Nick Haswell

For unaccompanied young people, forced migration and resettlement take place within intersecting life transitions into new social, cultural and environmental conditions. Previous research shows that peer networks provide crucial support for young refugees as they navigate through these transitions. This qualitative study used a practice-theoretical lens to better understand how friendships are made and participated in over time as young refugees build new lives in Finland. Using thematic interviews with young refugees on their past, present and future friendships, this study explores how changing conditions enable or constrain the practices through which friendships are maintained. Findings show that some friendship practices endured or evolved within changed conditions related to safety, gender, language, geography and technology. Findings also show that friendships made in residential care had continuing significance in young refugees’ adulthoods, suggesting that facilitating the development of these friendships has positive long-term implications for young refugees’ resettlement and well-being.

This chapter considers how “living well in a world worth living in” is imagined, replicated and lived in children’s free play. Drawing primarily on video data collected by 21 young migrant and refugee background primary school students in Finland and Australia, we consider what children’s play can reveal about a just, equitable and fair world in the present and in future, and how schools can support its development by providing the needed cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements for play. Our chapter shows that as children play, they not only create, simulate, and negotiate between themselves an imagined, future-oriented world worth living in for all, but also, through the real collaboration, empathy and care they develop and practise together, they bring that world into being.

Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee, miten Suomen kouluissa käsitellään pakolaisuuteen liittyviä aiheita ja pakolaistaustaisten oppilaiden kokemuksia. Artikkeli pohjautuu vuoden 2022 lopussa opettajilta, rehtoreilta ja koulunkäynninohjaajilta kerättyyn kyselyaineistoon (n = 267) ja kyselyä tarkentaviin puolistrukturoituihin opettajahaastatteluihin (n = 15). Tätä artikkelia varten on analysoitu kaksi kyselyn avokysymystä ja kaksi kysymystä opettajien haastatteluista. Tulokset osoittavat, että koulujen henkilökunta toivoo lisää tietoa ja koulutusta siitä, miten pakolaisuutta voi käsitellä iänmukaisesti, turvallisesti ja sensitiivisesti koulun arjessa. Useilla opettajilla oli pelko, että pakolaisuudesta puhuminen voi kuormittaa tai traumatisoida oppilaita. Vastauksissa korostuivat opettajien pyrkimykset rakentaa turvallista ilmapiiriä ja kohdella sekä pakolaisoppilaita että luokan muita oppilaita kunnioittavasti. Nämä pyrkimykset vaikuttivat siihen, miten opettajat lähestyivät pakolaisaiheita luokissa. Lähestymistavat jakautuivat kolmeen ryhmään, joita kutsumme tasapainoiluksi, tilan antamiseksi ja näkymätisöinniksi. Pakolaisuuden ja muiden vaikeiden aiheiden käsittely koulussa vaatii hyvää oppilaantuntemusta, sujuvaa tiedonkulkua, tarpeeksi pieniä ryhmäkokoja ja riittäviä työaikaresursseja. Ukrainan sota ja sotaa paenneiden oppilaiden siirtyminen perusopetuksen piiriin lisää aiheen ajankohtaisuutta suuressa osassa Suomen kouluja.

This paper explores the relationship between nature contact, wellbeing and belonging in the resettlement experiences of young refugees in Finland. Drawing on qualitative data, including participant-made artworks and semi-structured interviews, it explores the different ways refugees encounter nature in their past, present and (imagined) future. Using a relational wellbeing approach, the paper considers how subjective, material and relational dimensions of wellbeing arise and interrelate within refugees’ encounters with nature and how these encounters link with refugees’ developing sense of belonging to people and places in Finland. The paper describes how, in the context of refugee resettlement, nature encounters can foster a sense of belonging in three ways: through restoration and attachment in the present, through maintaining links with the past, and through shaping desires about a future in which to thrive. Considering refugees’ sense of belonging in Finland as part of the relational wellbeing generated, in part, from their encounters with nature, these three aspects of belonging represent particular interrelations between subjective, material and relational dimensions of refugees’ wellbeing.

The metaphor of navigation has been used to investigate the social and moral movements people make in changeable or fluctuating circumstances, as well as to shed light on the intersection of people, practices and the changing contexts and social forces around them. In this chapter, we first provide a short overview of navigation as a metaphor, and how the situations of young refugees might add to the multiple meanings of navigation. Using empirical data from the international NordForsk-funded project Drawing Together: Relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland, we explore how young refugees socially and morally navigate through the complex and unstable circumstances of building new lives and new social networks in host countries. Then, turning to our findings, we discuss how ‘living well’ involves not only movement towards individual goals, but also movement with, for the sake of, and in relation to important people locally and transnationally. We conclude the chapter by envisioning the destination of young refugees’ navigation as hinted at by the data: a world worth living in for all.

This article considers what students with a migrant background in Finnish comprehensive schools report as difficult, and how they succeed in overcoming these difficulties. We draw on two sets of school wellbeing and learning surveys for migrant students, conducted in 2016 and 2021 in comprehensive schools (grades 1–9) in and around two major cities in Finland. We pay attention to student answers to three questions: What is difficult in school? How do you succeed in difficult tasks in school? and Who helps you in school? The datasets from the two points in time are compared to see whether changes in school demographic situation and the student length of stay in Finland had an impact on student experiences. Our findings show that theory-based school subjects that depend strongly on language, such as science subjects, maths, Finnish, Swedish and English, are considered difficult. Additionally, interaction with peers, which also relies on language, causes challenges. The students report turning to teachers, other professionals and peers for assistance and support, and also mention personal strategies they have developed to overcome school-related difficulties. Understanding what migrant students find difficult, as well as how, and with the help of whom, they overcome such difficulties is crucial for the development of effective and sensitive pedagogical practices.

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper discusses how education can help to form a new generation of children, young people, and adults equipped for the new post-Corona world, and equipped to respond appropriately to the eco-crisis. This requires significant changes to existing arrangements of education systems. What is needed is new practice architectures – new conditions of possibility – under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth.