Abstract
Introduction
This special edition is a collection of papers on the broad topic of race and ethnicity in education. These are issues that have been addressed many times in the past, but it was felt that it is timely to revisit the topic due to increasing global migration within the various countries of Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, as well as between these places. Additionally, the absence of debates around race and ethnicity and the global South, in academic journals published in the global North, is a lacuna that demands exploration and attention. In many ways journals themselves function as contested publication spaces, which often serve to prioritize some geographical areas and societies over others. Recognizing and filling this gap, specifically in relation to race and ethnic diversity, was a key aim of this edition from the proposal stage, which also reflected the editors’ concerns about the balance of North/South coverage in educational issues. The collection includes papers from a diverse range of contributors from multi-disciplinary backgrounds. As such, it has much to offer scholars of education, theories of race, educational practitioners and others whose key interests lie in areas of race and ethnicity or learning and inclusion.
Race and ethnic diversity are conditions under which education takes place but these also operate as curricula foci that educators address in the everyday practices of teaching and learning. Published debates around education, race and ethnicity in the UK have been largely dominated by a focus upon formal learning settings and commentators from within those contexts (Archer and Francis, 2007; Byrne, 2006; Gillborn, 1995, 2005; Heath and Brinbaum, 2007; Reay, 2009; Troyna, 1993). However, wider educational debates in Europe and the global South struggle with issues of race that seem perennial and deep-seated, in particular, in a European and South African context around educational responses to new migrants (Delanty et al., 2008; Essed, 2002; Fekete, 2004; Pisani, 2012; Vandeyar, 2013; Vandeyar and Vandeyar, 2012, 2014). As the voices of researchers working in Southern countries are seldom heard in the North in relation to education, race and ethnicity, it is especially pleasing to be able to include a number of papers from South African contributors. There are also contributions from the United States, Japan and Europe. What the global perspective of this special issue highlights is the universal acceptance of ‘race’ as a phenomenon, despite ‘the almost universal consensus that “race” as a biological phenomenon has no substance’ (Jansen, 1998, 2004; Soudien, 1998; Vandeyar and Jansen, 2008). Existing as it does in the social world, the challenge then becomes to eradicate the pervasive influence of race. It is this attempt that lies at the heart of the research in the papers in this volume. This is not a straightforward task. The collection of papers here, tackle this from different angles. In order to overcome ‘race’ the language in which to talk about it is needed, which, as Layne and Alemanji found, is sometimes missing. The contribution from Davids and Waghid highlights the silences that often surround issues of race. Whilst in the papers by Caparoso and Collins, Naidoo, and Toh race takes the form of language to show how race goes beyond the ‘look’ that Soudien focuses on, to include speech and language. The question then remains, as Soudien asks, how do scholars work with a concept that is real only in its social acceptance?
Why ‘race’?
As Soudien (1998) explains, historically race has been an ascribed identity, notably during apartheid in South Africa, although formal categorizations are now more usually ‘self-ascribed’ – chosen but within the limit of relevant understandings (Nkomo and Vandeyar, 2009). Racial classifications are not freely chosen and do often rely on the ‘look’, as Soudien explains. This ‘look’ can lead to racial stereotyping of the kind Caparoso and Collins examine through humour. Social identity is always both a name (Black or White) and an experience (Jenkins, 1997). The kind of ‘humour’ that relies on naming different groups adds to potentially negative experiences for those named groups. The humour exhibited by the Hawai’ian students is essentially ordinary, as is racism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001). This is not racism as an overt subject position but rather ‘White’ privilege as a universal discourse of power embedded into structures of power and policy, making it more difficult to combat (Gillborn, 2005) and, often, to talk about (Bennett and Lee-Treweek, 2014; Harries, 2014). The ideology of ‘Whiteness’ and racial hierarchies is discussed by Layne and Alemanji through the children’s book they examine, and by Davids and Waghid in examining the difficulties of minority group teachers in South Africa. All of the papers here tackle the invidious, hard to define effects of structural racism and ‘White’ power, with many taking an overt (Toh) or implied (Avery; Davids and Waghid; Layne and Alemanji) Critical Race Theory approach by engaging directly with the experiences of those who are not usually given a voice and telling their stories (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001).
Race is defined not only by looks but also by language and, as Naidoo shows in a South African maths lesson, primarily the English language. The distribution of power between the various participating groups in these interactions will differ according to both the setting and who is present (Crossley, 1995). Toh finds that despite his expertise in the English language he is not fully accepted by the other teaching staff as an English teacher in Japan because of his ‘look’, and that White Americans with less teaching experience will be favoured over Black or Asian English teachers. The racialization of language is not a distinction around the language itself but around the group that authorizes it (Bourdieu, 1977: 21). The authorizing group, for Toh, are the Japanese academics and university administrators; in a South African classroom English is used as the default ‘common’ language (even when not all students are proficient). Language is also the focus of Avery’s paper but here it is the subjugated ‘mother tongue’ of migrants, which is relegated to after school lessons.
Looks and language are perhaps outcomes of racial classifications rather than formative of them. Who is and is not ‘White’ varies across time and place. Therefore, what looks and language do is define who is, or is not, ‘one of us’ – who belongs. That may be who belongs as a teacher at a particular school, in a particular part of South Africa (Davids and Waghid; Vandeyar, 2013) or which students belong in a maths lesson (Naidoo), or at after school language classes (Avery). The latter paper also identified that there is often an unspoken assumption of a hierarchy of learning spaces, in which ‘borrowed’ classroom space is constructed as a place of remedial or undervalued learning work by mother-tongue tutors and their pupils. Spaces change at different times, so the classroom after school is a very different place (and experience for those in it) to the classroom during ‘normal’ hours. Relegated to a borderland in terms of the time of lessons and ownership of the space they take place in, pupils and teachers are made starkly aware that their learning work is secondary to the ‘real’ learning of regular school classes. The spaces of education are thus spaces of struggle for many who do not conform to the correct ‘look’ or cannot speak the accepted language.
However, drawing comparisons between countries and across continents is fraught with difficulties. Any social construction will vary across times, cultures, social contexts and places. Race is not the same thing in America and Britain, or in Britain and South Africa. What counts as ‘White’ varies across times and places, as do the many varieties of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people and where they stand in the racial hierarchy of power. In this issue there is also an attempt to single out ‘race’ amongst many other intersecting categories of inequality such as gender or disability. For example, would male ‘mother tongue’ teachers in Sweden be treated differently from females? Inequalities of all kinds are hard to pin down, contentious and elusive but also persistent and harmful, which is why it is felt worthwhile continuing to investigate the pervasive influence of race in diverse educational spaces.
Belonging, categorization and symbolic violence
All of the papers included here have, at their heart, definitions of who belongs and who does not based on how people are classified through what is called ‘race’. Belonging is an important aspect of identity (May, 2013; Vandeyar, 2013; Yuval-Davis, 2011) so race, as with gender, dis/ability and so forth, as a qualifier of belonging, has an important part to play in general well-being and inclusion. This might be seen as being particularly relevant in an educational setting where children and young people are forming their identities. This is the key message in the papers by Avery and Layne and Alemanji as both focus on the potential impact on relatively young children of creating identities as ‘others’.
These papers, both from Scandinavia, focus on migrants to Sweden and Finland. European countries tend to follow either a multicultural line of allowing different ethnic groups to exist together separately (as in the UK), or an assimilationist line where new migrants are expected to fit in with the host country’s culture (as in Denmark) (Valentine et al., 2009). Both approaches tend to embed different forms of racism into the everyday ways of negotiating difference. Avery looks at how, despite the positive intentions of the Swedish government, allowing first and second generation migrants to be taught their ‘own’ language outside the regular school day is potentially a way of downplaying the importance of these languages to the children’s sense of identity and belonging. The lessons take place after school in borrowed classroom space – the ‘edgelands' of the school in terms of time and space – thereby marginalizing the teachers of these extracurricular lessons and their pupils. Their right to classroom space and wall space for displays is contested by the regular class teachers and symbolically this serves as a visual cue to migrant pupils and teachers that their time and energies are secondary to the ‘real’ learning work of regular schooling. In effect, there is no space for these children to belong through their parents’ language; the lessons and learning spaces themselves position the children as ‘other’.
Layne and Alemanji, in their paper ‘Zebra world’ look at how the ‘other’ is depicted in Finnish educational discourse. They use a children’s picture book, which tells the story of a young girl moving from an imaginary country somewhere in a generic place called ‘Africa’ to Finland to elicit qualitative data from trainee teachers about race and ethnicity. The pictures in the book are discussed in a focus group by the trainee teachers, which serves to help Layne and Alemanji to examine their understandings of racial differences. The book contains stereotyped images of both Finnish and generic ‘African’ children and adults. In examining the pictures in the book in particular, the emphasis here is on ‘the look’, a mode of discourse about race, which Soudien also critiques. ‘Zebra world’, as the title suggests, positions Black and White as distinct and opposite, whilst also living side by side harmoniously.
In trying to account for difference, in both Layne and Alemanji and Soudien’s papers, ‘otherness’ is emphasized. Categorizations of any kind, whether race, gender, ability and so on, inevitably highlight those who fall outside of the most inclusive category. There is, in neither of these cases, any overt intention to be exclusionary based on race, nationality or language. In fact, as Layne and Alemanji point out, the intentions of these forms of education are good. However, this does not preclude and indeed promotes symbolic violence, ‘the gentle, invisible form of violence’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 192). One way that symbolic violence is perpetrated is through gifts or debts. Immigration can be understood as a gift and this puts immigrants into a position of obligation towards their new country. In teaching immigrants their ‘mother tongue’ as part of the educational curriculum in Sweden a further debt of obligation is being created between the immigrant families and the education authorities. Often the teachers come from the same immigrant groups as the pupils they teach, making it very difficult for them to challenge the good intentions of the educational authorities.
Whilst the two papers from Europe focus on the ‘otherness’ of children (Soudien, 1998) within the educational arena, Toh’s paper from Japan and Davids and Waghid’s paper from South Africa focus instead on the ‘otherness’ of teachers (Vandeyar, 2014). As an ethnic Chinese teacher of English in Japan, Toh uses his own experiences to create a critical counter-narrative that he combines with a critical pedagogy to expose racialized and racist practices created through Japanese constructions of race and culture. Davids and Waghid explore the experiences of minority group teachers (in terms of the racial and ethnic make-up of the school community) in South African schools to show how the silence around ‘otherness’ leads to the invisibility and exclusion of these teachers. The difficulties of talking about race, particularly in ‘post-racial’ cultures have been written about elsewhere (for example Bennett and Lee-Treweek, 2014; Harries, 2014) but Davids and Waghid make a significant contribution to this body of work by drawing on Agamben’s (2007) conception of human experience in relation to language and communication. In positing the school community as one of ‘becoming’ and without a defined identity, Davids and Waghid argue that there is the possibility for ‘an encounter with otherness’. As ‘other’, these teachers also experience a lack of belonging on the level of ‘race’. Some perceive this as creating them as second-class teachers in the eyes of the majority, so they are additionally excluded on the level of their career identity, as well as on a personal level. Each of these papers positions the contestation of space within the classroom within a broader national conception of a unified cultural identity. In Japan this is based around the uniqueness of the Japanese, excluding other (particularly East Asian other) identities. In South Africa, the post-apartheid notion of the ‘rainbow nation’ suppresses acknowledgement of the racial differences embedded within the economy and educational structures of society. The reduction, in each of these cases, of racial identity to simplified notions of ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘Indian’, homogenizes the ‘other’, leading to the type of stereotypical representations discussed in Caparosa and Collins’ paper on student humour.
Racial categorization can lead to a sense of un-belonging. It suppresses individual identities within the homogenization of the concept of ‘the look’; existing side by side whilst acknowledging difference puts one categorization in a position of power towards the other. In Sweden, those who want to maintain a dual identity are pushed to the edge or borderlands in time and place; in Finland, stereotypical notions of homogenized Africans promote diversity at the same time as positioning Finland as a more advanced society. In South Africa and Japan, teachers’ abilities are assessed through ‘the look’. As ‘others’, whether immigrants or minorities within a particular school setting, it is incumbent upon the minority group to be obligated to the majority for sharing their space. Looked at through the concept of symbolic violence, it is clear how this indebtedness allows the dominant group to maintain their dominance.
Power and the language of education
The educational arena as a space dominated by the English language is another recurring theme throughout these papers. For Toh, the power of the English language is inverted and used against English language teachers who are BME. He points out that Black Americans, for example, are not automatically accepted as proficient English speakers. As Bourdieu (1977: 21) explains ‘the constitutive power which is granted to ordinary language lies not in the language itself but in the group which authorizes it and invests it with authority’. Where the language is English, the group is, generally, White, educated and middle class. White teachers give the university significant credence as a prestigious place to study for some Japanese students. This paper shows how in Japan ‘Whiteness’ and speaking English are strongly correlated and placed together in a racial hierarchy which is, nevertheless, still based on ‘the look’.
Naidoo also writes of the power the English language has in determining who can access the mathematics curriculum in South Africa. Those who are not fluent in English are excluded from accessing subjects across the curriculum. The concern about multi-lingual classrooms is not confined to a multi-lingual country such as South Africa but countries that are officially mono-lingual have increasingly diverse languages spoken in the classroom due to global migration. This is also a relatively new issue for South Africa, as many teachers would have been trained under the segregated system to expect to teach a particular (racial) group of students (Vandeyar, 2005, 2010). South African classroom spaces have become even more diverse with the introduction of Black immigrant students. Teachers now have to contend not only with desegregated classrooms in terms of the old racial categories of the apartheid era, but also the relatively new dynamic of Black immigrants from the SADC (Southern African Developing Community) region and from countries like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As in Japan, English is seen as an important language to learn because it offers a level of prestige. Naidoo’s research shows how trainee teachers use the notion of empowerment within the classroom to engage the different groups of learners and encourage them to work together, despite language differences. Much of these teachers’ work aims at overcoming the negative experiences of racial identity (Jenkins, 1997).
Stereotypes and humour
For Caparoso and Collins and Layne and Alemanji the spaces of the classroom and campus create stereotypes of ethnic and racial minorities, thus potentially subjecting these groups of students and young children to a loss of individual identity in learning arenas where they should feel safe. As Caparoso and Collins explain, their research on a college campus in Hawai’i found that the stereotypes on which much student racial humour is based follow a similar hierarchy to that of the different cultural and racial groups living in Hawai’i. This hierarchy also fits with ‘the look,’ which is also a prevalent characteristic of South African society. Many of the stereotypes depicted are based on skin colour and facial features, which are then associated with certain attributes, the most negative of which tend to be linked with darker skin. Caparoso and Collins found that this type of racial humour was considered acceptable in Hawai’ian society by the majority of students who participated in the research. But humour is a power-based performance in which not all performers have the same ability to alter the dominant notions of what is ‘funny’ and acceptable.
As Layne and Alemanji noted in Finland, the book they analysed had good intentions and was seen on the face of it to be a useful learning tool; similarly with the racially stereotypical humour in Hawai’i the intention was to promote laughter, and the underlying basis of the humour remains unquestioned. However, this positive intention can often mask the underlying negativity and harmfulness of racial caricatures as well as the consequences for those who are the subject of it and subjected to it; stereotypes become normalized and not seen for the gross misrepresentations that they are. This becomes apparent in Layne and Alemanji’s paper when their focus group discuss the depiction of physical violence towards children in some generic place called ‘Africa’, but in this instance they do recognize the racism inherent in the stereotypical representations.
Conclusion
Overall, this diverse collection of papers depicts much that is of concern within the contested spaces of education and politics of race today. Whether amongst teachers or students, racism is still present around the world, despite, as Soudien highlights, the acceptance of its socially constructed character. The papers in this themed edition amply demonstrate Jenkins’ (1997) point that identity is not just a name but also an experience. It is not in the naming of ‘White’ or ‘Black’ or using the terminology from Hawai’ian humour that is the issue: what is important is the experience that these acts of naming lead to in everyday learning spaces and in wider society.
These papers represent a concern with the on-going issues of race and racism within educational environments. They interrogate experiences from around the globe, which demonstrate the necessity to continue to educate children, young people and society as a whole about the invidious nature of ‘race’ or, more particularly, ‘the look’. It is hoped that this special edition can help to move the wider educational process forward and thus engage scholars from a range of disciplines in achieving this eminently worthy aim.