Global Migration and Education

Schools, Children, and Families

Leah Adams, Anna Kirova, Leah D. Adams, Anna Kirova, Leah D. Adams, Anna Kirova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136782602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Global Migration and Education makes a notable contribution to understanding the issues faced by immigrant children, their parents, and educators as they interact in school settings, and to identifying the common challenges to, and successes in, educational institutions worldwide as they cope with these issues. Global in scope, there are chapters f

Chapter 1

Introduction: Global Migration and the Education of Children

Leah D. Adams
Eastern Michigan University, USA

Anna Kirova
University of Alberta, Canada

Migration is not new. Human beings have always migrated; much of the prehistoric and historic record focuses on the migration of people. Although the highest percentage of world population migration was between 1850 and 1910, when as much as 10% of the world population was on the move, the transitional displacement of people appears to have become endemic by the beginning of 21st century, with more people on the face of the globe then ever before and some 200 million living away from their country of birth (Global Commission on International Migration, 2005). Every nation is a sending, receiving, or transient nation for migrants, and there is every indication that international mobility and the challenges associated with transition will continue to affect future generations (Langford, 1998; RAND Corporation, 2000; Schiff & Ozden, 2005). The trend has significant effects on the racial and ethnic composition of many of the world's schools (Rong & Preissle, 1998).

Although transnational migration is an increasingly recognized international term for people moving from one country to another, because of the international nature of this volume, the chapters and introductory sections use various terms for transnational migrants or for those who move from rural to urban locations. In many countries, particularly in North America, immigration is the term for the act of people moving from other nations to settle, and people who do so are termed immigrants; the term migrants is reserved for those who move within national borders. In Europe and in some other areas, new arrivals from other nations are sometimes referred to as migrants, and, in some instances, the terms immigrants and migrants are used interchangeably. In general, although the terms immigrants, migrants, and newcomers are used differently in various parts of the world, they typically refer to people who have left their places of birth by choice to settle in a new place either permanently or temporarily. The terms used to describe the people who have left their homes not by choice are refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people. For the purposes of this book, we decided that readers would be able to cope with the interchanging of the terms and that it would be inappropriate to alter the authors' preferred terms. The semantics used to describe the phenomenon are not as important as the recognition of the magnitude of the global phenomenon of movement from one nation to another and the impact on societies, communities, and schools.

The particular focus of this volume is the factors that shape the lives of families with young children in transition as they experience schooling in their new location. We see these experiences as fundamental to the study of global migration of people, because they provide a glimpse into how schools might allow space for the expression of people's ideas, languages, social behaviors, ideologies, and ways of seeing the world. Educators and school environments are the key to facilitating the socialization and acculturation of immigrant children. It is in schools that children often first encounter in-depth contact with the host culture, which leads to school becoming a central part of life for the children (Hones & Cha, 1999; Trueba, Jacobs, & Kirton, 1990; Yale Center in Child Development and Social Policy, 2003). As Corson (1998) pointed out, schools are where most of a culture's dominant discourses are exchanged; most simple, everyday conventional acts are observed; and new ways of doing things are learned. The cultural capital valued in schools may not be equally available to the newcomer who brings another set of cultural conventions into the classroom (Suárez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2001). Events experienced by children and their families before entering the school system, as well as the experiences of schooling in the host country, to a large extent affect the kind of relationship children will develop with the new culture and how they will begin to shape their new identities.

In the past, the paths of migration were more predictable, that is, from less economically developed countries to more highly developed areas. Current global economic trends, the growth of global communication, and greater access to transportation have affected this pattern of migration. Although it can still be expected that most immigrant families struggle financially and that children in immigrant families are more likely to be poor and to live in crowded housing conditions (Children Now, 2004; Segal 1993), this is not true of all immigrants. Many highly skilled and well-educated workers, managers, and entrepreneurs are among those who migrate (Fix & Passel, 2003). This trend has challenged the traditional view of immigrants as people who are forced to move away from their countries of origin to survive economically. Migration of skilled workers is often referred to as a brain drain (Schiff & Ozden, 2005), and some of the world's poorest countries have the highest incidence of this phenomenon. More than 50% of the university-educated professionals from many countries in Central America and the Caribbean live abroad; for some countries, this statistic is as high as 80%. Most college-educated emigrants from developing countries go to the United States, the European Union, Australia, and Canada. Canada and Australia have the largest percentage of educated migrants among the total number of migrants, and immigrants represent approximately 25% of the skilled labor force in Australia, Luxembourg, and Switzerland (Schiff & Ozden, 2005).

Migration for the children of highly educated workers is not necessarily any less challenging. Educated migrants often fail to find work that matches their education levels; one of the main reasons is lack of fluency in the host language. The family may struggle to obtain enough income for basic necessities, and many new arrivals feel obliged to support family members in their home country. Although the question arises as to whether the brain drain has adverse effects on the sending nation, a World Bank report (Schiff & Ozden, 2005) clearly shows that the remittances from migrants do help alleviate poverty in the home country. Sending remittances adds to the financial strain on immigrant families, but teachers should not assume that the parents of newly arrived children who live at or near the poverty line have limited education or skills.

Although the trend toward global movement among highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs still represents a small percentage of the overall number of people in transitional migration, it illustrates one aspect of global change that results in people considering themselves global citizens–comfortable living almost anywhere (Friedmann, 2002). Schools must be able to face the challenge of meeting the needs of students who are well prepared for the curriculum and already global citizens. It is important to consider that although importing culture, goods, and foods, along with global media and media products, may facilitate the process of becoming a global citizen, it also may lead to reduction in diversity through hybridization or even assimilation. Noddings (2005) reminded us that in our world of instant communication and swift travel, we have become keenly aware of our global interdependence. Along with this awareness, we ponder the question of global citizenship and how we can preserve diversity while seeking unity.

The forces behind international transitional migration cannot be reduced to economic factors. Intolerance and political exclusion and various forms of violence, including armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, or natural disasters, can and do force people away from their countries of origin to protect their own lives and those of their families. The United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 1994) estimated that more than half of any refugee population consists of children. Separation of families during flight (Boyden, de Berry, Feeny, & Hart, 2002); rape, abduction, and trafficking of refugee children; illness and malnutrition; loss of stability; and lack of education (Boyden et al., 2002; Tollefson, 1989) are among the traumas refugee families with children may experience before entering the host country. The multiple losses of the children and their families and the children's fears, confusion, sadness, loneliness, and alienation are carried with them to their new schools (Kirova, 2001). Thus, these premigration experiences present challenges to both the newcomers and the people and institutions that receive them in the new locations. Educators who work with immigrant and refugee children and their families must recognize the social, economic, health, and education hardships faced by these people. At the same time, educators need to recognize that many systemic challenges in education have yet to be overcome. The plight of the immigrant who is marginalized in the community through encountering xenophobia and economic, linguistic, or cultural barriers is a reality that needs the attention of all members of the international education community.

Although the reasons behind peoples' migration are multifaceted and usually involve a complex decision-making process that takes into consideration several factors, the process of settlement and establishing a new pattern of life in the new location after migration has some common elements for all transitional migrants. For example, regardless of their level of education, many migrants, especially those who are racially different from the dominant group, encounter varying degrees of prejudice, racism, rejection, or indifference (Li, 2001; Moreau, 2000; Nauck & Sattles, 2001). With regard to schools, recent studies (Gitlin, Buendia, Crosland, & Doumbia, 2003) in the United States have shown a discrepancy between what students, teachers, and administrators say about diversity and the exclusionary practices in place in schools that lead to marginalization of immigrant children. These experiences point to unresolved power issues among the cultural groups and indicate that the “mainstream population in the country of settlement is almost always more powerful than the migrating group” (van de Vijver & Phalet, 2004, p. 216). However, not all encounters with the dominant group are negative. Depending on their encounters with the dominant culture, newcomers may engage in “cultural frame switching,” (Lafromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993) which over time leads them to develop different relationships with the host culture.

The change in an individual or cultural group that results from contact with another culture is known as acculturation (McBrien, 2005). The process of acculturation, which once was seen as a unidimensional change in the direction of the mainstream culture, is now envisaged as bidimensional (Berry & Sam, 1997), an acknowledgment that immigrants increasingly choose options other than pursuing complete adjustment. For example, migrants who have positive relationships with the mainstream culture and consider it important to combine elements of it with their own integrate into the mainstream culture and become bicultural (Phalet & Hagendoorn, 1996; Phalet, Van Lotringen, & Entzinger, 2000). Terms such as biculturalism, transculturalism, and additive assimilation (McBrien, 2005) are used to indicate the processes through which, depending on the circumstances, people are able to move between cultures. Children of immigrants clustering around a bicultural style of adaptation (Trueba & Bartolome, 2000) typically emerge as cultural brokers who mediate the often-conflicting cultural currents of home and the host culture.

Immigrant groups who live in ethnic enclaves in the host country may gain sufficient momentum to develop and sustain their own culture through institutions such as schools (van de Vijver & Phalet, 2004) and may consider maintaining their own culture more important than establishing relationships with the host culture. This strategy is known as separation or segregation. The opposite strategy, which attempts complete absorption into the host culture and entails loss of the original culture, is known as assimilation (Berry & Sam, 1996; Gordon, 1964). Assimilation is associated with cultural dissonance, where children acquire the language and skills of their new culture, reject their parents' culture, and often join “oppositional structures of marginalized peers” (Gibson, 2001, p. 21). Trueba and Bartolome (2000) suggested that children in this pattern may develop either an “ethnic flight style” or “adversarial style” of adaptation. An ethnic flight style is expressed in the struggle of immigrant children and youth to mimic the dominant group and attempt to join in, thereby rejecting their own ethnic group–including parental authority, moral codes, values, and expectations–as anachronistic and not current in the new country. The adversarial style of adaptation is characterized by newcomer children's rejecting the institutions of the dominant culture, including school and the formal economy. The resultant school dropouts also tend to have significant problems with parents and relatives, because the culturally constituted function of parental authority often becomes severely corroded. It is from this situation, typically, that gangs emerge that exist on the margins of the dominant society and construct spaces of competence in the underground alternative economy or counterculture. Although these patterns are more often seen in second- or third-generation children of immigrants, recently arrived refugee children who lack a significant social support system are especially vulnerable to this negative pattern of acculturation, also known as subtractive acculturation (McBrien, 2005).

With the greater accessibility of technology, international transportation, and the magnitude of migration that facilitates the formation of social networks among ethnic groups after migration, more immigrants may choose to resist assimilation. Also, because the assimilation doctrine among mainstream cultures has largely been replaced by a climate of greater acceptance of migrants maintaining their culture of origin (van de Vijver & Phalet, 2004), transnational spaces created in the receiving countries allow immigrants to establish and maintain productive ties between their country of origin and the host country (Brittain, 2002).

Despite some current positive trends in overall societal acceptance of immigrants, educating children from diverse cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds is perceived as problematic. Bias and preconceived expectations on the part of educators are not limited to newly arrived children (Lee, 2002; McBrien, 2005; Suarez-Orozco, 1989; Trueba et al., 1990). The school's view of parents may be just as prejudiced and equally wrong. For example, the new community may hold false impressions about women from countries where a patriarchal culture predominates and strong cultural expectations influence the lives of women. Erel (2002) pointed out that migrant women from Turkey are generally perceived in an Orientalist manner as backward, oppressed, and passive, with the family unit perceived as the main site of sexist oppression. Her research reveals the self-representations of migrant women of Turkish background and provides a more complex view of mothering relations and migration than the stereotypical fixation on tradition. Further, the mothering relationships and the attainment of more autonomy may occur as a result of the migration process. Izuhara and Shibata (2002) studied Japanese migrant women in the United Kingdom and concluded that when removed from Japanese society, many appreciated the reduced pressure to conform to Japanese social norms. At the same time, it is essential for educators to recognize that reaching out to female members of an immigrant household demands different strategies than when looking to local residents for parental participation. Both sensitivity and cultural understanding are needed.

In addition to being accepting of immigrants, schools and communities must be prepared to adjust to the demographic changes that may accompany immigration (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002; Segal, 1993; Yale Center, 2003). Although fertility rates are declining in all developed nations, those who immigrate to these countries may have larger families, and the women are more likely to be of childbearing age (RAND Corporation, 2005), which will affect school enrolments in areas with high rates of immigration. Births in immigrant families accounted for 56% of the population growth in the United States in 2002 (Camerota, 2002). Female immigrants in the United States also may have more children than women in their home countries. For example, Mexican immigrant women have an average of 3.5 children, whereas women in Mexico average 2.4 ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Editor
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Global Migration and the Education of Children
• PART I. MULTIPLE GLOBAL ISSUES FOR IMMIGRANT CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOLS THEY ATTEND
• PART II. THEY ARE HERE: NEWCOMERS IN THE SCHOOLS
• PART III. VIEWS AND VOICES OF IMMIGRANT CHILDREN
• PART IV. FAR FROM HOME WITH FLUCTUATING HOPES
• PART V. SEARCHING FOR NEW WAYS TO BELONG
• Author Index
• Subject Index