Educational participation of young refugees in the context of digitized settings

Abstract

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.