Marta Warat
Migration Studies – Review of Polish Diaspora, Vol. 4 (182), 2021 (XLVII), pp. 7-22
https://doi.org/10.4467/25444972SMPP.21.049.14802The presented article focuses on two main objectives. On the one hand, it presents the complex and multifaceted issues of migrant children’s education from a theoretical perspective, which have a significant impact on the course of their integration process, their quality of life and their chances of a better future in the country of migration. We draw attention to the importance of migrant children from the perspective of a child-centred approach, which emphasises children’s agency and subjectivity, the importance of their voice, their experiences, as well as the mission of the school and the roles of the professionals (teachers, cultural mediators, social workers) working with them and influencing their integration success. We show the school as a space that is not only institutional, formal and oriented towards intercultural education, but also a relational space in which informal processes take place to shape the future of children, dependent on significant others but also on the educational system. On the other hand we refer mainly to the contribution of the research project Children Hybrid Identity (CHILD-UP) to formulate theoretical explanations about the visibility of migrant children, their agency in school, and to uncover empirical findings about their achievements, barriers, challenges. Although these are in various locations, in different schools and educational programmes, they nevertheless bring about changes in the structure of a class and the occurrence of important processes due to their ethnic and national, cultural, religious, and language context.
Marta Warat
Migration Studies – Review of Polish Diaspora, Vol. 4 (182), 2021 (XLVII), pp. 139-157
https://doi.org/10.4467/25444972SMPP.21.056.14809The aim of this article is to analyse how teachers experience, navigate and negotiate their daily work in Polish school with migrant children. We explore the title statement of one of the teachers we interviewed – we look at the teachers’ strategy of ‘doing everything with their own hands’. The data presented in the article comes from the quantitative and qualitative study conducted within the CHILD-UP project. The research was conducted in two different locations that allowed us to capture the diversity of migrant children in terms of their status and the specificity of working with them: in a large city in the south of Poland characterized by a significant influx of immigrants in recent years, and in the Lublin Province, where schools are attended mostly by refugee children from Centers for Foreigners. The article provides an analysis of teachers’ agency at three different interconnected levels: the macro level (public policies), the meso level (local community), and the micro level (specific schools and their community). We claim that teachers’ agency expressed by them in a constant search for new tools to support migrant children’s education and integration is shaped by complexities of social, economic and political factors produced by the school system in Poland.