By Tuire Palonen and Tom Richardson Colleagues from Scotland, Sweden and Finland have been busy presenting results of TEAMS research to schools, in a variety of formats. The aim at all these events is to link the TEAMS project to the professional context of the teaching staff – to make the discussions about TEAMS (how […]
In order to understand at the policy level how school communities should work to promote integration of pupils with migrant backgrounds, TEAMS studied the educational policy documents that frame and guide teaching and learning practices in Finland, Sweden, and Scotland.
The vast majority of Ukrainian refugees are women and children, many of school age. This new wave of refugees exacerbates an already accelerated rise in the number of migrants globally as people continue to move for economic reasons or to escape natural disasters and conflict.
A growing number of learners are participating in instruction through their second or additional language. This challenges teachers to consider their practices in supporting the knowledge construction, both in the language of schooling and with the rich multilingual resources brought to classroom interaction by the learners.
In two previous blog articles, Marc Sarazin and Tuire Palonen discussed the importance of studying collaboration networks in schools. The fundamental idea is that the collaborative relationships between actors in schools (teachers, administrators, parents, counsellors, etc.) and the patterns they form make a difference in the school outcomes and experiences of students, including those from migrant backgrounds as we postulate in the TEAMS project.
Teachers and other school staff members have faced huge changes and requirements in their work like technology-enhanced learning and teaching, globalisation and multiculturalism, and most lately the challenges raised by the global pandemic. These recent and partly unexpected challenges have increased the demands and pressures for school staff members’ daily work even further than their initially demanding work.
Sweden has a long history of being a country that receives immigrants from many different parts of the world. Education of these migrants, especially children of school age, has been seen as an integral part of migrant integration and the challenges and opportunities they face have been the topic for different research areas.
Diversification has increased in Finland for the last three decades. The proportion of people who have a foreign background is still smaller than many other European countries, but changes can be seen in Finnish society and everyday discussions.
