Immigration, Integration and Education

Children of Immigrants in France and England

Oakleigh Welply

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429814884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of the 2023 Globalisation and Education SIG Best Book Award at CIES 2023!

Immigration, Integration and Education offers a unique comparative analysis of the views and experiences of children of immigrants in school in France and England. It showcases how the theorization of children's narratives can offer new methodological tools and insights in comparative education and help understand the different role of educational systems and discourses around issues of immigration, integration, race, language and religion.

Presenting an in-depth analysis of children's own narratives, this book offers a close comparative examination of the French and English educational systems, and the ways in which they impact on the experiences and identities of children of immigrants. The narratives of the children reveal the multiple forms of othering, discrimination and exclusion that shape their experiences in school, but also the multiple strategies they deploy to navigate these complex educational landscapes. It stresses that beyond national ideologies and philosophies of integration, structural and cultural aspects need to be explored to understand the role played by schools in the inclusion of immigrant populations.

This book is an essential resource for academics, researchers and graduate students in the fields of sociology of education, migration studies, intercultural education, educational policy and comparative and international education. It will also appeal to those who are committed to addressing inequalities and discrimination in education.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Immigration, integration, and education: critical perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9780429444371-1

This book focuses on immigration, integration, and education in France and England. Increased mobility and migration, as a result of globalisation, conflict, and poverty, have brought new opportunities and challenges to contemporary societies. For high-income countries in the ‘global North’,¹ which constitute the majority of the destination countries for international migrant populations, the changing composition of immigration over time has created new contexts of diversity (religious, cultural, linguistic), which have put into question long-established ideas of inclusion and integration promoted by nation-states. This has particularly (but not exclusively) been the case for Western democratic states, especially in North American and in Europe. These shifts have opened up interrogations about the integrative role of public institutions, in particular schools, and the ways in which they can respond to increased diversity in the classroom.

Immigration is commonly framed as a ‘social problem’ for Western liberal democracies (Ichou, 2018; Joppke, 2017; Tomlinson, 2019; Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2010). Imagined notions of the ‘threatening immigrant Other’, presented as the cause of social ills and the fragmentation of society, have emerged in media and political discourse, creating a climate of hostility that has symbolic and material manifestations, marked by an increase in nationalist, xenophobic, racist or anti-immigration discourses. This has been manifested through an increase in hate speech and violent acts of racism, the toughening of immigration laws and processes, and the electoral success of extreme-right and populist political parties across the world² (Collet, 2017; Fargues, 2017; Jackson, 2016; Joppke, 2017). These discourses and political movements build on a rhetoric which mobilises race, religion, culture, and language as markers of Otherness, presented as a threat to idealised notions of national (and racial) homogeneity and belonging, which draw on imperialist notions of white and ‘Western’ superiority. Within this context, increased polarisations in society have become more visible, brought to the fore in 2020 by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Racial and ethnic inequalities in Western societies have become more apparent and difficult to ignore, shedding light on forms of institutional and day-to-day racism that were previously dismissed through the myth of a ‘post-racial society’. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, following the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, exposed the deeply entrenched injustices at the heart of many Western democracies. Unapologetic affirmations of ‘white supremacy’ in recent times have revealed a shift in the permissiveness of racism, shown in the counter-protests to Black Lives Matter accompanied by ‘White lives matter’ declarations and the success of conspiracy theories. This was epitomised by the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, in which protesters chose gallows and confederate flags as their rallying symbols. These manifestations of ‘democracy in crisis’ call for an examination of public institutions and their ‘integrative’ roles in fostering democratic participation and capabilities (Bhabha, 2021; Brown, 2020; Fraser, 2018; Jennings et al., 2021). Schools and education, in particular, have an important role to play.

Whilst these debates have gained more visibility in recent years, perceived challenges associated with immigration and integration are not new. In particular, the question of how national public institutions, historically inscribed in nationalist and modernist frameworks, can integrate more diverse populations has been at the forefront of debates around multiculturalism over the past few decades, in particular in Europe and the United States (Banks et al., 2016; Blommaert, 2010; Jackson, 2016; Joppke, 2017; Modood & Salt, 2011; Modood, 2021; Torres & Tarozzi, 2020). Education and the role of schools have been positioned centrally in these debates around immigration and integration, in which they occupy a paradoxical place. On the one hand, critics have lamented schools’ failure to foster successful integration for immigrant populations, whether this is understood as the ‘assimilation’ of immigrant children into society or the ways in which schools continue to reproduce inequalities (social, economic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, or religious). On the other hand, schools are invested with an integrative and socialising role, by equipping young people with the knowledge, skills, and credentials to successfully belong and participate in society, economically and politically, in the future. These contradictions are expressed in educational policy, caught in a tension between an idealised, meritocratic view of education and the pressures of deep structural, social, and geographical inequalities that underpin national educational systems. In OECD countries, on average, 13% of 15-year-old students in 2018 were categorised as having an ‘immigrant background’, and in most countries, a large proportion of students from immigrant backgrounds tended to be socio-economically disadvantaged (OECD, 2018a). As children of immigrants continue to experience issues of inequality, underachievement, racism, discrimination, and exclusion in schools across the world, the integrative role of education has been called into question. This stresses the urgent need for further research in this area. This book offers a timely response to these issues by focusing on the experiences of children of immigrants in France and England.

The educational experiences of children of immigrants have been examined through a variety of lenses, which offer different theoretical and empirical perspectives on issues related to education, immigration, and integration. These different lenses correspond to different research traditions and approaches and offer different insights into children’s experiences and the barriers they face in terms of integration or inclusion. Large-scale international surveys can tend towards homogenisation and mask the huge variation of situations and experiences for children of immigrants within and across different countries (Nicolai, 2017; UNESCO, 2019). As such, more localised and in-depth research has tried to offer a more contextualised understanding of the forms of inequalities and discrimination experienced by children from immigrant backgrounds. Studies in the United States, Australia, France, and the UK have shown that children from immigrant families are more likely to have poor educational outcomes and more difficulties in terms of ‘integration’ if they suffer from multiple situations of disadvantage: poverty, socio-spatial inequalities, racial or religious discrimination, linguistic barriers, and citizenship status (Ichou & van Zanten, 2019; Shain, 2012; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2013). However, explanations for these inequalities vary across disciplinary fields and national research contexts, ranging from socio-economic factors (often referred to as a ‘structuralist’ approach) to cultural or linguistic factors (often referred to as a ‘culturalist’ approach) (Alba & Duyvendak, 2019; Byrne et al., 2020; Ichou, 2018; Portes & Rivas, 2011; Safi, 2013). These variations correspond to different constructions of the social reality of ‘immigration’ and ‘diversity’ and different conceptualisations of the role of education with regard to integration (Ichou & van Zanten, 2019; Welply, 2019a).

Integration, belonging, and Otherness

As the concept of ‘integration’ features centrally in this book, it requires closer examination. The notion of ‘integration’ is a politically loaded term, often mobilised in a negative form in political and media discourse to portray immigrants as ‘failing’ to ‘successfully’ integrate into society. In this view, integration is associated with notions of assimilation and communitarianism, concepts that have been widely used in public discourse in recent decades to negatively frame immigrants as a ‘threat’ to social cohesion or state security. The term ‘integration’ is thus neither straightforward nor unproblematic and does not have a stable or unitary definition in the political realm or in academic research. This lack of consensus around the meanings and usages of the term ‘integration’ highlights an aspect that is fundamental to this book: integration as a polysemic concept for theorising forms of belonging and othering in society. The concept of integration and its different understandings and uses across disciplinary traditions or national contexts are discussed in more depth in Chapter 2.

This polysemic and fluid nature of the concept of integration brings us to one of the starting points of this book, and the research that underpins it: an interest in how these multiple understandings of integration, which reflect variations in conceptions of belonging and Otherness in society, might shape the experiences and identities of children of immigrants in schools. In particular, how are these different understandings of ways of living together with, despite or across ‘differences’ (cultural, racial, linguistic, religious) expressed in schools, and how are they interpreted by children to make sense of their everyday experiences? This line of questioning guided the comparative perspective of this book. Variations in an understanding of the concept of integration across different national educational systems and educational landscapes make a comparative perspective particularly relevant, as much can be learnt from looking at the ways in which belonging and Otherness are constructed in schools and experienced by children of immigrants. This stresses the importance of a multi-levelled perspective to the understanding of issues linked to immigration, education, and integration, which this book aims to address through the following interrelated aims:

1. To build theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding the relationship between immigration, integration, and education, from a cross-national perspective.
2. To examine how children of immigrants experienced belonging and Otherness (linguistic, religious, national) in schools in France and England.
3. To investigate how the interplay between public institutions such as schools, social actors (teachers, families, peers), the local environment, and wider socio-political discourses might shape the experiences of children of immigrants in school.

Having stated these aims, the question remains about how ‘integration’ is understood in this book. This presented two challenges. First, the cross-national perspective adopted in this book meant there was a need to navigate different national orientations around the concept of integration, both in scholarly work and in public or everyday discourse. Second, the focus on children’s experiences meant that the approach to the concept of integration needed to address some of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Immigration, integration, and education: critical perspectives
• 2 Crossed perspectives Immigration, integration, and education in France and England, a review of policy and practice
• 3 Belonging and othering The construction of difference and Otherness in schools
• 4 Language and power Children’s views on language and Otherness in school
• 5 Discourse and microaggressions Belonging and Otherness in peer-group relations in the English school
• 6 Ideology and utopia Belonging and Otherness in peer-group relations in the French school
• 7 Narrative and self Children’s identity narratives of belonging and Otherness in school
• 8 Conclusion On reflection, recognition, and reparation
• Epilogue: where are the children now?
• List of references
• Glossary of French terms
• Index