Eastern European migrants’ experiences of racism in English schools: positions of marginal whiteness and linguistic otherness

ABSTRACT

The number of students in England registered as speaking the languages of Eastern, and Central Europe has grown significantly in the past decade, but these migrants’ educational experiences remain under-researched. This study, based on interviews with students, parents and teachers in four secondary schools in London and in the East of England, found that Eastern European students experience various forms of racism and low expectations from teachers. Using a framework influenced by Critical Race Theory and critical conceptions of whiteness, we argue that these students occupy a position of marginal whiteness, related to their linguistic Otherness. However, as the parents we interviewed were aware, the students do benefit from whiteness if they speak English without an accent so that they are not perceived as ‘foreign’.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• whiteness
• Eastern European
• EAL
• migrant students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See for more details Table 1 in Tereshchenko and Archer’s (2014) report, produced using statistical data on NALDIC’s website www.naldic.org.uk.

2. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is the chief inspection and regulation department responsible for inspecting educational institutions in the UK.

3. Two individual student interviews were conducted in Russian, and one in Ukrainian.

4. Although the dynamic proved to work well, it was not always possible to form groups with participants of the same ethnic background due to small numbers of students of similar age from certain backgrounds.

5. The majority of the students were willing to choose their pseudonyms and thus English names in the article reflect their choice. We did not question them about the chosen names and therefore find it hard to be certain whether their choices are related to feeling of belonging in England. Many students left the pseudonym field blank, in which case a name arguably reflecting their ethnic origin was assigned by the lead researcher. We are conscious though of the power of participant naming process (Lahman et al. 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy through the Newton International Fellowship.