Abstract
Introduction
The Refugee Council of Australia has declared 2020 as the #YearOfWelcome. At a time when increasing numbers of migrants and refugees are experiencing the world as unsafe and inhospitable, the #YearOfWelcome is to be a year where we ‘build a society we believe in, one we feel proud of’ (Refugee Council of Australia, 2020). Through wide-ranging research, community initiatives, seminars and other publicity and events, the Council is working towards this goal, and encouraging individuals to undertake monthly actions. The January task, for example, is to tweet and send messages of welcome to refugees and migrants as they arrive in the country.
The #YearOfWelcome raises awareness of the collective responsibility in society to form attitudes, to act and to be in ways that are welcoming, accepting, respectful, and sensitive to each other’s differences. It raises such issues as that ‘building a society that we believe in’ might look different for different sectors and groups within that society, and that the society itself is made up already of enormously diverse elements, groups, cultures and interests, in terms of how it lives in and makes use of its natural, ideological, religious, economic or educational landscape. Furthermore, in each of these areas – and plenty more – what each group ‘feels proud of’ can differ vastly amongst groups, localities and orientation. This editorial explicates some of the educational provocations emerging from the call to make 2020 the #YearOfWelcome, with a particular focus on its impact on attitudes and orientations towards diversity in early childhood education.
Experiences and attitudes
There is no question that the message and notion of the #YearOfWelcome have the potential to impact in important ways in early childhood education. They affect the experiences and attitudes of those being welcomed, arriving daily from many diverse countries, and also the experiences and attitudes of those involved in the welcoming. Indeed, this editorial argues that examining the experiences and attitudes of those who are doing the welcoming – the teachers and educators in early childhood settings – crucially impacts on the nature of the welcome itself. In the early childhood education sector this call is crucial and urgent for both reasons. It is crucial and urgent on the level of welcoming children and families from diverse cultural backgrounds, as, worldwide, the number of people who live in countries other than where they were born continues to rise. With global migration on the rise, including internal migration, children, teachers and educators in early childhood settings are increasingly engaged with peers from culturally diverse backgrounds.
A migrant is defined as ‘any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence’ (United Nations Migration Agency, 2020). According to the United Nations (2020): In 2019, the number of migrants globally reached an estimated
The call is crucial and urgent on the level of examining more closely the experience and attitudes of those who are responsible for welcoming migrants and refugees in early childhood settings. In this vein, the #YearOfWelcome might provoke considerations of teacher and educator attitudes towards the uncertainties, for example, that can arise in confrontations with cultural differences. It might push teachers and educators to examine how they go about the welcoming process and particularly how their attitudes shape the pedagogies and policies implemented to facilitate the welcoming process. Teacher attitudes towards cultural diversity arise within the governing policy and structural context of their settings.
Governed by regulatory structures, for example, of curriculum, international, national and local policy, cultural diversity remains widely seen as problematic in early childhood education. This is especially so when viewed against the backdrop of international benchmarks and measurements that remain driven by the dominant neoliberal agenda (Arndt and Tesar, 2015; Kelsey, 2015; Smith and Campbell, 2018; Springer, 2016). Many have examined the common problem of cultural, linguistic and racial diversity in early childhood education, which remains without a ‘solution’ (Baldock, 2010; Lee and Yelland, 2018; Souto-Manning et al., 2018), despite research arguing for particular ways of working with young children who come from diverse backgrounds (Cherrington and Shuker, 2012; Mitchell, Ouko and University of Waikato, 2010; Robinson, and Jones-Diaz, 2016). Although the significance of teacher and educator attitudes towards teaching and learning across and between cultures is raised, their subtleties are complex and under-researched (Arndt, 2016; Guo, 2015).
Maybe the #YearOfWelcome will provoke new openings for such research? Within the dominant focus on free market growth and competition in education, Springer (2016: 2) points to a need for ‘new regimes of truth’ that need to go ‘beyond the suffocating strictures of neoliberalism’. Might the #YearOfWelcome contribute to such new regimes of truth? Might this call elevate early childhood teachers’ and educators’ thinking and being beyond the surface-level knowledge and quick-fix solutions that predominate, and that too often dictate the nature of preferred knowledge and attitudes within their settings? And might this call enable teachers and educators to challenge blanket determinations about which pedagogies are desirable, beyond those that are easily marketable and economically advantageous?
The urgency of the welcome means that it is time to rupture orientations. Perhaps this means elevating the in-between spaces, where conceptual, physical and ethical thought-boundaries become un-fixed, destabilized and un-normalized? In such spaces, particular labels of who is different, who is the stranger and who ‘belongs’ may no longer fit, and notions of normality in childhood become at the very least blurred, and hopefully deeply and philosophically interrogated at their very foundations. Such a rupture would unsettle any sense of certainty, of a ‘right’ way of doing things – a solution – and of adult, human-centric control in teaching situations. Rupturing attitudes and orientations towards difference may challenge even curricula that are considered to be open, holistic and relational, and most certainly it would uproot any foundation that practices, routines and pedagogical processes have, in manuals, models or ‘how to’ books and websites explicating techniques and strategies as solutions for teaching and learning with young children who are ‘different’.
Teacher and educator attitudes to difference are crucial, in the #YearOfWelcome. They intricately affect the nature, effect and affect of the welcome, and the ongoing acceptance, respect and sensitivity shown towards migrants and refugees in their new early childhood settings and local communities. Teacher and educator attitudes and orientations are also complex, however, and dependent on many factors, beginning with their own experiences of histories and realities (Arndt, 2018). At the same time, difference itself is not straightforward or simple – Kristeva (1991) reminds us of this – when strangeness ruptures what is seen as ‘normal’, and what is not. The #YearOfWelcome calls for confrontations with this complexity. It calls for confrontations with what it means to be different. ‘Who is the stranger?’ is a question that Kristeva (1991) interrogates through her feminist, poststructuralist, foreigner lens. While acknowledging that the stranger, or foreigner, might be the one who enters into the space of those who are at home there, she advocates for recognizing that difference is also within us. ‘Strangely’, she says, ‘the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder’ (Kristeva 1991: 1).
It is in this recognition, Kristeva (1991: 1) continues, that is, ‘by recognising him within ourselves’, that ‘we are spared detesting him in himself’. But what does this mean, for example, for teachers and educators in early childhood education, engaging in person and on a daily basis with multiple children and families from many different cultural backgrounds? What does it mean when families’ requests, expectations and desires not only differ, but conflict with teachers’, educators’ or other families’ interests or ways of doing things with and for their child? And what does it mean for teachers and educators who are having difficulty communicating, even on a very simple level, with children and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds? In what ways do policy-makers, politicians and the managers in early childhood education work with and make sense of the intricacies and complexities of such everyday encounters? Kristeva implores a recognition of strangenesses, to reveal the ‘nonexistence of banality in human beings’ (1991: 3). Such a revelation elevates even further the multiplicities and realities of everyday busyness in early childhood education, and of teachers’ orientations and attitudes to welcoming. Pressured already, as implied by Springer (2016) above, teachers’ and educators’ lives are complicated and dependent on localized and also global imperatives, benchmarks and measures. Despite this, the urgency of the #YearOfWelcome call may mean carving out a personal and collective space for reconceptualizing, reframing, their attitudes and orientations towards the personal, political or environmental histories that have brought them and the children to their early childhood settings.
Shifting pedagogies
Educational systems are both suffocating and hopeful in many ways. The rigidity and inequalities in existing policy over 20 years ago was lamented as not addressing children’s experiences of diversity, and ‘the unique phenomenon of their (the children) having been uprooted’ (Igoa, 1995: 15). Rigid policy, Igoa claimed, creates disempowering environments, that lack understanding of the often chaotic processes of immigration, of ‘culture shock, fears, the sudden inability to communicate, and the loss of the homeland’ (1995: 15). In her call for teaching children in holistic ways, ‘the whole person, not just part of the person’ (1995: 1), and not just that part that appears familiar, understandable or easily assimilated with the rest of the children in the group, she claims that ‘there really is no formula’, and that ‘the most effective approach (is) to become a teacher-researcher’ (1995: 7). As affirmed in a review of her book, The Inner World of the Immigrant Child, ‘at some level, all teachers of immigrant/culturally diverse students must become researchers if they are to teach effectively since no theory can supply the answers to the range of issues teachers are faced with in our increasingly diverse schools’ (Cummins, as cited in Igoa, 1995).
The challenges faced by children and families as they move into their new countries indicate that there can be no formula. There can indeed be no single ‘solution’ to the problem as identified by Baldock (2010) and others earlier, when challenges for children and families include fears for family members, separation and detention (e.g. Maldonado, 2013; Matthews et al., 2018) and difficulties related to developing a sense of identity and belonging in their new environment (De Heer et al., 2016; Mitchell, Ouko and University of Waikato, 2010). These challenges impact on children’s wellbeing, their learning, and on teachers’ and educators’ approaches to the welcome.
The burden of racism and colonizing practices is often perpetuated in these challenges by those in positions of authority and power. They fail to recognize racism and hatred for what they are, and continue arguing for and enacting culturally responsive pedagogies, practices and policies that are arduous and often isolating (Souto-Manning et al., 2018). A commitment to reconceptualize attitudes and orientations requires courage and more than a change in strategy: it requires in itself an attitudinal, ethical and moral shift. It requires research, as argued by Igoa (1995), in an interrogation not only of the policy landscape, although that of course is critical; it also requires an interrogation of attitudes, of teachers, educators, academics, authors and thinkers. In what ways are we, or can we, contribute to interruptions rather than to perpetuations of systems of power that are marginalizing, unwelcoming and further isolating?
Earlier research and curricula identify various ways of conceptualizing children’s belonging as a crucial element in their wellbeing in early childhood education. The Australian early childhood curriculum title, for example, highlights belonging as a key imperative for learning and for being a child. Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF) goes as far as stating that belonging is ‘fundamental to human existence’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009: 7). Despite this apparent elevation of the importance of both the welcome and the ongoing support required for children and their families to continue to feel part of their new early childhood education communities, it also runs the risk of creating superficial understandings and pedagogies, that fail to engage adequately with the complexities of epistemological and ontological meanings and potential experiences of ‘belonging’ (Peers, 2018). The EYLF is, after all, as Peers cautions, a government-sanctioned policy document from a moment in history when governments have no appetite at all for intellectual inquiry, I think we have to refer to debate outside the field of education – in philosophy, to be precise, where the practice of interrogating the meanings of words and the logic that they activate is still robustly pursued. (2018: 364)
Concluding comments
The ‘moment in history’ in which the Australian EYLF came about arguably still exists. Families cross borders and territories of nations, climatic areas, safety, job markets and various disasters, and policies fail to engage with the deeply nuanced realities that these migrations entail. Human migration remains an escape from war and violence, famine, religious or cultural persecution and violations (United Nations, 2020). Environmental catastrophes playing out as we commence this new decade add to the reasons for human migrations: here in Australia, extreme bushfires force what may be long-term changes in lifestyles and living, as families with children become dislocated. In other places around the world, war, floods, volcanic eruptions and wildfires disturb and unsettle peoples’ ability to remain in their usual place of living.
Will the #YearOfWelcome help provoke deeper engagements with and interrogations of meanings and experiences of migrants and refugees? Perhaps. It certainly highlights the urgency for further research to inform educational policy and practices. Critical philosophical examinations are required of the intricacies and intimacies of strangeness, to recognize the foreigner. Not only the foreigner who comes into early childhood settings, that is, but, first of all, the foreigner in ourselves.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.