Social Justice Leadership for Co-Educating Refugee and Migrant Students in Greek Primary Schools Through Distance Education During COVID-19

Introduction

As the years go by, humanity has received multiple blows, which have affected social cohesion and living conditions. Wars, violence, economic crisis, pandemics are the most, characteristically, difficult elements in history, which continue to plague human societies worldwide, causing significant changes in human survival and lifestyle. Two thousand and twenty (2020) is a milestone year, which will be remembered, in the world history, as the year that humanity experienced one of the worst pandemics, that of the Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19).

The oldest known case of infection dated back in December 1^st 2019 in the city of Yuhan China and, then, the virus spread rapidly in all provinces of China and in more than 150 other countries around the world, including Greece (CONID-19 Dashboard CSSE, 2020). This pandemic of COVID-19 is caused by the severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) with rapid human to human transmission and a mortality rate of approximately 0.6%, as deaths from this virus have reached the number of 1,761,381 by December 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard, 2020). In particular, the baseline number (Ro) is 5.7, which means that any infection with the virus is expected to lead to 5.7 new infections, when no new members of the community are immune and no precautions are taken, while, additionally, the virus spreads mainly between humans through close conduct and through airborne droplets, produced by coughing or sneezing (Wiersinga, Rhodes, Cheng, Peacock & Prescott, 2020). According to the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020), regarding the prevention and control of infections, a number of measures must be taken in order to reduce the transmission of this virus, such as: hand hygiene and use of a protective mask, proposing, however, the avoidance of social conduct and home isolation (quarantine) as the main measure. These measures have created a new way of life and new social conditions, to which people must adapt in order to avoid infection.

School is an important part of the wider social system and, therefore, becomes a daily recipient of intense developments and changes, influenced by what is happening in the external environment. As a result, when a society is hit by the pandemic phenomenon, the school organization, extroverted and interconnected with the external social standards, is directly affected, conducting a series of educational changes in order to appear effective in these new social data. School principals play the most important role in managing such a crucial social situation and in assisting the school unit to cope with these changes successfully. As Murphy, Υff and Shipman (2000) point out, a school principal is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by understanding and responding to current socio-economic, political, institutional and cultural content. Furthermore, society, in addition to the pandemic phenomenon, has to deal with other critical situations, such as the management of the refugee and migrant flows, which have defined and, decisively, determined the modern world, bringing increased impact to the European countries around the Mediterranean area (Greece, Spain, Italy). Similarly, school, as an open organization which interacts with society, has been influenced by this situation, forming a multicultural student population, composed of groups with particular ethnic, religious and cultural characteristics.