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Teaching Forced Migrants in Czechia: Challenges of Diversity and Necessary Support Systems
Tereza Švadová, Jana Veličková, Alice Brychová, Petr Pytlík, Hana Svobodová
Masaryk university, Czech Republic (Czechia)
In 2022, the Czech Republic received the highest number of forcibly displaced persons from Ukraine per capita within the European Union (Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, 2022). As a consequence of these migration waves, more than 40,000 pupils of Ukrainian nationality enrolled in Czech primary schools within a single school year (StatIS 2021/2022–2022/2023, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports). The number of pupils and families experiencing psychological, economic, housing, and legal insecurity also increased (PAQ Research, 2022). The integration of pupils was further hindered by language barriers and limited system capacity, resulting in an uneven burden placed particularly on schools and teachers in regional capitals. This situation revealed previously underexamined mechanisms of exclusion operating at multiple levels of the Czech education system. The discussion focuses on the perspective of educational professionals, their need for further training and methodological support as key preconditions for providing quality support to pupils, and simultaneously raises questions regarding professional motivation and the financing of language and other forms of support. Building on these premises, the Czech part of an international project (with Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary) will be presented. This project examines the professionalisation of pre-service and in-service teachers working with forced migrant students in lower and upper secondary schools, as well as the resulting classroom diversity. It addresses the question of what teachers need in this field and how they would like to be educated or trained. Based on the findings, an online course will be developed to address the professional development needs of teachers in this field. Ten interviews were conducted: eight individual interviews with teachers and two focus groups – one on-site with six teachers and another online with six pre-service teachers. Initial findings indicate that teachers have a clear need for practical pedagogical strategies to ensure that classroom diversification benefits both forced migrants and Czech students. In particular, they emphasise the importance of individualised teaching that is sensitive to multilingualism, cultural diversity, and experiences of trauma, addressing the needs of students with migration experience. They also highlighted the need for a clearer comparison between the Czech educational system and curricula and those of students' countries of origin. At the system level, a need for a navigation guide to the infrastructure of available counselling facilities was mentioned. Last but not least, support instruments or strategies for teachers' wellbeing are also reported to be needed. An introduction to the newly developed training course for educators will be included in the presentation. Overall, the presentation aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary dialogue within the panel on how schools, particularly teachers, can more effectively respond to the overlapping challenges of diversity in democratic education systems, and how teacher education can better address teachers' needs in coping with this challenge.
