Being a migrant learner in a South African primary school: recognition and racialisation

ABSTRACT

This article is an exploration of racialised understandings of migrant learners within the educational space of primary school and the social context of xenophobia in South Africa. These understandings draw from small-scale creative visual research that focused on migrant learners’ perspectives on their school experiences. Framed by the concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘White privilege’, it uses the spatial encounter between two learners – one racialised as White and one as Black – and draws on elements of storytelling to present their fragmentary, mosaic-like narratives, highlighting two facets of racialisation: the prizing of White migrant identities and the erasure of Black migrant identities. This study contributes to the field of children’s geographies in terms of revealing how migrant primary school children experience the school space differently as differently racialised individuals, as well as how research approaches common in education (picturebooks) and Critical Race Theory (storytelling) can enable such stories to emerge in migration research.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• migration
• South Africa
• racialisation
• White privilege
• visual methods

Acknowledgments

I am incredibly grateful for feedback on early drafts of this article, as well as for huge encouragement, from Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Dr Rebecca Loader.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘migrant’, while imperfect, is used in this article for brevity to denote people who have moved between two or more countries. Ordinarily, I find the term ‘person who migrates’ or ‘person with a migration background’ more accurate and less suggestive of the negative stereotypes often attributed to ‘immigrant’ or ‘migrant’ in the media and political sphere.

2 ‘Apartheid’ was a White supremacist form of state governance that focused on keeping different ‘races’ separate in all aspects of daily life. While it became the official government policy from 1948, White people had held power and privilege since the area was colonised as early as seventeenth century. See Motala and Vally 2010, for a more detailed explanation.

3 While problematic, these identity markers are commonly used in writings on South Africa. I have followed Hammett 2010 here, as well as for an explanation of the complex and non-unified category of ‘coloured’ in the South African context.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number SG162248]; National Research Foundation (South Africa).