Introduction

The motivation for this research started with a photo published in newspapers around the world, of the tragic accident of the three years old Syrian refugee boy Alan Kurdi. In the picture, published in September 2015, he appeared as he had been found: dead, with his face turned to the sand, on a Turkish beach. The article said that his family was fleeing the war in Syria and had the objective of reaching Europe in search of peace and a new beginning. His boat wrecked in the Turkish sea, leading to the death of the boy, mother and brother. Only the father survived.

The rawness of that image, associated with the cold reality of the words that described its history and context, had a profound impact on us. It is not that we did not know that injustice, violence and disrespect for life are not practices, unfortunately, common to human history, but that image reminded us that such practices lead to extermination, to the end of existence. This, in turn, reminded us, as educators that we are, that there are other practices that can lead to the same sad ending, within the very field of Education (and other social fields). If not literally, at least symbolically: at the end of a life trajectory (in this case, academic); at the end of the dignity of a life; at the end of the will to belong, be and participate in a given group.

We are referring to the diverse and perverse forms of exclusion that materialize in the daily school space and against which we have struggled in our trajectories as teachers, researchers, extension workers, activists. In the case of refugees, we had not yet properly perceived this population, and this episode made us think about how many refugee children there are in this world that, in addition to going through the dangers portrayed in that article (and in so many others that we started to find from that day onwards), are also experiencing dangers of exclusion in the educational context of the countries in which they take refuge? How are these children, after going through this traumatic event of forced immigration, treated when they finally arrive in a country and go to school? How are they treated, for example, when they arrive at the Brazilian schools? Are their traumas taken into account when learning? Is their language, in many cases different from the Portuguese language, taken into consideration? Is the school a welcoming space for this refugee child?

Seeking to understand these issues, we investigated how Brazil has been participating in welcoming refugees. In the international scenario, at least until 2018, Brazil had been recognized as a country that welcomes refugees. According to the Ministry of Education, in 2015, counting only the Syrian public, there was the insertion of 2 thousand children in public schools in the country. In terms of reception and enrollment in public schools, the country is number 1 in Latin America, being praised by the UN for its initiative (Ministry of Education, ²⁰¹⁵).

Despite the positive reception, there are few clarifications on how these students of such a different culture and language would be inserted into the Brazilian school environment (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees - UNHCR, 2016). In an article published in 2016, UNHCR’s Brazilian branch narrated the case of a 12-year-old student in São Paulo named Hanan Dacka, who reported being bullied in the classroom by her classmates, due to being a Syrian child and being unable to keep up with the class, on top of having difficulties understanding the language.

Also, according to the UNHCR (²⁰¹⁶), combining data with UNESCO, only 50% of the refugee children in the world enroll into a school, out of a global average of over 90% non-refugees. Over the years, some drop out of school, resulting in only 22% of these now adolescent refugees being in school, with an overall comparison of 84% non-refugees. At a higher level, the chasm is even greater, with only 1% of refugees, out of a global average of 34% of adult non-refugees.

This represents a crisis for millions of refugee children and adults, because as the UNHCR (2016) points out, education for refugees is neglected. According to this institution, education would be one of the few opportunities to transform and build the next generation, so that it may provide a better quality of life for the tens of millions of people forcibly displaced worldwide.

Anticipating this global concern for the education of refugee children, in 2015, in Incheon, South Korea, at the World Education Forum 2015-2030, 20 education related goals for the next 15 years were established. Amongst these goals, the eleventh highlights the importance that host countries guarantee the education of the refugee public, while also offering children and adolescents a safe school environment, free of violence and prone to healthy development.

To summarize, the World Education Forum (2015)⁷ pledged to develop more inclusive educational systems, more resilient to meet the demands of children, young people and adults in these contexts of internally displaced persons and refugees. The Forum recommended a broad response, appropriate to crises, from the emergency response to the recovery and reconstruction of the refugees’ country of origin; coordination of responses at national, regional and global levels, up to the development of capacity to minimize risks, ensuring that education is maintained in situations of conflict, post-conflict and in the beginning of the recovery of the affected country.

Brazil was represented in this Forum by the then Minister of Education of Brazil, Renato Janine Ribeiro, by the UNESCO representative in Brazil, Lucien Muñoz, and by the UNESCO Education Coordinator in Brazil, Rebeca Otero⁸. Thus, it committed itself to the same decisions and to their implementation at the national level.

Today, four years later, we wonder about the extent to which these measures have been taken, considering, in particular, the fact that an impeachment has taken place in the country, a center-right government then took power and, to make things more “curious” (to say the least), a far-right government won the elections soon after, in 2018.

Seeking to inaugurate, in the field of educational studies, investigations about the schooling process of a refugee child from the Democratic Republic of Congo and located in a school in Duque de Caxias, in a macro, meso and micro dimension, at the state, municipal and institutional levels respectively, we ask ourselves: How is the process of entry of refugee children who come to the state of Rio de Janeiro?

To answer this question, we resorted to two researches: one, between 2016 and 2017, which led to a course completion paper that raised the process of these refugees’ arrival in Brazil and their insertion in schools (^{Almeida, 2017}). In the ongoing research, when we dedicated ourselves to data analysis, combined with the findings of the previous research (2016-2017), we were faced with a surprise element, linked more closely to the institutional context than to the specific case of the observed student. That was what we are going to call here a kind of institutional blindness, as we will see later. As a consequence, we began to ask ourselves how the school in which she studied was characterized. What could we learn from what we saw from the inclusion/exclusion processes that the child was going through, and to what extent was this reflected more as an institutional issue than focused on a subject?

Thus, the objective of this article is to explore a certain process of naturalization of situations of inclusion in a complex context in which, as we defend in our perspective (Omnilectical), one can never find only inclusion or one sort of element. The analysis of these situations, necessarily, will end up pointing to the coexistence of opposite and complementary aspects in cultural, political and practical terms.

Therefore, we intend to carry out an omnilectical analysis of the discourses we perceive within the school routine. It could be said that such speeches, at a glance, would be able to ensure that the student in question was included. At the same time, however, we were observing institutional practices that, at a closer look, could be used to deconstruct the very idea that the case in question would be (only) an example of inclusion.

Methodology

In this section, we will describe the general outline of the research, the instruments we used to generate the data, and we will talk about the participants who made themselves available to participate in this study.

The Omnilectic: a praxic epistemological perspective

The Omnilectical perspective had its roots in the 2000s, from Santos’ studies with material that triggered institutional self-review processes known as the Index for Inclusion (^{Booth; Ainscow, 2002}). Originally created to provoke schools to (re) think about their own dimensions of inclusion cultures, policies and practices, the authors argue that school institutions are permeated by the dimensions above, and that, in order to promote inclusion, it is necessary that they develop, in particular, an inclusive cultural dimension, on the assumption that this is the basic dimension so that any effective transformations are possible in schools.

By cultures, the authors refer to the values, beliefs, certainties and perceptions of school subjects about any aspect of life. Cultures are built, but can be so ingrained that they may become something complicated to transform without a deep immersion in a reflexive-decisive-active process. In other words: a process in which the aspects that cause exclusions in the current reality are reflected on, decisions are made about what constitutes a priority in order to combat these exclusions and decisions are put into practice.

By policies, the authors refer to the organizational aspects implicit when drawing up a plan to combat exclusions, according to the priorities raised. Here, therefore, deciding on the forms of support that will need to be mobilized and provided will be an essential element, as will the strategies by which the implementation of the action plan will begin.

By practices, the authors refer, in particular, to the curricular organization and its implementation, that is: what content, what didactic strategies, what materials need to be available or developed with the goal of promoting inclusion and practices to combat the exclusions identified and prioritized?

In the Omnilectical perspective, these three dimensions are brought up, with some subtle differences. With regards to cultures, we do not consider them to be more fundamental than the other two dimensions. We do not believe, therefore, that we first have to change cultures in order to then change the other two, and thus promote effective changes. We believe that the three dimensions have the same weight and importance when it comes to promoting changes, and that these can start with any of those, but will always involve the three dimensions at stake, to a greater and lesser extent, all the time and alternately, on a continuous basis.

With regards to the policies, the Omnilectical perspective considers that it is not only about the organizational arrangements that will promote support for the development of inclusion practices. They also refer to the political spaces themselves, at the macro, meso and micro level, meaning national, regional/local and institutional/group/personal. In this manner, intentions are of political order and, in this sense, they can be represented both by national Laws and Guidelines and international treaties (macro levels) as well as circular and state and municipal secretarial or legislative ordinances (meso levels) or even institutional (micro level). Still belonging to the micro level are the personal decisions made, consciously or unconsciously, that will regulate (or have this intention) our day to day, or our near future (example: a year-end resolution).

Finally, in defining the dimension of practices, Omnilectics considers curricular issues, but also issues related to pedagogical-didactic practices themselves, as well as aspects linked to the specific reality of each school community and each subject within this community.

This, although the origins of Omnilectics can be traced to the years of research with the Index, it has been developing since then and started to incorporate, between 2007 and 2011, the dialectic dimension (^{Santos, 2013}). The dialectic of Omnilectics is the one defended by Lukács, that is, a dialectic that, due to being materialistic:

[...] realizes and develops the approach to objective reality together with the procedural characteristic of thought as a means for this approach [e], it can understand universality in a continuous tension with the singularity, in a continuous conversion in particularity and vice versa. Thus, the concreteness of the universal concept is purified from any mystification and conceived as the most important vehicle for knowing and dominating objective reality (^{Lukács, 1978}, p. 104).

In other words, this dialectic emphasizes the need not to separate what is in the order of thought from what is in the order of reality; what is in the order of ideas from what is in the order of matter; because both are ideas and matter. Both are parts of a praxic totality, which needs to be understood and articulated when thought in relation to other praxic totalities. The Omnilectical perspective appropriates this discussion and argues that the contradictions at stake, perceived by the dialectical analysis, do not contradict each other in the sense of denying each other, but rather of incorporating each other, because each contradictory aspect identified in itself constitutes a part (a singularity) and at the same time a totality. These parts-totalities are elements of a more complex game of several parts that compose, in turn, more totalities, always changing, as the parts acquire new singularities from new elements (or parts) that enter the analytical game. This game, despite being analytical, is based on the concrete materiality of human life, which is historical and social.

More recently (after 2011), the author’s studies have led her to believe that, in addition to the tetradimensionality of Booth and Ainscow (cultures, policies and practices) and Lukács (dialectic), there would also be a fifth dimension: that of complexity, inspired by the works of Edgar Morin, in particular when he refers to the relationship between complex thinking and the uncertainty principle. By claiming that “[…] in today’s mechanistic world, determinism has been shaken and modern science has to deal with the uncertain” (Morin; Almeida; Carvalho, 2007, p. 86), the author complements his idea by stating that, for this very reason,

It is also necessary to teach that today we know that the human adventure is unknown and that we have only two instruments to face the unexpected: The first is the awareness of risk and chance. […] The second instrument is the strategy and this implies being able to modify the behavior according to the information and new knowledge that the development of the action provides us (^{Morin; Almeida; Carvalho, 2007}, p. 99).

In short, therefore, the epistemic aspect of the Omnilectical perspective occurs not only by bringing together important analytical categories within the same concept, but also by launching itself into the intellectual task of putting into play categories supposedly specifically attributed to modern (Booth, Ainscow and Lukács) and postmodern (Morin) thoughts. As for its praxic characteristic, it is linked to the fact that it is a perspective concerned with not performing a purely conceptual analysis of events, but rather always linked to numerous concrete possibilities of cultural, political, practical and complex aspects that dialectically both contradict and complement each other, forming new explanatory relations that imply new perspectives on the part-totality relationships, perspectives which are continually based on the intellectual exercise and on the materiality of the observed phenomena.

In this direction, the Omnilectical perspective corresponds to a kind of multi-lens, through which we exercise our gaze several times, exploring, each time, the possibility of seeing the situations from a new angle. This translates to the idea that nothing can be explained forever, and that each explanation found, in addition to being relative, is provisional, but by no means less legitimate. The relativity we refer to here is not one that implies falling into relativism and thinking that everything is possible, but one that considers the possibility of multiple ways of seeing and explaining phenomena at a given historical moment when taking into account the five dimensions in constant interplay and in multiple determination of each other.

Mirela’s Case: results and discussion

In this section of the article, we will present the data and discuss it from an omnilectical perspective. We will start by bringing some contextual data (of the refuge and the city) and then we will present excerpts from Mirela’s school life, from her third school year.

Conclusions: in the attempt to include the child, the path to inclusion is built

Upon starting this paper, we mentioned that we went through a moment of surprise when narrating what we came across while performing data analysis from one of the studies that underlie this paper: ongoing research. Based on the element of surprise, namely, what we call institutional blindness, we then chose the following questions to focus on in this article: How would the school where the focus student of the ongoing research studied be characterized? What could we learn from what we saw from the inclusion/exclusion processes that the child was going through, and to what extent was this reflected more as an institutional issue than focused on a subject?

Finishing a paper whose perspective of analysis is called Omnilectic is, so to speak, a contradiction for us. The Omnilectical perspective does not allows us to get to the end of things, but perhaps, we would say, to new beginnings. In this sense, answering the questions that inspired us does not mean making a single statement, nor presenting today’s conclusions as final. In this way, we will then try to answer the questions on a provisional manner, keeping in mind what we have been able to raise analytically with our critical outlook on cultures, policies and practices in dialectical and complex interplay, in the present historical moment. It is never too much to emphasize that new conclusions (and always temporary) are possible according to the eyes that analyze our narrative, as well as according to the cultural, political, practical, dialectical and complex context in which these eyes meet.

The first question upon which we planned to lay our gaze was how the school of our focus student was characterized. The school in question was characterized by an institution locally recognized as inclusive due to being a reference in the scope of special education. Here we identify a question that is open to further discussion: if inclusion is a matter to be tackled by everyone, how can an institution that dedicates itself to a particular group be acknowledged by an entire local community as inclusive? Or maybe there was, in that community, a local culture that considered inclusion as something aimed only at students with disability, which could, in turn, explain, at least partially, the lack of a local policy regarding inclusion (on the assumption that the already existing national ones would suffice). Furthermore, this could also explain certain discriminatory practices, or naturalization of what our eyes saw as blindness. This, in itself, would point to a series of likely contradictions, which, on the other hand, if faced, could open new doors for situations that are quite different from what we are used to seeing.

Regardless of this observation, the fact is that the institution started to receive refugee children in 2015, and in 2016 there was a process in which we identified attitudes that excluded the focus refugee child, in other words, left her separated from the dynamics, from the exchanges between peers. Returning to the thought process in the previous paragraph, we could argue that, upon expanding its scope of population of “included” students, perhaps the school also expanded its own concept of inclusion - a hypothesis that we consider quite desirable.

Even though it is not possible, due to the Omnilectical gaze, to characterize the school in a finalistic sense, we can say that, in a broader context, this school did have something special (in the positive meaning of the term), after all, it was the one that welcomed the most refugee children in our realm of possibilities. This “specialty” of the school can be translated as an important gap in this historic moment, not only because it stood out receiving more students than other schools in 2018, but also when considering the current context of 2019, in which such subject (refugees) and various others closely linked to Human Rights, seem to have been left in the background in the political agendas of Brazil, or, at least, seem to have fallen a lot in priority, given the silencing of the mainstream media on the subject and given the populational division about Human Rights in current days.

Likewise, in an institutional context, we were able to observe initiatives that, however insufficient they might have seemed in our eyes, are worthy of proper consideration, as the school has only very recently started to receive this population (refugees). This may point to a school that has not shied away from the challenge of facing aspects that are still unknown and incorporating them into its reality. We chose to believe that this was the movement chosen by the school, which gives us hope regarding its development towards an institutional profile that is increasingly guided by the principles of inclusion in education.

It is also worth mentioning that, although this matter is not directly within our subjects of discussion, at the municipal level, the lack of knowledge of the NUPE Coordinator can be understood as our first encounter with what we call institutional blindness, as she did not master the minutiae of the child’s entry and referral process, thus harming the child’s inclusion process. At the same time, the lack of knowledge on the topic in Brazil can be pointed out as a factor for this blindness.

These questions led us to wonder the following: why does the refugee child’s school not see situations of exclusion and difficulties faced by the child? With this paper, we can point out that the in-depth ignorance of the demands of this target audience can be an answer to this question. It is also possible that the Brazilian legislative/institutional ignorance about refugee children, given that it is a new theme under study in the country, despite being a country made up of immigrants, some of whom are refugees, could be a way of understanding this blindness in what relates to the problems of the insertion of the refugee child.

The second question that we set out to reflect on was about asking what we could learn from what we saw from the inclusion/exclusion processes that the child was going through.

In this conjuncture, upon recalling the initial contact of the refugee child in the Brazilian school, we started to think that the developed institutional, pedagogical and strategic procedural movement (cultures, policies and practices) reaches the new public, in the welcoming phase, and is imbued with elements that demonstrate care and attention, such as: the school placement test. On the other hand, in the gut of the matter, if we may use the expression, this process makes us question in what proportions and/or possibilities the realization and the subsequent referral of the refugee child is being planned, considering the specificities for the development of its potential: language and (Lingala/French) and African culture. Thus, in our view, the initiatives of the various instances involved in the inclusion movement are clear, making an effort to practice inclusion, but in an embryonic manner, since the characteristics are not being seen carefully.

Despite this, the inclusion process takes place in the reflection of the practice. Looking at the trajectory of a refugee child already reveals to us the movement itself that is being elaborated and constituted by the many educational agents that seek to materialize inclusive practices. In other words, in an attempt to include the child, the path to inclusion is constructed. By observing, more deeply, the step-by-step of the girl, Mirela, through the eyes of her teacher, we understood the obstacles and challenges possibly experienced by children in situations of refuge who are dialectically part of an inseparable process of inclusion/exclusion that is constantly happening through human relationships.

Omnilectically, inclusion will take place in the constant reflection of daily practice and in the construction of new institutional policies and generating new cultures, considering that the relationships are dialectical and complex.

Finally, the third question pondered the extent to which the verified blindness was reflected more as an institutional issue than as something that came from the refugee child itself. The lack of knowledge about the subject by the institution, at the municipal level seen in NUPE’s Coordinator and at the school level seen in the teacher of the 3rd year of elementary school, point, provisionally, to an institutional blindness of the child’s linguistic and cultural demands of the refugee child and the exclusionary relationships that occurred in the classroom.

Mirela, the refugee child mentioned, experienced, according to the teacher, moments of loneliness and apartheid, as classmates did not allow her participation in the games during recess. This situation seemed instigating to us, as, despite being aware of the child’s vulnerability, the teacher did not understand her isolation as a discrediting and exclusion-promoting facet of part of the class. Her practice was limited to asking the child, daily, about what was happening, meaning there was an unintentional blindness, as the professional did not consider the subjective aspects of the child’s inclusion process in the class. At first glance, the child seemed to be included, but the process was being challenged by minutiae that were not investigated by the school as a whole, as the child’s isolation happened at recess, and thus was a visible element for other school agents who circulated in the space, meaning no one saw this as a problem.

Finally, we return to the fact that the inclusion/exclusion process takes place daily and is permeated by the contradictory elements that constitute it. The movement for inclusion is endless, but despite that, we should not disregard the proposed inclusion attempts. In the case studied, the attempt to include the refugee child after the realization that she was being excluded was the path taken by the school. Looking for pedagogical alternatives for school issues, which are not always clear to educational agents in their work processes, we saw that the inclusion process is non-linear and can happen from a situation of exclusion¹¹.