Toward an awareness of the “colonial present” in education: Focusing on interdependence and inequity in the context of global migration

ABSTRACT

Across the world, the number of displaced people has risen to unprecedented levels. In the United States, rightwing politicians call for closing borders to Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. These conditions lead the authors to ask how to educate with and for immigrant students who are positioned as enemy aliens – “impossible subjects” – within their new nation? We take a comparative approach, looking across our studies with Palestinian immigrant and Cambodian refugee youth in the US to think about how their experiences in US schools can inform an education for justice. In looking across two ethnographies, done more than a decade apart from each other, we illustrate the remarkable similarities between discourses about these different groups of students. In this article, we focus on three stances toward immigrant incorporation that the young people in our research studies encountered – stances through which they learn about the meanings of and expectations for citizenship and belonging. Our argument is that despite the differences between these stances, all three erase the “colonial present” that shapes the lives of immigrant youth and their families. We call for an education that decentres the nation, and focuses attention on the co-dependent inequities at the centre of our global interdependence.

KEYWORDS:

• Multicultural/diversity education
• immigrant education
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Arzubiaga, Nogeuron, and Sullivan (2009) suggest using im/migrant to denote the variety of people included in the category of immigrant (for example, immigrant, transnational migrant, and refugee).

2. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research explores questions about citizenship education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. She recently published a book that explores how young Palestinian Americans and other Arab Americans grappled with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of 11 September 2001: Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11 (2015, University of Chicago Press). Other publications about this research (which was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship) have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Harvard Educational Review; Educational Policy; and Theory into Practice. Her first book, Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice (Routledge, 2006), offers a critical account of the range of justice claims at play inside real schools, exploring several different, important dimensions of educational equity that are often ignored in contemporary educational policy debates.

Ellen Skilton

Ellen Skilton, the Rosemary and Walter Blankley Endowed Chair in Education at Arcadia University, is an educational anthropologist who is interested in understanding linguistic diversity in US education. Her research has focused on immigrant and refugee education in the United States (particularly for Cambodians in Philadelphia), biliterate development, (arts-based) global/local civic education and engagement, the inclusion of English Language Learners and students with disabilities in general education contexts, service learning in undergraduate and graduate education, and embodied learning.