https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4206-9893
As an educator and researcher, I have a rock-solid faith in student voice as a catalyst for deep change in schools and societies. I believe that students are and can be agents of change that bring authentic school improvement, not the type of school improvement merely measured by standardised test scores. In the current issue of Multicultural Education Review, five articles are assembled to make the invisible presence of marginalised student groups visible in our discussion of diversity and authentic school improvement.
The five articles tell us stories of diverse student groups in different socio-cultural contexts, including students of colour in U.S. high schools, LGBTQ Asian American youth, culturally and linguistically diverse African immigrant students in U.S. urban schools, youth in Canadian schools, and newly-immigrated students in Swedish primary schools. The first three articles shed light on the lived experiences and voices from minoritised student groups in the U.S. The other two articles address the quality of school life experienced by students in Canada with a focus on connectedness and in Sweden with a focus on emotion, respectively.
Specifically, Marrun and her colleagues point out that diversifying the teacher workforce in the U.S. is a critical issue, given the persistent White dominance in the teaching profession. Within this context, they report that only a minority of students of colour go to college to pursue teaching careers, and one important reason for that is because they perceive the teaching profession as ‘a boring, undervalued, and white profession.’ The authors posit that such perceptions mainly stem from a lack of adequate encouragement, support, and advice about college going and career counselling in conjunction with the teaching profession. To address this problem, the authors offer insightful recommendations about how teachers can generate and sustain students of colour’s interest in and excitement about pursuing a teaching career.
Endo explores a research topic for which research literature is very thin on the ground – i.e., the experiences of LGBTQ Asian American youth. As she points out, the presence of school-aged LGBTQ Asian American youth is treated as either invisible or statistically insignificant to be researched or reported by scholarly communities and governmental agencies. In this regard, Endo’s work contributes to enhancing our understanding of various forms of racialised homophobia that are perpetually experienced by LGBTQ Asian American youth.
Kiramba and her colleagues investigate another distinct group of students – i.e., 50 culturally and linguistically diverse African immigrant students in U.S. urban schools. The authors illuminate the educational experiences of the African immigrant students with a focus on the various challenges they face with learning. Such challenges include adapting to different pedagogy and curriculum, language and cultural differences, and stereotypes of being an African. The authors report that familial capital was the key source for African immigrant students to overcome the challenges.
The fourth article pays special attention to students’ feeling of connectedness to school as a cornerstone for students’ well-being and development. Patte and her colleagues examine discrepancies in school connectedness by student ethnicity in Canada. Drawing on the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, their latent class analysis shows four clusters with different ethnic group proportions. For example, they found that White and Asian students were more likely to belong to a cluster called ‘strongly connected’, whereas Black and other ethnicity students were more likely to be represented in two other clusters named ‘social belonging’ and ‘weakly connected,’ respectively. These findings show how racialised and ethnic experiences play out in the formation of students’ feeling of connectedness to school.
Finally, Magnusson and Hedman’s article explores the pedagogic discourses and practices exercised in ‘Introductory Classes’ in the Swedish context. Introductory Classes aim at helping new immigrant students to settle in linguistically diverse primary schools. The authors report that the logic (or legitimacy) and enactment of multilingual and emotional support for new immigrant students designed in Introductory Classes relied primarily on teachers’ multilingual competencies and previous experiences with Introductory Classes. In this context, the authors also highlight the supportive role of school management in conjunction with Introductory Classes.
The five articles in this issue offer vivid snapshots of the voices and experiences of various minoritised groups across different societies. Given that placing students at the centre of pedagogy and school practices begins with listening to their voices and experiences, the line-up of five research articles in this issue would be resourceful for researchers and educators in the field of multicultural education.
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Notes on contributors
Moosung Lee
Moosung Lee is a Centenary Professor at the University of Canberra. He is Editor-In-Chief of Multicultural Education Review.