Schools and teachers as brokers of belonging for refugee-background young people

Together or separate? Tracing classroom pedagogies of (un)belonging for newcomer migrant pupils in two Austrian schools

“…Edgeworth and Santoro (2015), p. 423 call the 'pedagogies of belonging' teaching practices that construct all students as belonging to a school community. Teachers are key actors in this since they design and enact (un)belonging in the classroom via their curricular, pedagogical, and social practices (Edgeworth and Santoro, 2015;Comber and Woods, 2018;Dadvand and Cuervo, 2019;Anderson et al, 2023). In other words, teachers' pedagogical decisions and practices in how they organize social and curricular learning may set conditions for newcomer migrant students to feel (un)belonging (Comber and Woods, 2018;Picton and Banfield, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, while policy and practice strongly emphasize the need to finding 'solutions' to best support the language of schooling, the maintenance of home languages is somewhat overlooked (Rodríguez-Izquierdo and Darmody, 2019). As noted above, these dilemmas that policy-makers and school practitioners articulate are overly one-sided, and newcomer migrant youth emphasize the importance of both being able to effectively learn the language of schooling while seeing one's cultural and linguistic knowledges reflected in schools (Anderson et al, 2023;Martin et al, 2023).…”

“…Therefore, educational policy and school practitioners continue to face the dilemma of how to support curricular learning, which predominantly happens in the language of schooling, while creating an environment that builds on the diverse cultures, languages and knowledges that pupils bring to teaching and learning (Omidire, 2019;Hudson et al, 2020). While this dilemma is often presented in policy discourses as a clash between two incompatible educational missions, studies with newcomer youth show that both are important for being able to develop a sense of school belonging (Anderson et al, 2023;Martin et al, 2023). These insights indicate that the policy dilemma may reflect an artificially juxtaposed binary, and that both need to be addressed in teachers' classroom practices.…”

Reading Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education Diffractively: Transdisciplinary Exploration of Matters That Matter and Matter That Matters in Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education

“…In the U.S., where I am situated geopolitically and through my teacher-scholar-leader-learner experience, the 1982 Plyler v. Doe federal court case established that states cannot deny any child a free, public education regardless of immigration status, thus mandating full "inclusion" of refugee/(im)migrant learners in public schools. As many scholars and practitioners have noted (e.g., Bajaj et al 2023;Koyama and Turan 2023;Manning et al 2022;Mendenhall et al 2017a), however, policies and practices of dis/unbelonging, inequities in experience and outcomes, lack of appropriate and adequate resources, and limited preparation for teachers, school leaders, counselors, social workers, and other school and district staff means that disparities in refugee/(im)migrant education are pervasive (e.g., Anderson et al 2023;Hos 2020;Sugarman and Geary 2018;Umansky and Avelar 2023;Vigil and Lopez 2020). These are matters-concerns and issues-that matter in refugee/(im)migrant education.…”