Refugee education and justice issues of representation,redistribution and recognition

This paper examines justice issues of representation, redistribution and recognition within a specialised secondary school for immigrant and refugee students in Queensland, Australia. Fraser’s three-dimensional model of justice – towards the ideal of ‘participatory parity’ – is drawn on to analyse interview data gathered from a study that sought to identify productive approaches to addressing cultural diversity. Through these lenses, injustices created by mainstream/dominant discourses within and beyond the school are highlighted. The paper details the school’s efforts to support greater equity for these students through educator advocacy, critically reflective practice and a centring of students’ perspectives. The significance of educators identifying and challenging the limits and exclusions of these discourses to support these efforts is highlighted. Fraser’s theorising is presented as useful in capturing, understanding and addressing justice and marginality in schools amid the broader social context where matters of justice are characterised by uncertainty, complexity and contention.     

Productive engagements with student difference: Supporting equity through cultural recognition

In this paper, the focus is on how a group of Australian educators support student equity through cultural recognition. Young's theorising of justice is drawn on to illuminate the problematic impacts arising from the group's efforts to value students’ cultural difference associated, for example, with quantifying justice along distributive lines and with essentialising student difference as negation and lack within a frame of cultural imperialism. These theoretical tools draw attention to, and support a critical examination of, the social rules and relations within the school that create barriers to equity. Towards reconciling discrepancies relating to how student difference might best be supported, the paper endorses the prevailing imperative of centring students’ perspectives and experiences. Such centring remains crucial to educators recognising the partiality and interest within their attempts to ‘help’ marginalised students and disrupting the relations of teacher privilege and authority that reinscribe domination, control and exclusion.     

Activist dispositions for social justice in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling

This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school, with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, in a high-fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus) and Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative justice are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers’ activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers’ practices.     

Playing the game: critical literacy,gender justice and issues of masculinity

This paper explores issues of critical literacy, gender justice and masculinity through ‘Mr A’s’ story. Mr A is head of English at ‘Grange College’ – an all boys’ school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). The paper highlights how the privileging of rationality, control and ‘the masculine’ within Mr A’s ‘teaching‐as‐usual’ discourse constrains his efforts to pursue gender justice through critical literacy. While Mr A scaffolds his students’ critical analysis of gender and power in texts, his investments in teacher/student binary relations draw rigid boundaries between himself and his students in ways that delegitimise the terrain beyond the rational and ignore a theorising of the self. Drawing on Mr A’s story within Davies’ theorising about the possibilities of critical literacy, this paper adds to key work in arguing the importance of teachers’ interrogating their classrooms as lived texts where the relations of domination and power that derail the social justice possibilities of critical literacy can be made both recognisable and revisable. Such interrogation is foregrounded here as particularly urgent within the current moment where rationalist discourses within and beyond schools are increasingly working to circumscribe and constrain teacher practice in ways that stifle transformative social agendas.     

Supporting minority students through a reflexive approach to empowerment

Referring to the experiences of three Muslim refugee girls recently settled in Australia, this paper examines issues of schooling and empowerment. The paper draws on teacher and student interview data from a study that investigated inclusive approaches to addressing issues of cultural diversity in a secondary state high school in Queensland. The paper foregrounds the girls’ highly positive views of their experiences at the school; views that reflect the girls’ access to spaces of empowerment but belie the complexity and tensions involved in how empowerment was understood and approached by educators at the school. Theorising empowerment through poststructural understandings of agency, the paper examines conditions and ways of understanding that make possible spaces of empowerment for the girls. In particular, the paper argues for a reflexive approach to empowerment that is informed by an understanding of the framing discourses shaping minority student identity and a critical reflection on educator and school positionality.     

Performing Allegiance: An Adolescent Refugee's Construction of Patriotism in JROCT

Drawing on a year-long qualitative study, this article examines how one refugee student from the Vietnamese Central Highlands negotiated social and cultural constructions of patriotism and citizenship in a Junior Reserves Officer Training Corps (JROTC) class at an urban high school. Data are analyzed using Butler's (1990) the theory of performativity, and illustrate how this student appropriated and transformed language and ritualized action to assert individuality in an otherwise rule- and routine-driven classroom context. I conclude by theorizing cultural practices of citizenship as they relate to the education of refugee and immigrant youth, and argue that researchers and practitioners must acknowledge the pedagogical and social impact of peripheral spaces in school, such as the JROTC classroom, in shaping many students’ trajectories in and beyond school.     

Building spaces of hope with refugee and migrant-background students

Within the Australian context, research into schooling experiences of refugee and migrant-background students has tended to focus on developing English language proficiency with little attention given to initiatives that contribute more broadly to students’ social and educational resources. Whilst not denying the significance of English language acquisition, this paper explores strategies, implemented at one school, designed to enhance social, cultural and educational outcomes for refugee and migrant-background students. We draw on a relational view of space informed by Foucault and Lefebvre, and Fraser’s theorisation of justice, to explore the school context, connections to students’ life-worlds, moving beyond trauma and teachers as knowledge producers. Findings suggest that contextualised forms of knowing and practices can work to build connections and educational resources for refugee and migrant-background students. Where human spatiality, including as this relates to schools, produces advantages and disadvantages, we conclude in arguing for further research that incorporates the perspectives and voices of refugee and migrant-background students and their teachers.     

Schools,teachers and community: cultivating the conditions for engaged student learning

This paper reveals the nature of the actions, discussions and relationships which characterised teachers’ and associated school personnel’s efforts to engage poor and refugee students through a community garden located in a school in a low socio-economic urban area in south-east Queensland, Australia. These actions, discussions and relationships are described as both revealing and producing particular ‘practice architectures’ which help constitute conditions for practice—in this case, conditions for beneficial student learning. The paper draws upon interview data with teachers, other school staff and community members working in the school to reveal the interrelating actions, discussions and relationships involved in developing and using the garden for academic and non-academic purposes. By better understanding such interrelationships as practice architectures, the paper reveals how teachers and those in schooling settings learn to facilitate student learning practices that likely to assist some of the most marginalised students in schooling settings.     

An Examination of Black Science Teacher Educators’ Experiences with Multicultural Education, Equity, and Social Justice

Diversity, multicultural education, equity, and social justice are dominant themes in cultural studies (Hall in Cultural dialogues in cultural studies. Routledge, New York, pp 261–274, 1996; Wallace 1994). Zeichner (Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and teacher education. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, pp 737–759, 2005) called for research studies of teacher educators because little research exists on teacher educators since the late 1980s. Thomson et al. (2001) identified essential elements needed in order for critical multiculturalism to be infused in teacher education programs. However, little is known about the commitment and experiences of science teacher educators infusing multicultural education, equity, and social justice into science teacher education programs. This paper examines twenty (20) Black science teacher educators’ teaching experiences as a result of their Blackness and the inclusion of multicultural education, equity, and social justice in their teaching. This qualitative case study of 20 Black science teacher educators found that some of them have attempted and stopped due to student evaluations and the need to gain promotion and tenure. Other participants were able to integrate diversity, multicultural education, equity and social justice in their courses because their colleagues were supportive. Still others continue to struggle with this infusion without the support of their colleagues, and others have stopped The investigators suggest that if science teacher educators are going to prepare science teachers for the twenty first century, then teacher candidates must be challenged to grapple with racial, ethnic, cultural, instructional, and curricular issues and what that must mean to teach science to US students in rural, urban, and suburban school contexts.     

Does educational privatisation promote social justice?

Social justice in education refers to the expectation that the education system provides fairness in its access to opportunities and results. Proponents of educational privatisation believe this would not only open up opportunities for those that otherwise are restricted from attending good schools, but that it would also improve overall efficiency in the education system through pressures of market competition. This article first provides a framework for analysing a quasi-market in education and for considering the potential effects of privatisation. It then applies this framework to the Netherlands, a school system premised completely on choice where two thirds of the schools are privately sponsored. We conclude that the Dutch system, thanks to a series of policies and regulations in place, performs relatively well on social justice, when looking at freedom of choice and overall productive efficiency. However, for equity and social cohesion, despite clear policy efforts, the privatised system seems to undermine social justice for certain groups in the population. The dilemma observed here is that some private benefits of education must be compromised to achieve greater equity and social cohesion. It is an open question whether policy makers are willing to make such tradeoffs.     

SCHOOL CHOICE, EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: THE CASE FOR MORE CONTROL

ABSTRACT:  This paper focuses on school choice and the extent to which admissions to publicly-funded secondary schools in England address issues of equity and social justice. It argues that schools with responsibility for their own admissions are more likely than others to act in their own self interest by 'selecting in' or 'creaming' particular pupils and 'selecting out' others. Given this, it is argued that individual schools should not be responsible for admissions. Instead, admissions should be the responsibility of a local authority (or non-partisan body); this body should make decisions about who should be allocated to which school on the basis of the expressed wishes of the parents, and the admissions criteria of the school in question. Admissions criteria should be objective, clear and fair and the admissions system itself should address issues of equity and social justice. It is argued that systems where there are some 'controls' on the choice process should be facilitated to address equity and social justice considerations which can benefit individuals and communities.     

The importance of context: Vietnamese,Somali, and Iranian refugee mothers discuss their resettled lives and involvement in their children’s schools

Parental involvement in schools is regarded as critical to student success in Australia, Canada, and the USA, the world’s top refugee resettlement countries. Refugees can be disadvantaged when they are unfamiliar with the practices and when their own cultural beliefs conflict with expectations in their new communities, or when they are consumed by other pressing needs. As part of an evaluation of a nonprofit US refugee agency’s liaison program, three groups of refugee mothers from different world regions spoke about their lives and connections with their children’s schools. Focus groups revealed satisfaction with many aspects of their children’s schools as well as contrasts between the groups’ needs and experiences. Differences indicate the need for the education community and other service providers to be aware of international backgrounds that bring refugees to the countries of resettlement and cultural differences that create diverse concerns of these groups.     

Pupils' views on equity in schools

This paper presents student perspectives on what they consider to be a fair and equitable national education system, based on their own experiences of primary and secondary level schooling by the age of 13 or 14. A survey of 5432 students in five countries involved a questionnaire administered as part of an EU‐funded project to develop indicators of equity in European school systems. Overall, the UK students reported favouring an egalitarian system where all students were treated in the same way, and this was largely what they felt that they experienced. In this respect, they differed from their peers in the other EU countries, a substantial proportion of whom thought that the least able should receive more support and attention in class, but who found that more attention was actually given to the more able. The UK students also appeared to be more self‐confident about their ability to succeed in school. We discuss these results in terms of policies for school allocation, student assessment and the formation of personal notions of justice. In particular, we argue that equity in structure and procedure is important for the effective teaching of notions of justice in citizenship studies.     

Productive pedagogies and the challenge of inclusion

Julie Allan is Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of Stirling, where she also directs the Participation, Inclusion and Equity Research Network. In this article, she explores the challenges involved in achieving an inclusive education system. Her argument draws on recommendations from two separate studies, undertaken in Queensland, Australia and Scotland, which are attempting to shape inclusion policy and practice. The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study identified a set of productive pedagogies in which issues of social justice, equity and inclusion are foregrounded. The Scottish Parliamentary Inquiry into special needs, to which Professor Allan was adviser, recommended a number of changes aimed at establishing an inclusive education system for all pupils. Comparisons of the two sets of recommendations, which formed the basis of a series of workshops with teachers, school leaders and administrators within Education Queensland, have prompted two major questions which are addressed in this paper: what gets in the way of inclusive practice and what will it take to be inclusive? Julie Allan's responses to these questions take account of the ways in which we think about ‘special education’ teacher training and professional development; and educational policies and practices. She represents a fascinating set of ‘double‐edged responsibilities’ that will challenge practitioners, policy makers and teacher educators to refocus and reframe their thinking about special educational needs and inclusion.     

Teachers’ work in culturally and linguistically diverse schools

Teachers in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms work in highly charged contexts where policy, curriculum, student backgrounds, equity issues and pedagogical expertise provide both resources and constraints. Often, these classrooms are in underachieving schools in low socio-economic areas. This study investigated one school in Melbourne where teachers struggle to balance subject content and the language and literacy needs of their students. It addresses a serious gap in research on teachers in such schools by combining a theoretical model of job demand and control, and an explicit focus on teaching literacy in a culturally and linguistically diverse school. Using data from teacher focus groups and written reflections, the study illustrates the spectrum of conflicts teachers grapple with in their daily work, including issues of workload, time constraints, institutional practices and social and cultural practices which tend to isolate and disempower them. The findings support the need for a deeper differentiation of school contexts in language teacher research. The analysis also has implications for a range of strategies to build more autonomy into teacher work and to retain good teachers in schools where they are most needed.     

Equity for English Learners: Evidence from Four Years of California’s Local Control Funding Formula

This study examined evidence of equity for English Learners-one of the three targeted student groups–in the early implementation of California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) across data sets from seven studies. We used social justice inquiry methods and data integration analytic approaches that included purposeful sampling of districts’ Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs), and data integration analyses of interviews with education leaders to examine how equity was advanced for English Learners. Our findings reveal that the quest for equity for English Learners is elusive and requires multilevel efforts to reverse the national, state, and local histories of unequal treatment, deficit orientations, socio-political dynamics, and legacies of unequal funding that still permeate many schools. Further advances in equity will require greater systemic coherence that sharpens the focus on educational outcomes for English Learners. California’s most recent policy shifts–including the passage of Proposition 58 and the English Learner Roadmap–show promise of systemic coherence and alignment to an assets-based approach for English Learners in the state and nation, as tangible evidence of equity in services and outcomes are still works in progress.     

‘Much more than a basic education’: supporting self-determination and cultural integrity in a non-traditional school for Indigenous girls

This paper presents data from an interview-based case study of a secondary school located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia). The school is a non-traditional education site designed to support disadvantaged girls, many of whom are Indigenous, and is highly regarded for its holistic approach to gender and cultural inclusion and equity. Through lenses that align Nancy Fraser's theories of redistributive and recognitive justice, with Indigenous feminists' equity priorities, the paper identifies and analyses the structures and practices at the school that support the girls' capacities for self-determination and their sense of cultural integrity. The paper is an important counterpoint within the context of mainstream gender equity and schooling discourses that continue to homogenise gender categories, sideline the multiple axes of differentiation that interplay to compound gender (dis)advantage and deflect attention away from marginalised girls. In particular, it provides significant insight into how schools can begin to reconcile the double bind of racism and sexism that continues to stymie the schooling and post-school outcomes of Indigenous girls.     

Teacher interventions in students’ collaborative work in a technology-rich educational makerspace

This study reports on an investigation of teacher interventions in students’ collaborative work in an educational makerspace. We draw on a qualitative analysis of video data on teacher–student interaction derived from 94 students (aged 9–12) and their teachers in a Finnish school. The results show that the teacher interventions were both student- and teacher-initiated. Three leading teacher intervention strategies were identified, namely authoritative, orchestrating and unleashing which emerged in teacher–student interactions dealing with conceptual, procedural, technological, behavioural and motivational issues. The study demonstrates the demands makerspaces pose for teacher–student interaction, and how moving from authoritative to collaborative interaction requires collective efforts and cultural change.     

Learning and Teaching With Loss: Meeting the Needs of Refugee Children Through Narrative Inquiry

Providing refugee students with a safe and welcoming classroom environment is critical for school success but largely dependent on teachers’ knowledge, values, practices, and attitudes. This qualitative study juxtaposes the experience of one refugee students’ experience in the school system and one beginning teachers’ experience in working with and meeting the psychosocial and educational needs of refugee students in the classroom. Using narrative inquiry, from the perspective of a refugee student and a beginning teacher, this study identifies themes and key issues related to teaching refugee students. These experiences are compared to the current literature on refugee education to highlight the beliefs and values that teachers bring to their practice. Findings reveal that there are gaps in beginning teachers’ knowledge about who refugees are, their experiences, and how best to support them in the classroom. Some teachers also held negative attitudes and perspective of refugee students and failed to develop a nuanced perspective of diversity and multiculturalism. This study also shows how narrative inquiry, in the formal of a personal history account, can be used as tool to surface, challenge, and overcome negative stereotypes, biases, and assertions that prevent teachers from effectively supporting their students.     

“We’re not a bank providing support”: Street-level bureaucrats and Syrian refugee youth navigating tensions in higher education scholarship programs in Lebanon

Scholarships are increasingly used to expand higher education access for refugee youth in exile, but less is known about their equity implications. Drawing from scholarship on street-level bureaucrats and Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, I identify street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) decision-making within refugee higher education. Drawing on 62 interviews with Syrian youth and organizations in NGOs in Lebanon, and 24 organizational, scholarship-related documents, I elaborate the fundamental (mis)alignments that emerge in scholarship-granting organizations’ goals, and the needs of refugee youth they seek to support. Organizations over-emphasize transitions to university, overlooking the most vulnerable youths’ transitions through university. Though youth link their futures to opportunity and not geography, SLBs seek to fund youth willing to return to Syria and engage in post-conflict reconstruction.