Research
“I Never Want to Lose That Key”: on school as an opportunity structure for unaccompanied refugee children in Sweden
Authors:
Farhad Jahanmahan ,
Department for Children and Youth Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, SE
Mats Trondman
Department of Cultural Sociology, Linnaeus University, Växjö, SE
Abstract
In recent years, a large number of refugee children have arrived in Sweden. In this article, 15 Afghan boys tell us about their normative longing for education and schooling (should), their experiences of school as an opportunity structure (being) and the resilience of their personal agency as regards succeeding in school (doing). Our empirical data indicate that, particularly thanks to the efforts of many individual teachers, the boys’ should, being and doing are connected and relatively strong. Nevertheless, school as an opportunity structure also entails challenges: an overly one-sided concentration on the Swedish language as well as frequent absence of multilingual classroom assistants, native language instruction, and inclusion. At the same time, the boys long for and work hard to achieve school success. Strong resilience is not individual, however; it works in connection with a preserved should and a strongly developed, activating being.
How to Cite:
Jahanmahan, F. and Trondman, M., 2020. “I Never Want to Lose That Key”: on school as an opportunity structure for unaccompanied refugee children in Sweden. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 10(1), pp.69–86. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2478/njmr-2019-0027
Published on
01 Mar 2020.
Peer Reviewed
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