This article considers what students with a migrant background in Finnish comprehensive schools report as difficult, and how they succeed in overcoming these difficulties. We draw on two sets of school wellbeing and learning surveys for migrant students, conducted in 2016 and 2021 in comprehensive schools (grades 1–9) in and around two major cities in Finland. We pay attention to student answers to three questions: What is difficult in school? How do you succeed in difficult tasks in school? and Who helps you in school? The datasets from the two points in time are compared to see whether changes in school demographic situation and the student length of stay in Finland had an impact on student experiences. Our findings show that theory-based school subjects that depend strongly on language, such as science subjects, maths, Finnish, Swedish and English, are considered difficult. Additionally, interaction with peers, which also relies on language, causes challenges. The students report turning to teachers, other professionals and peers for assistance and support, and also mention personal strategies they have developed to overcome school-related difficulties. Understanding what migrant students find difficult, as well as how, and with the help of whom, they overcome such difficulties is crucial for the development of effective and sensitive pedagogical practices.
The metaphor of navigation has been used to investigate the social and moral movements people make in changeable or fluctuating circumstances, as well as to shed light on the intersection of people, practices and the changing contexts and social forces around them. In this chapter, we first provide a short overview of navigation as a metaphor, and how the situations of young refugees might add to the multiple meanings of navigation. Using empirical data from the international NordForsk-funded project Drawing Together: Relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland, we explore how young refugees socially and morally navigate through the complex and unstable circumstances of building new lives and new social networks in host countries. Then, turning to our findings, we discuss how ‘living well’ involves not only movement towards individual goals, but also movement with, for the sake of, and in relation to important people locally and transnationally. We conclude the chapter by envisioning the destination of young refugees’ navigation as hinted at by the data: a world worth living in for all.
This article explores a child-led project of building a treehouse through the theory of practice architectures. It draws on video data collected by 13 children wearing microcameras (GoPro) in a multicultural Australian primary school. The data was co-analysed with the children. The article illuminates how play practices emerge, diffuse, persist and/or disappear with time. This knowledge is needed to understand the different facets of free play and build enabling conditions for its unfolding.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.