School leadership for inclusion and representations of migrant students in Chilean public schools

• In Event: New Dynamics of the Educational Integration of Survival Migrants in Latin America

Proposal

In Chile, classrooms with migrant students are a new phenomenon for public schools. For this reason, the country has updated its immigration and educational inclusion policy. However, these regulations have an administrative and instrumental focus, confusing inclusion with schooling (Alarcón-Leiva et al., 2020). This precarious understanding of the concept of inclusion is replicated in the everyday workings of schools, which focus on facilitating access for migrant students and generating welcoming instances (Jiménez-Vargas et al., 2020), without enabling socially fair and democratic pedagogical contexts (Aravena et al., 2019).
The role of school leaders is pivotal in making the inclusive actions of schools more complex, since they can influence both the creation of meaning (Coburn, 2005) and the transformation of cultures, organizational conditions, and teaching capacities (Zembylas & Iasonos, 2017). However, this will be conditioned by the way in which school leaders perceive migrant students, understand inclusion, and their role in it (Aravena et al., 2019).
Considering the above, the purpose of the study was to explore the representations of school leaders from Chilean public primary schools of migrant students, inclusion, and their role in inclusive processes. Through a study of multiple cases of purposeful sampling four schools were selected, in which two individual interviews with principals and pedagogical technical heads were conducted, as well as a group interview with said pair and a reflective workshop. The resulting information was analyzed using the constant comparative method from grounded theory.
The findings show that the interviewees perceive migrant students favorably, characterizing them as “extroverted”, “cheerful”, “communicative”, “with good manners”, “committed to learning”, “participative”, and “with good academic performance”. At the same time, they are identified as “socioeconomically vulnerable”, especially those who have migrated recently, which generates empathy in leaders.
Interviewees understand educational inclusion as the presence of migrant students in the establishment, and the recognition of cultural differences through exchanging activities of a folkloric nature (food fairs and typical dances).
For the interviewees, the role of the school leader in the inclusion of migrant students is merely one of welfare, and is made clear from the above perceptions. Given that these students are described as successful, and that the schools already carry out actions of cultural recognition, for these professionals their actions in areas other than the socioeconomic disadvantage of foreign families would not be critical.
These results report a significant gap with the current models of inclusive leadership, whose relevance lies in influencing the improvement of teaching and learning (Leithwood & Day, 2008), committing to the reduction of barriers that cause educational exclusion not only on a sociocultural level, but also on a pedagogical and participatory level (Ryan, 2016). Furthermore, inclusion policies are insufficient to produce transformations if the development of capacities within educational communities is not promoted, ones which are aligned with an intercultural representation of diversity (Alavez 2014; Echeita, 2013 cited in Aravena et al., 2019). Therefore, this study provides contextualized evidence on the phenomenon of leadership in schools with migrant presence, a budding line of research in Latin America.

Authors

• Carolina Cuéllar, Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez

• Camila Lizama Zamora

• Andrea Horn, Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez

• Rene Valdes, Universidad Andrés Bello