Forced migration is an increasingly significant global issue with over 84 million forcible displaced people recorded in 2021 (UNHCR 2021). These numbers are especially significant within the context of a pandemic which has ostensibly closed borders and restricted movement. Schools located in communities within destination contexts across Europe have faced the realities of the inequities of daily life for their students which the pandemic has highlighted, inequities which are especially magnified for marginalised children such as young refugees. Our focus in this presentation is on practitioners working in schools within such communities.
Teachers of refugee children in European classrooms are caught between competing discourses of inclusion and performativity. Whilst international agreements about the right to a quality inclusive education for refugee children, such as SDG 4, are part of global policies which nation states have signed up to, at the local level, teachers in European classrooms navigate an increased standardisation agenda reliant on pupil performance and high stakes testing. This presentation seeks to answer the question ‘How can we integrate the global imperative for an inclusive educational response to refugee children at the local level where there are competing agendas?’ Our research is in Sweden and England, most recently as schools and teachers adjust to life during the pandemic- arguably a time when the need for an inclusive approach for refugee children is intensified.
Previously our work with teachers and school leaders in England and Sweden led to a co-constructed holistic inclusive model of refugee education (McIntyre and Neuhaus 2021). This theoretical model had its roots in the confluence of Ravi Kohli’s ‘resumption of ordinary life’ (2011, 2014) and Nancy Fraser’s ‘participatory parity’ (2003). The interdependence of the two theoretical framings had resonance with our practitioners who viewed the model not as an abstraction but as a practical tool to be used in planning and operationalizing the ethics of inclusive education for their refugee pupils. The emerging model of inclusive practice for refugee pupils has been subsequently modified and trialled in case study schools in the English context (McIntyre and Abrams 2021).
Currently, our empirical work is a study of how the model works at the local level in schools in Sweden within a global context of dislocation resulting from both the ongoing pandemic and continued conflicts and humanitarian crises leading to arrival of more forcibly displaced children and young people into Europe. At the same time there is national pressure for schools to make up for ‘lost learning’ due to the pandemic and the increased accountability required to measure this. The teachers are caught within the tensions of meeting top-down global and national demands of seemingly contradictory discourses of equity and standardised measures of pupil performance, whilst also navigating their own individual moral endeavours to meet the needs of the children whose journeys of forced migration have seemingly ended in their classrooms.
The work reported here responds to the challenge of shaping research that has the potential to improve education provision for refugee children. We also report on our reflections about the ways in which our research methods are heavily dependent upon relational trust and the need to understand local and place-specific contexts. This has created specific challenges when working within a context of waves of lockdowns and restrictions as both country-sites responded to the pandemic at often asynchronous times, during the period of the research.
The project was funded by the Open Societies Foundation and our aim is to establish the utility of pedagogical tools arising from the theoretical model for both school leaders and teachers working in schools with pupils from refugee backgrounds and for teacher training.
