Educational integration in Cúcuta, Colombia: Youth participatory action research with Colombian nationals and Venezuelan migrants

• In Event: Towards integration, inclusion, and belonging across the educational trajectory: Venezuelan migrants living and learning in a Latin American host countries

Proposal

Since 2015, a massive influx of Venezuelan migrants has arrived in different Latin American countries. The neighboring state of Colombia has become the main host country for this migrant population, with approximately 40% of this migratory crisis. About forty percent of the 2.8 million Venezuelans living in Colombia are children of school age seeking basic educational opportunities across borders. Despite Colombia’s “open-door policy” that allows school enrollment for all children regardless of migratory status, Venezuelan migrants widespread experience discrimination and xenophobia, including in schools. Schools located in the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia struggle to enroll, welcome, and support Venezuelan students in the context of ongoing border insecurity and political instability in Venezuela. This project grows out of school-based observations and dialogue with teachers and administrators expressing interest in developing school-level initiatives to support integration.

We designed and facilitated a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project with 16 students (8 Colombian nationals, 8 Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia) at a national school located in Cúcuta. The project seeks to educate and empower young people to analyze, critique, and transform their school context in support of multicultural/ multinational belonging. Together with teachers, we are in dialogue with young people who self-identify as displaced migrants or who value diversity and have a motivation to contribute to a more welcoming and inclusive school community. Biweekly sessions began in June, and will continue through November 2024. Our timing coincides with Venezuela’s fraudulent Presidential elections, integrating how young people involved in the YPAR supported one another during an acute moment of uncertainty and increased violence that brought on mixed emotions– enthusiasm for change, closely followed by disappointment, fear, and skepticism.

In this paper presentation, we will focus on students’ interests and motivations for joining the YPAR collaboration, as well as the ways that young people involved in this work have centered education as a key area of interest within a larger context of challenges to migrant integration. Youth are engaged in regular dialogue about cross-border conditions and how to counteract rising xenophobia towards Venezuelan migrants, mutual interests and practices that brought this group of young people together. The YPAR has become a critical space for fostering connections across national identity, contextualizing Venezuelans’ movement, reflecting on individual, intergroup, and school-level experiences, and inviting students’ impressions of how to better support newcomer migrants to Colombian schools.

Authors

• Michelle Bellino, University of Michigan- School of Education

• Marcela Ortiz, University of Michigan Ann Arbor