"My Mom Thanks You and Sends Her Regards as Well" – Pedagogical Process and Migrant Students During the COVID-19

Janja Žmavc, Sabina Autor and Alenka Gril

Summary:  The paper deals with the education of students from a migrant background during the Covid-19 epidemic in the spring of 2020 through a curricular perspective. It points out the problem of Slovene school policy documents at that time, which were mainly focused on the supplying of ICT equipment as an essential element of remote teaching, while curricular planning in the new conditions and dealing with vulnerable groups of children migrant students respectively were not a part of extensive treatment. The main part of the paper represents a qualitative survey involving 20 teachers and principals and migrant pupils and students. In analyzing their answers to three written open-ended questions about the course and specific approaches to the implementation of emergency remote teaching and the responses of participants in the pedagogical process, the paper focuses on changes of relevant factors in the implementation of the learning process for migrant students. The results of the analysis show a reduction of learning content, which, with more difficult-to-understand written instructions, technical limitations and specifics of home learning space, requires teachers to engage in dialogue directly via telephone or social media and agree to fluid teaching time. The learning process, which was limited mainly to the teaching of Slovene, could only start with the provision of basic moral and emotional support to migrant students and their parents who were left without contact with the Slovene language environment during the epidemic. The analysis points out how certain factors of teaching at a specific time influenced the decisions of teachers in their curricular planning, preparing and implementing the process and how these decisions marked the interaction between subjects directly or indirectly involved in teaching (teachers, students, school staff, parents), and recalls that even a »fragmentary interpretation« of a school situation always says something about current educational paradigms and the school system as a whole.