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

Sun, March 23, 9:45 to 11:00am, Palmer House, Floor: 7th Floor, Dearborn 2

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The Venezuelan humanitarian crisis has significantly impacted the Latin American region and forced more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to flee their country (R4V, n.d.). The lives and educational trajectories of children and young people experiencing displacement via “survival migration” (Betts, CITE) are profoundly disrupted. Displaced families may face administrative or bureaucratic barriers to school enrollment (e.g., Rodríguez-Gómez, 2019), have limited opportunities to access schools due to poor or insufficient school infrastructure (Cerna, 2019), experience the mismatch between language of instruction and mother tongue (Dvir et al.,2015; Alpaydin, 2017; Madziva & Thondhlana, 2017), and face unfair or denigrating treatment due to discriminatory or xenophobic practices (Bellino & Ortiz-Guerrero, 2023; Gou et al., 2019). These situations create explicit and implicit barriers to upholding the right to education for migrant young people. Many host country settings across the Latin American region have developed policy initiatives aimed at expanding educational access and formalizing rights for Venezuelan migrants.Individual schools and higher education institutions have also played a role in facilitating (and withholding) opportunities for young people’s learning and integration.
The concept of integration is widely used in refugee and im/migration studies, though its links to classic assimilation theory are associated with cultural and linguistic erasure and devaluation. Scholars have pointed to the lack of consensus on what integration entails, as well as how to measure, achieve, and sustain it (Strang & Ager, 2010; Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018; Hyndman, 2011). Within UNHCR’s framework of durable solutions, integration remains a formal mechanism, but states have intentionally avoided it, making integration a “forgotten solution” (Jacobsen, 2001; Hovil, 2014; Hovil & Maple, 2022).
How do discourses of integration and inclusion present in schools and higher educational spaces? To what extent do educational actors subvert the political avoidance of integration through systemic and everyday acts of welcoming? A sense of belonging is essential for young people’s academic and social development, but people do not feel belonging uniformly across all contexts in their lives. Can Venezuelan students feel a sense of belonging in schools, even if they experience unbelonging in their surrounding communities? Are institutional policies facilitating belonging along the educational trajectory of Venezuelan youth? Papers in this panel will explore the ways that educational institutions enable, construct, challenge, and complicate young people’s understandings of integration, inclusion, and belonging and their desires to achieve a sense of long-term connection to their host country. This will shed light on both the achievements and the challenges related to upholding the right to education to Venezuelan immigrant and refugee children and youth.
Papers in this panel draw on and contribute to multidirectional and multidimensional models of integration across domains, actors, and operating at multiple levels, emphasizing the role of host communities and institutions in shaping welcoming and inclusive environments (Castles et al., 2002; Phillimore, 2020; Van Hieu, 2008; Valtonen, 2004; Hynie, 2018). Phillimore (2020) emphasizes the importance of opportunity structures that enable and hinder integration for displaced peoples, encompassing locality/context of reception, media and public discourse, community attitudes and relations, supports, and immigration structures and policies (p. 1954). The work highlighted in this panel will center on different actors working across levels within the Latin American region, spanning basic to higher education, and exploring efforts amongst policymakers, teachers and administrators, parents and families, and young people themselves.

References
Alpaydin, Y. (2017). An analysis of educational policies for school-aged Syrian refugees in Turkey. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 5(9), 36-44.
Bellino, M. J. & Ortiz-Guerrero, M. (2023). “The Worst Thing That Could Happen to us but Unfortunately They Have Nowhere to Go”: Colombian students’ Contradictory Views on Venezuelan Migration, Democratic Crisis, and Xenophobia. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.
Cerna, L. (2019). Refugee education: Integration models and practices in OECD countries [OECD Education Working Papers No. 203]. Paris: OECD Directorate for Education and Skills.
Dvir, N., Aloni, N., & Harari, D. (2015). The dialectics of assimilation and multiculturalism: The case of children of refugees and migrant workers in the Bialik-Rogozin school, Tel Aviv. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 45(4), 568-588.
Gou, Y., Maitra, S., & Guo, S. (2019). “I Belong to Nowhere”: Syrian Refugee Children’s Perspectives on School Integration. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 14(1), 89-105.
Gryzmala-Kazlowska, A. & Phillimore, J. (2018). Introduction: Rethinking integration. New perspectives on adaptation and settlement in the era of super-diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(2), 179-196.
Hyndman, J. (2011). Resettled refugee integration in Canada. Centre for Refugee Studies, York University.
Hovil, L., & Maple, N. (2022). Local Integration: A Durable Solution in need of Restoration? Refugee Survey Quarterly, 41, 238–266
Madziva, R., & Thondhlana, J. (2017). Provision of Quality Education in the Context of Syrian Refugee Children in the UK: Opportunities and Challenges. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(6), 942-961.
Rodríguez-Gómez, D. (2019). Bureaucratic Encounters and the Quest for Educational Access among Colombian Refugees in Ecuador. Journal on Education in Emergencies, 5(1), 62-93.
R4V. (n.d.). Refugees and migrants from Venezuela.
Strang, A., & Ager, A. (2010). Refugee Integration: Emerging Trends and Remaining Agendas. Journal of Refugee Studies, 23(4), 589–607.

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