This article focuses the educational settings in the everyday life of young refugees in the context of distance education under the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. It explores dimensions and intensifications of education-related digital inequality during this period in formal and non-formal educational settings. Based on ethnographic interviews with teachers, young refugees and social workers, different dimensions of inequality as well as interrelations between informal (leisure), non-formal (child and youth welfare) and formal (school) educational contexts for empowering the educational participation of young refugees, especially regarding online learning, are discussed. The empirical data show that during the period of distance education the specific needs of young refugees are only taken into account to a limited extent and thus increasing risks of exclusion from education emerge. Lack of technical access, media expertise, language skills and personal support turn out to be major challenges in enabling educational participation of vulnerable groups such as young refugees. Therefore, educational policy at federal and national level in Germany needs to outline a scheme on how to meet these challenges by further developing non-formal as well as formal educational support structures.

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This paper presents an ongoing joint ethnographic research project by the University of Cologne and the Leuphana University Lüneburg, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), focusing the role of digital media in facilitating young refugees‘ educational participation (“Bildungsteilhabe Geflüchteter im Kontext digitalisierter Bildungsarrangements”, 2019-2022), The project aims at reconstructing factors that enable educational participation of young refugees in digitally-mediated educational environments. In three extended phases of ethnographic field work (participant observations) and artefact analyses of digital media in non-formal educational contexts such as youth welfare institutions (e.g. residental groups, pedagogical family assistance and youth-cafés) formal educational contexts (e.g. schools, vocational training etc.) and informal spaces (e.g. family, peer activities etc.) implicit and unplanned as well as explicit and pedagogically planned uses of digital media are focused. The central research question in this paper is what importance (if any) does digital media (such as social media sites, apps, smartphones, learning software etc.) have in the everyday life of young refugees when it comes to educational practices and coping in the everyday life. In this context, practices and their relation to aspects of unequal basic conditions (e.g. level of education) and digital inequalities (e.g. reproduction of disadvantages in media usage, differences in media experiences etc.) are analyzed. This paper presents the empirical work in progress focusing methodological and ethical challenges in research at the intersection of sensitive areas such as forced migration, youth welfare, private life and schooling.

Der vorliegende Beitrag rekonstruiert anhand ethnografischer Feldprotokolle die Bedingungen, unter denen sich hybride Praktiken der Alltagsbewältigung junger Geflüchteter unter Beteiligung digitaler Medien vollziehen. Anhand dreier ethnografischer Situationen werden exemplarisch Formen der Alltagsbewältigung zwischen informellen, non-formalen und formalen Arrangements herausgearbeitet. Die Entfaltung vielfach zugeschriebener Potenziale digitaler Medien erweist sich dabei als voraussetzungsvoll und erfordert diverse Einordnungs- und Transferleistungen, die sich vor dem Hintergrund der fluchtmigrationsspezifischen Situation als besondere Herausforderungen erweisen. Die Komplexität hybrider Praktiken und Arrangements, die Kontingenz von Bewältigungsgelingen und die Bedeutung institutionalisierten Verbindungskapitals werden dabei deutlich. So ist die Vermittlung zwischen den Optionalitäten digitaler Medien und den Voraussetzungen der Akteur*innen in den jeweiligen durch Hybridität geprägten Situationen besonders bedeutsam.