Due to the state of war in Ukraine, since February 24th, 2022, a large number of refugees have arrived in Hungary. A significant part of them came with their families or followed their father, who had already worked "outside" (meaning in Hungary), leaving behind the older generations whose task was to look after the former residences of the emigrants in the hope of the possible return of the young and middle-aged working population. They are mainly men between 18 and 60 and their families. When the armed conflict broke out, it was unknown how long it would last. Thus, some families decided to send their children to school in Hungary and not, or not only, to continue the 2021/22 academic year online in Ukrainian public education. In the end, they finished this year in their new schools.
Our research aims to examine the children's enrollment process into the Hungarian public education system and their experience with the change in their place of residence. The research methodology we follow is a participatory approach (Bodó et al. 2022, Buchholz et al. 2016, Svendsen 2018), given that we want to learn about children's experiences. Alongside researchers, the children's parents and teachers are involved in the research as participants. We gather data about the children in different ways (1) in the form of interviews with the children, (2) their parents and teachers narrate events from everyday interactions, in which they were participants; and also they retell and audio record stories narrated by the children; (3) they keep diary records; (4) they also make audio and video recordings at home and school.
In addition to the data collection, the participatory approach actively invites the participants to develop the research questions and their thematics, embrace and explore their own experiences and become inherent actors of the research.
Among the research subjects, there are four linguistically different groups. The children are between 5 and 10 years old.
- The common characteristics of the first group of children are that they all come from Transcarpathia and speak Hungarian.
- The second group includes children whose first language is Ukrainian. They do not speak Hungarian at all.
- In the third group, the children belong to the Russian minority in Ukraine.
- The other Russian-speaking group includes children born in a Russian-Ukrainian marriage who speak both languages equally.
From the grouping above, we can also see how the language and ethnic issues can appear in Ukraine in many different ways due to the country's multicultural situation. Thus in the present research, we explore, to the best of our ability and from as many perspectives as possible, but without claiming to be exhaustive, the outlined issues of school integration of refugees and those displaced by the war in Ukraine.
In this paper, we present the integration patterns that emerged in the first year of the research, which concentrates on the phenomenon of language use and school integration.
