Refugee “calouros” during the Covid-19 pandemic: effects on Portuguese learning in higher education in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the problems faced by refugee students during the COVID-19 pandemic (summer semester 2020) as calouros, i.e. freshmen during their first year, in a public university in Brazil. Through a content analysis of their personal accounts, collected electronically by their teacher of Portuguese for academic purposes (the first author), we describe how five students (a Syrian, two Haitians, a Venezuelan and a Togolese refugees) (re)visit their experiences, in which several dynamics intersect: being ‘calouro’, being refugee students, learning the shelter language in loco, and experiencing social distancing due to the closing of universities. Because learning the language of the host country is not the only factor affected by the pandemic, we also observe how language learning (settings) intersect with other aspects characterising the refugee status: housing conditions, availability of learning materials, and the uncertainty attached to the present and future of their own lives and of other family members.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• Refugee students
• Intersectionality
• Portuguese as a shelter language
• Covid-19

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the first author, Bruna Ruano, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. The analysis covers the 14 weeks from March to June 2020 (i.e. the complete semester). It should be noted that by March 2020, the pandemic was already becoming a global issue, with the Federal University of Paraná closing on 13.03.2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruna Ruano

Bruna Ruano is currently a professor of Portuguese as a Foreign Language at the Faculty of Languages at the University Lumière Lyon 2 (France). She is a member of the interdisciplinary programme ”Migration Policy and Brazilian University”, linked to the Sérgio Vieira de Mello Chair (UNHCR), at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (Brazil).

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer is a full professor of foreign language teacher education (French and Spanish) at the Universität Hamburg (Germany).