Abstract:

In the current health crisis, educational systems around the world are having to adapt to enormous change, such as the suspension of face-to-face activities that has affected more than 1,450 million students at all educational levels. As many reports show (World Bank, 2020a; Inter-American Development Bank, 2020; Paz, 2020; OECD, 2020; Human Rights Watch, 2021; Casanova Cardiel, 2020) the pandemic is likely to have a disproportionate impact on immigrants, as they may be particularly vulnerable to direct and indirect consequences of this health crisis for many reasons: their living and working conditions, the lack of consideration of their cultural and linguistic diversity in service provision, xenophobia, their limited networks, local knowledge and access to rights in host communities, among others (Bertocchi and Dimico, 2020; World Bank, 2020b). This daunting panorama is accompanied by the growing “toxicity” of the immigration debate, with the pandemic being weaponised to spread anti-immigrant narratives (Banulescu-Bogdan et al., 2020; Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020; Guadagno, 2020) and the educational systems worldwide submerged in an affective economy of fear (Sara Ahmed, 2004).

This paper presents the first steps of an international research funded by the Spencer Foundation that explores a once-in-a-lifetime topic: the deepening of educational inequities affecting racialised and minoritised immigrants around the world in the context of COVID-19. It’s main aim is to help to understand, in real time, how the pandemic is affecting the education of these vulnerable groups in different parts of the world, capturing the complexity of this phenomenon so as to enrich the vision provided by emergent research on this topic, which mostly follows a panoramic and quantitative view but misses the nuances and textures of the pandemic as a ‘lived experience’.

The research design is based on a transnational case study to be developed in six educational institutions located in five countries - Brazil, Malta, Spain, the United States of America, and Uruguay. Data collection and analysis will be following a dynamic-narrative approach using participatory research techniques, and will be organized in three main phases:
1) Case contextualisation, focuses on exploring narratives and discourses related to immigrants’ education in each context, particularly of legal and media discourses.
2) Case construction, based on participant observation and in-depth interviews carried out with immigrant students, local students, educators and other stakeholders relevant in each context (e.g school principals, counselors, advocates, families, representatives of local authorities), and
3) Co-creation of joint solutions to the problem of racism and inequality in education through the organisation of local and international participatory workshops to involve the educational community in discussing the study results and make policies and practice propositions based on them. In this communication we will explain the methodological design of the project and share the preliminary results of the first phase of discourse analysis.

Keywords:

Education equity, migration, diversity, COVID-19 pandemic, narrative research, transnational case study.