In the first half of 2023, almost 170,000 Ukrainian children attended Polish schools and kindergartens. These pupils arrived in Poland after February 24, 2022. Despite the lack of preparation for this unprecedented situation and various institutional constraints, Polish schools tried their best to cope with the situation arising from the admission of Ukrainian pupils. They also provided care for them and their families. This would not have happened had it not been for the commitment and creativity of school principals, teachers, parents, local government officials, and representatives of NGOs working with schools. What were the driving factors behind these positive responses? How can they be strengthened? How can the education system support schools in this type of emergency?
Answers to these questions will come from the study conducted by Professor Michał Federowicz, from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Professor Serhii Terepyshchyi, from the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kyiv, funded by the grant FOR UKRAINE awarded by the Foundation for Polish Science.
“The mass migration of the Ukrainian population to Poland, starting from February 24, 2022, has brought unexpected challenges to the education sector. The spontaneous reactions to this situation of many people – volunteers and local government officials – are commendable, but the response of the Polish central authorities, especially in the field of education, was somewhat delayed and not always adequate. Schools and local communities were completely unprepared to receive such a huge influx of migrants, and certain institutional conditions and formal mechanisms even made it difficult to organize proper care for the new pupils. In particular, children who were traumatically uprooted from their homeland due to the invasion of the Russian army require special care and educational support. Our project aims to document the social creativity in the school environment that arose under these unprecedented circumstances. We want to show examples of positive grassroots reactions that have helped to overcome previously unpredictable problems,” says Michał Federowicz.
The researchers will focus on qualitative research and conduct a series of in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, children, and parents from several primary schools spread across Poland: in Warsaw, two other large cities (such as Wrocław, Kraków, or Gdańsk) and two smaller centers. Moreover, they will include in the survey the institutional environment of the school in question – the local authority managing the school and the NGOs cooperating with it. The research will also involve interviews with children and parents in several schools in Ukraine (including Kyiv and Lviv). These will include children who have returned from Poland, possibly also from other countries, or who have moved within Ukraine due to war. The researchers emphasize that these children have also experienced war trauma and the sudden need to change schools and environments.
“As part of the project, we are developing research tools with which we intend to enter schools in the autumn. We expect the first results of our research in about a year. However, our initial reconnaissance shows a very strong sense of temporariness among our Ukrainian visitors. This was very noticeable at the beginning of the migration wave in spring 2022. Nevertheless, the sense of temporariness is still very high in 2023. Some people have returned to Ukraine, some have stayed in Poland, but they are not necessarily determined to stay here for the long term. Temporariness constitutes a difficulty from the perspective of school work, because education only gives results in the long term. Nevertheless, many school principals approached the challenge of integrating Ukrainian children and young people into regular school work very creatively. Each of them had to improvise, find fresh solutions to completely new problems, and face daily situations that had not happened before. We want to find out and, together with the protagonists of these events, reflect on what has remained of these experiences, whether there have been lasting changes in their thinking, attitudes, and actions, and whether the authorities have drawn lessons at the level of institutional adaptations to such extraordinary circumstances,” explains Terepyshchyi.
A practical outcome of the research will be recommendations for local and central governments on how to support schools in situations that require rapid, unusual action and face waves of migration. The development of policies and long-term strategies to deal with similar situations will benefit both the arriving children and the school ecosystems and entire local communities that receive refugees.
Researchers will also look at how the situation of war has affected democratic values in the broader sense of the term in school reality – this includes openness to others, the ability to change one’s perspective of one’s thinking or the maintenance of equal relationships. As the project’s assumptions are multifaceted, an interdisciplinary approach to its implementation is necessary. “It is very helpful in this respect that Professor Federowicz and I have slightly different previous research experience. Our research areas overlap but are not identical,” concludes Terepyshchyi.
Dr. hab. Michał Federowicz, Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, leads there the Sociology of Politics, Economy, and Education Research Group. He is a graduate of the University of Warsaw (Institute of Sociology) and the Warsaw University of Technology (Faculty of Mechatronics). In 2005, he created the Team of Interdisciplinary Studies on Education, which developed new assumptions for the core curriculum of general education. From 2009 to 2015, he led the interdisciplinary research programme “Entuzjaści edukacji” (Education Enthusiasts). He was Director of the Institute of Educational Research and the Graduate School for Social Research of the Institute of Philosophy of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Serhii Terepyshchyi, Assistant Professor at the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kiev completed his Master’s degree in geography and briefly worked as a geography teacher. Subsequently, he obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy of education at the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kyiv. He is currently working at the Faculty of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Education at this university. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards and stipends, including the Presidential Grant of the President of Ukraine for Gifted Youth (in 2009), the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine Fellowship for Young Scholars (2020–2021), and the Fellowship for Ukrainian Scientists of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences (in 2022). His current research interests focus on social philosophy, philosophy of education and the organization, globalization, and internationalization of higher education. He enjoys hiking in the Carpathian Mountains and Ukrainian literature. He values spending time with his family: his wife and his son Roman, who was born a few days before the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022. At the time, he and his family were renting a flat in Irpen (near Bucza). Currently, he is also active as a volunteer: he is the founder of the charity foundation Roman, named after his son, and dedicated to helping children born during the war.
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