This article investigates children’s participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children’s own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wanting to be cared for by adults were flexible, allowing the children’s movement within and between the categories.

After claiming asylum, refugee children work to re-build their worlds across three dimensions: safety, belonging, and success. This article examines the pedagogical practices that support this work arguing that a key, but under-examined practice draws on what we have termed pedagogical love. Building on a qualitative Finnish-Australian study, we suggest that as refugee students enter schools in their host countries, pedagogical love can be created through teacher-student interactions in a range of ways despite limited shared language. Later, pedagogical practices that foster a nurturing classroom environment and help students to build a sense of belonging become increasingly important. As students settle in their schools and societies, teachers showing a belief both in the child and their contribution to their new society are crucial. We understand that these actions may be described as teachers’ professional duty of care. Yet our findings show that teachers went beyond this duty by opening their minds and hearts to the students’ lived conditions, engaging with their histories, and constantly shaping their pedagogy accordingly. These practices, we argue, are forms of pedagogical love.

From a normative perspective, education serves a double purpose, that is, to prepare students to live well in a world worth living in. The practices of educational leadership are crucial elements in achieving this telos. In this article, we reimagine leading practices as pedagogical love, orchestrating conditions which enable refugee students’ academic achievements and overall school wellbeing. The article draws on a large, parallel case study which examined refugee education in Finland and Australia. The data used for this article consists of interviews with a leadership team in an Australian primary school. We argue that educational leading as pedagogical love needs to be reimagined as a co-constructed praxis between refugee children and educators, and that it can be enabled by a well-thought through combination of philosophy and practice. We suggest leadership practices as pedagogical love may disrupt the drive toward standardized curricula with its emphasis on performativity and testing. Exploring leading as pedagogical love allows us to show how love as a practice unfolds within the practice architectures of specific educational sites. As these practice architectures can be explored and theorized, they can also be transformed.

This article considers how asylum-seeking girls in residential care in Finland construct their everyday lives while waiting for asylum outcomes. These girls, from various African countries, are shown to experience waiting as both debilitating and productive. First, our findings confirm the established picture of asylum-seeking young people being in limbo, unable to influence the resolution of their claims. Second, we explore more hopeful ways in which they wait. We emphasize the complex responses and relationships they build in waiting times with each other and their carers. We suggest that waiting is not just ‘dead’ time, but is also lively in periods of uncertainty.

This article explores the social and historical formation of ‘successful’ refugee students’ learning practices utilising in-depth, critical incident interviews with primary school aged, refugee-background students in Australia. Employing a practice lens, this article firstly explores the informal learning practices the students identify from their past; secondly, examines the arrangements which hold these learning practices in place, and thirdly, explicates the ways in which these practices may enable students’ educational achievement in their current host country. We conclude that despite difficult starting points and educational gaps, many refugee students find ways to learn and succeed in school, but such achievement should not be a matter of serendipity. Inclusive schools must acknowledge not only the challenges in refugee students’ learning, but also the resources they bring into their education.

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper discusses how education can help to form a new generation of children, young people, and adults equipped for the new post-Corona world, and equipped to respond appropriately to the eco-crisis. This requires significant changes to existing arrangements of education systems. What is needed is new practice architectures – new conditions of possibility – under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth.