Session Information
31 SES 02 B, Comparative Perspectives on the Academic Integration of Newly Arrived Migrant Students in Canada, Finland, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands
Panel Discussion
Contribution
This panel discussion examines the social and academic integration of newly arrived migrant children and youth in Canada, Norway, Finland, Belgium and The Netherlands. It provides multiple perspectives on the results of a survey of educators who work with newly arrived migrant students in these countries, including the role of community agencies in the educational integration of refugees. Further, it examines promising practices for integrating newly arrived migrant students in primary and secondary schools.
In 2017, more than 700,000 and more than 23,000 individuals applied for asylum in Europe and Canada, respectively. Importantly, a high percentage of this population constituted of minors (i.e., around 40 % in The Netherlands). This has important ramifications for education. European and Canadian legislation mandates that every minor should have access to education in the host country offered under the same conditions as nationals (Papademetriou, 2014). However, despite these regulations, there is considerable variability in the educational opportunities for these students across the EU and Canada (Le Pichon-Vorstman, in press). As such, we developed a survey that reflect the socio-political and educational contexts of Canada, Belgium, Finland, Norway and The Netherlands to find out about educators’ perspectives on the social and academic integration of newly arrived students. We explored the practices, successes and challenges of educators working with newly arrived, including refugee children. As school policies play a key role in the inclusion process of these students and their families, our survey explored the perspectives of educators on their social and academic integration and, to what extent, they adhered or distanced themselves from local political ideologies.
As such, the four panellists provide a comparative perspective on the educational integration of newly arrived migrant students in Canada, Finland, Norway, Belgium and The Netherlands as well as make recommendations for teachers and teacher educators related to the inclusion of these students in schools. This research is embedded in a larger study focussed on the social and academic integration of Syrian refugees (SAISYR) funded by the Canadian government. The papers in this panel provide multiple perspectives on the integration of newly arrived migrant students. The significance of this research stems from the comparative perspectives it provides on the realities of the integration of newly arrived migrants in schools in a world of ever increasing migration, and the implications for teachers and teacher education for the creation of inclusive spaces for them.Our goal is to stimulate debate among attendees on the integration of newly arrived migrant students in schools and related implications through our brief presentations. We will contribute to the conversation by providing different perspectives on the topic based on our research on teacher education and identity-focussed pedagogies for linguistically and culturally diverse students.
References
Connor, P. (2018). Most displaced Syrians are in the Middle East, and about a million are in Europe. Fact Tank News in the Numbers, Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled/ Le Pichon- Vorstman, E. (In Press). The schooling of asylum seekers and refugees. In Gogolin, Hansen, Leseman, McMonagle and Rauch. Multilingualism and Language Education. Papademetriou, T. (2014). European Union: Status of Unaccompanied Children Arriving at the EU Borders. The Law Library of Congress, 1-17. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/unaccompanied-children/status-of-unaccompanied-children-arriving-at-the-eu-borders.pdf
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.