in the form of high rates of absenteeism, drop out, academic failure etc. According to our preliminary findings, fierce competition for job and quality education have naturally created a surface of friction between the local and Syrian people as both parties aspire for the same jobs (garbage collector, street vendor, house cleaner etc.) and schools. The condition that we named as social status anxiety is experienced by local people because they have difficulty of making sense of their civic identity (who they are for the country), as it was perceived, Syrian refugees, have same (in most cases more) social rights and governmental aids. We found that this friction reflects on the school settings as a clash between the kids of both parties and many schools have to deal with this problem as a major issue. Parents also get involved in this clash when aggression emerges against each other. This research also expects to find out how this clash is between groups reflects into classroom settings and how teachers and other school staff negotiate between the identities. Much efforts have been given to ensure that inclusive education was provided for the Syrian refugees however the clash between poor people sets very important blocks along the way. The study will discuss what this means for social inclusion.

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