Educational Self-Determination in the Iranian Diaspora: Tracing Intergenerational Dialogues on Race, Parenting, and Identity

• In Event: Beyond the Engagement Paradigm: Family and Community Leadership in Co-Designing Educational Justice

Abstract

This paper analyzes the forms of discourse and collective social analysis that emerged among a group of Iranian parents/grandparents who engaged in a series of design circles focused on the educational and social needs of their children in the United States. As part of a national project on critical approaches to family engagement and educational self-determination among non-dominant communities (Author & Author, 2016), I worked closely with a group of eight parents/grandparents as leaders in their communities to discuss their concerns and dreams with regard to their children’s education and identity development as members of the Iranian diaspora.

The design circles took place in a weekend Persian language and community program in a large mid-western city. The timeline for these discussions coincided with the election of Donald Trump as president, and the subsequent “Muslim Ban”—political events that figured prominently in the dialogue that emerged. Our design work culminated in the development and shared facilitation of a larger workshop on the cultural, linguistic and racial experiences of Iranian children growing up in the U.S. for parents whose children attended the Farsi school (30 participants).

Bringing together literature from Iranian Diaspora studies (Gholami, 2017; Shirazi, 2014), educational ethnography (Erickson, 1986; McDermott & Raley, 2009), learning sciences and participatory design research (Author & Author, 2016), this paper offers an analysis of the audio-recorded dialogues, tracing the ways parents/grandparents narrated questions of race, identity and belonging, and how these narratives shifted over time. Diasporic education typically focuses attention on young people and second-generation immigrants, those understood to be negotiating various forms of cultural and epistemic hierarchy and erasure. The emphasis on the racial identity-work of young people is also present in the literature on the Iranian diaspora, and more broadly within research on human development and identity formation (Nasir, 2011). Though youth, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, experience specific and intensified forms of identity formation, less attention has been given to the ongoing forms of identity formation among adults, in this case immigrant parents making sense of and negotiating their own cultural and socio-political subjectivities, often in relation to their second-generation children.

Findings emphasize the ways elders articulated educational needs, concerns, and dreams; the emergence of complex and sometimes contradictory discourses of race and racial identity as a context for learning; and the ways participants supported one another to disentangle self-defense from the politics of respectability. The complexities of elders’ narratives call for careful attunement the complex personhood (Tuck, 2009) of diaspora Iranians, in this case as they worked together to question and reimagine the educational and socio-political needs of the next generation. The analysis also centers the role of temporality and relationality in sowing conditions for particular stories and questions to be shared, and related implications for research with families.

Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University