‘Children at our school are integrated. No one sticks out’: Greek‐Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of integration of immigrant children in Cyprus

Abstract

Increasingly social scientists, including education theorists, find themselves having to fight an almost invisible racism that is masked by the racist undertones of the dominant discourse and practice of colorblindness. A continuous emphasis on colorblindness gives precedence to the role of race, diverting attention away from other forms of discrimination which can become the basis for exclusion. I would argue that for such acts of marginalization, difference‐blindness may have more explanatory power. This paper discusses Greek‐Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of the integration of immigrant children in a Greek‐Cypriot public primary school through the framework of difference‐blindness. The discussion shows that despite their good intentions, teachers utilized a difference‐blind ideology to rationalize practices of social exclusion of non‐Cypriot students in what was considered an ‘integrated’ school environment.

Keywords:

• difference‐blindness
• teachers
• immigrant students
• Cyprus
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stavroula Kontovourki, Beth Lloyd, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 29th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, February 29–March 1, in Philadelphia, PA.

2. Following inter‐communal violence in the 1960s and the 1974 invasion by Turkey, the two communities, Turkish‐Cypriots and Greek‐Cypriots, have been living apart. The study is situated within the Greek‐Cypriot context and the territory that falls under the jurisdiction of the Republic of Cyprus.

3. More recent estimations raise that number to 27,000 (Ministry of Interior, letter to author, 26 April 2010).

4. The 2009 Annual Report by the Ministry of Education and Culture estimates the percentage of non‐Greek Cypriot students enrolled in public primary schools to be around 9%.

5. Other‐language children is the term used by the MOEC to refer to children who are non‐native speakers of Greek.

6. All direct quotes come from personal interviews with the participants.

7. I remind the reader that Bonilla‐Silva (2006) uses four central frames in analyzing colorblind ideology discourse: (1) abstract liberalism; (2) naturalization; (3) cultural racism; and (4) minimization of racism.

8. In the present discussion, I use discourse (and discursive) to denote language‐in‐use as this unfolds among social actors within particular spatial, temporal, and sociocultural contexts.

9. Arapis (αράπης) is a disparaging slang word used to refer to men with dark skin complexion. It can also be used to refer to men from the Middle East, in which case it also implies a ‘backward’ cultural background associated with Islam.

10. Mavrou (µαυρύ) is a derogatory slang word used to describe women with darker skin complexions. It is the diminutive of the adjective mavri (µαύρη) which means black in Greek. In the context of the Greek‐Cypriot society it refers to female immigrants from Asian countries who are employed in Greek‐Cypriot houses as full‐time resident domestic workers, occupying a particularly low social status.

11. I follow Reeves’ (2004) conceptualization of instructional, curricular, and procedural teacher accommodations that the teachers in her study made for English Language Learners. She defines these as follows: curricular accommodations involve quantitative or qualitative curriculum modifications to reduce the amount of coursework or to make it less complex. Instructional accommodations modify the way the content is delivered by altering speech (i.e., slowing rate of speech) or texts (i.e., adapting or supplementing them) for comprehensibility. Procedural accommodations modify the procedures of the classroom by, for example, extending due dates or allowing non‐native speakers to use L1–L2 dictionaries.