2024: A Year in Review - Celebrating our Achievements and Looking to the Future

Elżbieta M. Goździak is reflecting on our accomplishments and challenges in 2024

Schools are empty at the moment as students and teachers enjoy a welcomed holiday break. Our team is also enjoying much deserved vacation, but I decided to reflect on our accomplishments and challenges in 2024 before the holidays end.

Fieldwork

We have completed hundreds of interviews with children, parents, teachers, school principals, and child advocates. In many instances these interviews were accompanied by participant observations as we attended meetings organized by schools and civil society organizations, participated in events held at schools and extracurricular programs, and took walks with high school students showing us around their neighborhoods.

We are very grateful to all the children who met with us to discuss their experiences in Polish schools and narrated ways of belonging within the school community and beyond. We listened carefully to accounts of the ways they integrated into their classrooms and to stories about exclusion. Sadly, integration into new schools and communities is not aways easy and some children experienced challenges to find ways to belong. We also appreciate the time parents and educators spent with our team members talking about their own perspectives on integration of migrant children in Polish primary and secondary schools. We collected rich data and continue to analyze them now.

Despite collecting lots of interesting information, our fieldwork was not without its own challenges. As seasoned anthropologists, we were trained to spend prolonged periods of time in the field aspiring to the "deep hanging out," an ethnographic research methodology first mentioned by Renato Rosaldo and picked up by James Clifford in “Anthropology and/as Travel.” Clifford used the term to critique approaches to ethnographic fieldwork which seemingly lacked methodological rigor. In a widely read 1998 essay in The New York Review of Books, Geertz reflects on Clifford’s ideas about ethnographic methodology in an essay which made more widely known the phrase, “deep hanging out.”

For our research team, "deep hanging out" was not always possible, especially in schools as spending time in classrooms required too many permissions from school principals and the board of education. Dealing with the red tape would have taken too much time. The children and their parents who agreed to participate in our study were very busy and spending long periods of time with them was also not feasible, although, on occasion we were invited to their homes to share a snack. Without the ability for "deep hanging," we relied on scheduled "interview moments" that fit the busy lives of migrant children, their parents, and educators.

In the original design of this study, I emphasized the use of innovative data collection techniques – short films, photography, journaling, daily texts, drama – to accommodate the young students’ modes of communication – along with interviews and focus group discussions facilitated by the interdisciplinary research team and led by older migrant children. We managed to use texting and WhatsUp messaging as modes of frequent communication but art projects or mapping exercises have not happened yet. It is challenging to get a group of children together to do any kind of group activity. School children are busy in the afternoons doing homework or attending extracurricular activities.

Looking forward, we will try to arrange more of these unconventional data gathering activities. Inspired by the approach by Carolyn Steedman in The Tidy House (1982) and Wendy Ewald in Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999 (2000),our post-doctoral researcher, Katarzyna, plans to listen in, record ,and follow migrant children’s conversations and creative linguistic re-fashioning of a poem by the Ukrainian-Czech poet Marie Iljašenko. She plans to share the poem with the children in three language versions – the original Czech, and its Polish and English translation by professional poet-translators, with the possibility of further fractalization of the text through spontaneous acts of translation by children into their (m)other tongues.

Publications

While we will continue to collect data, we already have some preliminary findings that have been published in a variety of academic journals.

Our newest publication has been authored by Larysa Sugay and Elżbieta M. Goździak who write about Heritage language preservation among migrant children in Poznań and Wrocław from the emic and etic perspectives.

Earlier in 2024, Elżbieta M. Goździak and Anzhela Popyk published a paper in Human Organization, the flagship journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). In this paper, they examine bordering, a process of socio-cultural exclusion, in Polish schools. Migration scholars discuss bordering mainly in relation to how immigration status can prevent migrants from accessing public services. In Poland, children regardless of their immigration status have access to free public education, but this does not necessarily mean that foreign-born children are accepted by their classmates and feel that they belong to the school community. In this article, the authors look at education as a bordering practice that excludes migrant children from full integration into Polish schools. Using ethnographic data, they identified borders present in educational spaces and analyzed their social, material, epistemological, and political effects. Thei analysis centered on places and actors involved in re/bordering public education in Poznań and Wrocław. We show that schools are important spaces for building social relationships and facilitating integration, but they also become places of exclusion.

Another member of our team, Wiktoria Moritz-Leśniak, published an article about the experiences of parents ( Zróżnicowanie doświadczeń rodzicielskich w grupie migrantów) and their parenting successes and challenges in the context of migration and moblity. Wiktoria reviewed Polish as well as international research related to families with migration experience, with a particular focus on parental experiences. In her article, she attempted to systematize research and theories related to specific aspects of migrant parents’ experience. Based on emergent categorization, the paper then proceeds with an analysis of mothers’ and fathers’ roles and their parenting practices.

Looking forward

We have several papers accepted for publication or in various stages of reviews as well as many more ideas we would like to share with migration and education experts and policy-makers. The challenge is to balance our desire to collect more data and meet many more interesting interlocutors--children and adults--and publish our findings in a timely fashion. Despite a proliferation of migration journals, competition remains stiff, especially for doctoral students just beginning their academic careers, but even for the more senior scholars there are many challenges related to lengthy review processes; reviewers providing contradictory suggestions that are hard to reconcile; not to mention Reviewer #2!

But just like Maria in the Sound of Music I have confidence in us!