Participation, Career Services and Displaced Learners at Higher Education: A Systematic Review

• In Event: Social Theory and Social Change

Proposal

Crises spanning all world regions have resulted in the highest number of displaced people worldwide since the end of the second world war (UNHCR, 2019). An influx of displaced learners has spurred the creation of services across Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), including preparatory language classes, buddy and mentoring programs, the opportunity to audit classes, and so forth (Unangst & Streitwieser, 2018). A nascent body of literature has begun to explore the experiences of displaced learners enrolled at HEIs and a separate but related grouping of literature compares institutional supports for workforce entry among displaced people with and without post secondary qualification. This paper considers a gap in the existing scholarship, probing attention to career pathways for tertiary-level displaced learners. Given that attention to career exploration/workplace transitions has been found to be important cross-nationally (e.g., Cheung & Arnold, 2014; Doyle, 2011), our systematic literature review represents new insight into how relevant programs and processes are being tailored by HEIs to serve diverse students with histories of displacement.

Method
This study is designed as a systematic review to comprehensively synthesize the existing literature (Petticrew & Roberts, 2016) and understand the frontiers in the field of higher education (HE) in the sense of displaced learners and career services and push the knowledge periphery even further, as indicated by Xiao and Watson (2019). To realize this fact empirically, we developed a systematic review protocol including the steps of the review process.

The focus of the review and definitions
This systematic review incorporates the accumulated knowledge on displaced learners’ participation in HE, available career services, and their transition to work life. The term participation is operationalized as active involvement in university life while career services refer to services provided by the university to guide students in their transition to work life. Lastly, the definition of the UNHCR (2023) for refugees who have been forced to leave their home country and cross an international border to find a secure place to live is a reference point, though we are cognizant that some learners are referred to as a “refugee” though they may in fact hold a temporary protected status.

This study pursues the following research questions that are both implicitly and explicitly addressed in the literature.

How does the existing scholarly and grey literature address displaced learners’ participation in HE and career support?
How does the existing scholarly and grey literature address displaced learners' transition to work?
How do career services support across the national contexts differ?

The following inclusion criteria covering the scope of the review, language, methodology, and type of studies, respectively, are utilized to identify the final corpus: (i)studies that focus on displaced learners’ experiences of participation in HE and transition to work-life and career services, (ii)studies published in English, German and Turkish, (iii)studies that utilize empirical data to provide evidence, (iv)various type of research including articles, book chapters, reports, and thesis. The published works that have methodological flaws, such as mismatches between study aims and the design, inappropriate sample selection, will be excluded from this review.

Search and identification process
As a guideline, the PRISMA statement will be implemented in this review to visualize and provide transparency in reporting of the existing literature. This statement includes a four stages flow diagram representing identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion (Moher et al., 2009).

Our search process includes two phases. In the first phase, we identified the keywords related to career services and transition to worklife, and created search strings in English. The relevant search string was translated into German and Turkish, and expert opinion was gathered for each. The search string was used to examine the literature in Scopus and Web of Science databases. In the identification process, the search was conducted in title, abstract, and keywords, and the related research was retrieved. There were only 41 hits in total in English with this identified search string. Since there were not adequate hits with these keywords and we would like to cover all related results about career services, we decided to expand the search string by adding other keywords such as participation, engagement, and experience in HE. We believe that these research may also steer us to find more results about career services practices in HEIs. With the expanded search string, there were 423 hits in the identification stage.

In the second phase, the search will be done in German and Turkish. Also, the initial corpus will be screened, and duplications will be removed in the second stage. For eligibility, the full text of the studies will be read, and the final decision will be made to include the works in the corpus.

Data analysis
A coding frame will be developed by the researchers to analyze the final corpus both inductively and deductively. The first stage will include a more descriptive perspective to map the accumulated knowledge in the field, such as displaced learners’ home countries, theoretical framework, and method. The second stage will be coded inductively based on the research results.

Quality assessment
As a last step of the protocol, quality will be assured through framing logical and practical inclusion and exclusion criteria, including high-quality research free from methodological bias, taking expert opinion, and including two researchers at each stage.

Significance


Displacement continues to unfold across the globe given climate crisis, political instability, and armed conflict; it is pervasive and persistent. Learners resettled in host countries will continue to pursue HE to support individual goals and well-being, and HEIs will continue to iterate services dependent on national context. Understanding how those same HEIs are considering the education-to-workplace trajectory and providing more-and-less resource intensive supports for displaced learners across the lifespan gestures towards the potential for industry partnership, alumni engagement, and, vitally, should be seen as locally and regionally specific. Our findings to date indicate several areas of study absent from the current literature: the direct role that funders have in structuring relevant supports, and vital questions around the terminology of policy liminality (displaced vs. dislocated, national vs. international).

Authors

• Sevgi Kaya-Kasikci, Boston College

• Lisa Unangst, SUNY Empire State University