Educational participation of young refugees in the context of digitized settings

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the educational participation of young refugees in the context of digitalized settings. Education policies often consider digital media beneficial for the educational participation of disadvantaged groups, or vulnerable groups facing many challenges in education and society, such as young people with a forced migration background. Moreover, digital media are highly relevant in the everyday lives of young refugees. Our 3-5-year (02/2019-07/2022) research project focuses on the trans-organizational orientation occurring in different everyday media-permeated life contexts of young refugees, which includes the formal educational setting of school, the non-formal setting of child and youth welfare, and informal contexts in the everyday life of young refugees. Through combining grounded theory, ethnography, and neo-praxeological methodologies, organizational cross-connections and cross-relations were revealed in practices and arrangements, involving digital artifacts as well as human actors. This article presents methodological insights into distributed educational practices concerning understanding information, acquiring knowledge, and developing agency in which digital media are implicated. Emerging dimensions of educational inequalities within digitalized educational contexts, which became apparent during lockdown periods in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• digital media
• practices
• inequality
• education
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank Antonia Dold, Felix Lemke, Till Mülheims, and Ulla Taha for their excellent work in the project, which helped in developing the findings presented here. Our greatest thank you goes to the young refugees who let us participate in their everyday lives and shared major aspects of their lives, as well as to the institutions and professionals working with them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 01JD1824A/01 JD1824B.

Notes on contributors

Nadia Kutscher

Nadia Kutscher is a full professor at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on digital inequality in the context of childhood, youth, and families and the digitization of social work and education (Bildung), including ethical issues of digitality, refugees’ media use, perspectives of parents and children on sharenting and digitality in early childhood institutions.

Jana Hüttmann

Jana Hüttmann (M.A., Assistant Researcher at Leuphana University of Lüneburg) researches educational participation of refugee teenagers in the context of digital media. Her focal interests include (forced) migration, transnational families, education and (social) participation.

Michi S. Fujii

Michi S. Fujii is an assistant researcher at the University of Cologne. His primary research areas include (forced) migration, digital media, education, and practice theory.

Niko Pepe Engfer

Niko Pepe Engfer is a postgraduate student in business education and sports for vocational education at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and works as a student assistant at the Institute of Educational Sciences.

Henrike Friedrichs-Liesenkötter

Henrike Friedrichs-Liesenkötter is a junior professor at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. She focuses on media pedagogical issues concerning education and socialization, such as the participation of refugees in the context of digitization and the use of digital media in the transition from childhood to adolescence or early childhood within media education.