Instating settings of emergency education in Vienna: temporary schooling of pupils with forced migration backgrounds

Abstract

In the year 2015, Austria was one of the main European destinations of displaced persons. According to education authoritiesaround 15,000 children with a forced migration background of school age who arrived in Austria over the course of a few months from late2015 to the beginning of 2016 called for immediate and partly temporary solutions. Due to Austrian legislation and unlike other countries,every child living in Austria between the ages of six to fifteen (or for nine years of schooling) is entitled to receive compulsory education. Though the school administration of Vienna generally promotes an inclusive approach to education in regular schools, schools inneighbourhoods with a large refugee population were reportedly unable to provide appropriate and adequate education for all children. Inresponse, the local school authority in Vienna decided to establish temporary classrooms in refugee accommodations. This article describesand analyses the emergence of new educational structures from the point of view of university students and lecturers who took part in theone and a half years of its implementation. The article thereby aims to document specific perspectives on educational emergency measuresat a certain point of time. In both the primary and secondary sectors, the emergence of a new temporary field of specialised and exceptional education were observed and recorded in a thick description of dynamic processes of trans-institutional, trans-organisational, transprofessional, communal, and individual development. Thus, the article presents a multifaceted picture of problems in refugee education under exceptional circumstances. The findings illustrate how insufficient educational opportunities for those falling outside the age of compulsory schoolingin particular, preschool children as well as youth older than fifteendiminish possibilities for the inclusion of these children within and beyond education. ARTICLE HISTORY

Good Practice in Inclusive Education: Participatory Reinterpretation of Already Existing Elaborate Classroom Practices Under a UDL Perspective

“…Vienna has seen several phases of the migration of large groups from other countries in its recent history. With respect to the last phase of immigration, forms of emergency education even had to be rapidly setup in a question of months, as described by Proyer et al for the years 2016 and 2017 (Proyer et al, 2019).…”

Perspectives on Transitions in Refugee Education

“…This exclusion is multifactorial with diverse variables at the micro, meso, and macro-level. On the micro-level, refugee students face various transitions in accessing and sustaining education (Bešic et al 2020;Gunnþórsdóttir et al 2018;Panagiotopoulou & Rosen 2018;Proyer et al 2021). On the meso level, institutions are dependent on resources and political commitment Cruel et al 2017;.…”

“…Although international regulations promote refugee and inclusive education, in practice integrating, separating and exclusionary structures are evident in the five countries ). In the case of refugee students, Iceland and the UK promote mainstream education while the three other countries have different concepts for newly arrived students like preparatory classes (Dovigo et al 2020: 17;Proyer, Biewer, Kreuter & Weiß 2021;Thorud 2017). The concept of capability, mostly being able to understand and speak the national language, is used as the key criteria to measure students' inclusion level.…”

“…Due to the so-called EU refugee quota, the transition from one country to another is very likely to happen. In Austria, Denmark, and Norway, the transition from a segregated setting like reception classes into the mainstream school system causes change after the acclimatization in the receiving country (European Commission 2019: 83; Dovigo et al 2020: 17;Proyer, Biewer, Kreuter & Weiß 2021). It is also possible to transit several education systems within one country because in countries like Austria education is a matter of the federal state.…”

Teachers Supporting Students in Collaborative Ways—An Analysis of Collaborative Work Creating Supportive Learning Environments for Every Student in a School: Cases from Austria, Finland, Lithuania, and Poland

“…Vienna, in contrast to many other parts of Austria, is a culturally diverse city [56]. In the Integrated Learning Center Brigittenau (ILB), all classes are inclusive, multi-age classes, each containing four to five pupils with special educational needs and students from an immigrant background.…”