Search

After claiming asylum, refugee children work to re-build their worlds across three dimensions: safety, belonging, and success. This article examines the pedagogical practices that support this work arguing that a key, but under-examined practice draws on what we have termed pedagogical love. Building on a qualitative Finnish-Australian study, we suggest that as refugee students enter schools in their host countries, pedagogical love can be created through teacher-student interactions in a range of ways despite limited shared language. Later, pedagogical practices that foster a nurturing classroom environment and help students to build a sense of belonging become increasingly important. As students settle in their schools and societies, teachers showing a belief both in the child and their contribution to their new society are crucial. We understand that these actions may be described as teachers' professional duty of care. Yet our findings show that teachers went beyond this duty by opening their minds and hearts to the students' lived conditions, engaging with their histories, and constantly shaping their pedagogy accordingly. These practices, we argue, are forms of pedagogical love.

In this paper, we consider how young refugees in the Drawing Together project experience integration in Scotland. We critically examine the term 'refugee integration' and emphasise its multiple dimensions. Specifically, we analyse Scotland's role as a country committed to the protection and care of young refugees by mapping some key Scottish legal, political, social and cultural policies and strategies that provide the contexts for refugee integration as a mutual endeavour based on hospitality and reciprocity. Finally, we show the ways young refugees talk of rebuilding a life in Scotland that feels coherent in relation to their past and present circumstances, and their future plans despite the challenges that they encounter in their everyday lives. We suggest that a 'relational wellbeing' approach to integration in Scotland is tangible. It confirms the importance of the practical and social opportunities available to young refugees as they resettle. This approach extends the meaning of integration beyond its political and social categories, to include young refugees' attachment to their faith of origin as well as the natural environment of Scotland. In all, we suggest that young refugees face the challenges and use the opportunities for integration in Scotland in ways that are of sustained benefit, for them as well as Scotland as their new country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors outline the Drawing Together project, a three-year research programme funded by NordForsk, an organisation that provides funding to strengthen Nordic research. The project works alongside young refugees living in Scotland, Finland, and Norway to understand how young people build full and vibrant lives in their new countries, with a focus on mutuality, hospitality, and reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers memories, mementos, and memorialization in stories by unaccompanied young people and their journeys within Europe. It looks at their 'navigation' of remembering and forgetting and how this intertwines with movement and stillness. It is based on a study about Afghan males aged 15–24 years in Norway and Greece. Participants differed in terms of their backgrounds, migration projects, and their legal status. In their various circumstances, their narratives point to how memories unfold, are shared, must be negotiated, and sometimes, forgotten as they navigate towards a sense of safety and a sustainable future. They also point to how mementos may take different forms while on the move, as traces along the migration trail that have the potential to become part of the memories of others who come across them. Finally, their narratives point to practices of memorialization, and how they too are intimately connected to remembering and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how asylum-seeking girls in residential care in Finland construct their everyday lives while waiting for asylum outcomes. These girls, from various African countries, are shown to experience waiting as both debilitating and productive. First, our findings confirm the established picture of asylum-seeking young people being in limbo, unable to influence the resolution of their claims. Second, we explore more hopeful ways in which they wait. We emphasize the complex responses and relationships they build in waiting times with each other and their carers. We suggest that waiting is not just 'dead' time, but is also lively in periods of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]