Who knows? (De)legitimizing knowledges in a refugee-serving school

The project "Who knows?" is an ethnograpic study which investigates the legitimacy of knowledges in a rural Finnish school, where adults with refugee experience attend a two-year basic education program. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland (2020-2025, #332390).
students doing groupwork

Table of contents

Project duration
-
Core fields of research
Languages, culture and society
Learning, teaching and interaction
Research areas
Learning and interaction
Department
Department of Language and Communication Studies
Faculty
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Funding
Research Council of Finland

Project description

The project "Who knows?" investigates the legitimacy of knowledges in a Finnish refugee-serving school. The project will (a) generate empirical data to understand which knowledges surface in a school, (b) examine how these knowledges do (not) become legitimate in this context, (c) critically revisit the concept “funds of knowledge” (FoK), and (d) support teachers in challenging knowledge biases. The site for this ethnographic study is a rural Finnish community college that offers a two-year basic education program which is populated by adults with refugee experience from mostly Middle Eastern and African countries. Data includes 80 hours of classroom/school observations, 60 hours of classroom/school audio recordings, 40 open-ended interviews with students and staff, and 10 hours of audio recordings and observations from on-site, PI-led teacher training workshops. These data capture instances in which the legitimacy of knowledges is addressed, e.g. by both students and teachers referring to policies or norms, emphasizing information, positioning themselves in relation to knowledge, or evaluating knowledges. In three years of data collection we have observed one cycle of the school’s program and one teacher training course with four monthly sessions. By bringing together foci on epistemology, legitimacy, and critical pedagogy and by producing new empirical evidence, theorizing it against the backdrop of the commonly used FoK approach, and feeding findings back into the field (teacher workshops), the study will be empirically, theoretically, and socially impactful. Ultimately, it aims to be a step towards increased epistemic equity in educational settings.