@article{f5561d1070504ff2ac11ae0bffe9e3c2,
title = "The potential of peer guidance to empower migrants for employment",
abstract = "Peerness is a common approach to learning, especially in Nordic adult education, but is increasingly adopted by European Union (EU)-funded projects that aim to improve migrants{\textquoteright} employability. This article discusses action research that evaluated an ESF-funded project, run by a Finnish popular adult education association in collaboration with vocational adult education institutes, NGOs, and a trade union. The project trained migrants to become peer group guides and empower migrant-background participants for employment. The training prepared guides to become experiential experts, but increased the distance between the participants and themselves. The guidance could even strengthen the otherness of participants when the peerness was based solely on sharing a migrant background. Voluntary peer guidance may reinforce this separation, but dependence on ESF funding also shapes mainstream adult education; therefore, the empowerment of migrants should build on collaboration between experiential experts and guidance professionals as part of the regular adult education system.",
keywords = "Adult education policy, Employability, Empowerment, Migrants, Peerness",
author = "Satu Heimo and Katriina Tapanila and Anna Ojapelto and Anja Heikkinen",
note = "Funding Information: In Europe, the educational integration of migrant-background young people and adults mainly focuses on improving their employability (Darvas, Wolff, Chiacchio, Efstathiou, & Goncalves Raposo, 2018). At the European Union (EU) and member state level, this is commonly governed by social and employment, rather than education, policies. The EU Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion is the main agency administering financial support for the education and training of migrants (European Commission [EC], 2020a) and one of its main instruments is the European Social Fund (ESF), which has been promoting employment and labour programmes in Europe since 1957. These programmes target groups currently identified as most in need, such as the unemployed, young people, the elderly, women, and/or migrants. The ESF focuses on equality, the prevention of social exclusion, participation, improving competencies, and developing newtrstuurescfmoploymrent eamrtks (EC, 2020b).e In their declarations on lifelong learning, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2016, p. 6–8) and the EC (2000, p. 3, 5) have outlined the future of European adult education, but the goals seemed to be contradictory: adult education should aim to respond to the unique learning needs of people and promote their lifelong freedom to participate in education, but concurrently it should develop adaptive competencies among learners for labour market participation and support their active citizenship through employment. Political documents make normative assumptions about citizens—how they should be or what they should become—as members of European society (Fejes, 2019, p. 234–235). Funding Information: The EU considers the ESF to be the most important vehicle for investing in human capital and, in some European countries, as much as 90 per cent of the labour force policy expenses, primarily relating to competitive projects, are covered by ESF funding (EC, 2016). In Finland, EU funding, especially through the ESF, has become the most important driver for the integration of adult migrants. Of over 2,100 ESF-funded projects during 2014–2020, directed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, which is mainly responsible for integration and employment measures in Finland, 270 directly promote the integration and employment of migrants. The funding for each project ranges from tens of thousands to four million euros (European Regional Development Fund, 2020). By contrast, funding through the state budget for promoting migrants{\textquoteright} integration and employment is, in total, roughly a few million euros annually (Ministry of Economic Affairsnamdploym eEnt, 2016). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 The authors. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.3384/rela.2000-7426.ojs1685",
language = "English",
volume = "11",
pages = "335--348",
number = "3",
}
