“We Do Everything with Our Own Hands” – Everyday Experiences of Teachers Working with Migrant Children in Poland

Abstract

The 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.