"Miss, Our Clothes Are Clean": Contesting Liminality in Lebanese Kindergarten Classrooms

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

Hala, a kindergarten girl, stated to a member of our research team, “Miss, our clothes are clean. At the mu’assisa’ our clothes are clean.” Referencing the local charitable institution that housed Hala and a third of the children in her public Lebanese kindergarten school, she fiercely proclaimed the cleanliness of the school uniforms provided for them. This incident signifies one of many instances we observed in which children and their teachers negotiated, at the micro-level of classroom practice, a globally circulating “culture of poverty” discourse, embedded in Early Childhood Education policy with its implicit promises for normative childhoods and bright futures.

Drawing on anthropological theories of liminality (Turner, 1969/2017), as well as discourse theory that illustrates how social identities forged at the level of historical timescales are constructed at the microlevel of everyday life (see especially, Wortham, 2006), we explore how these most vulnerable children’s marginalized status is created and resisted through the quotidian interactions of classroom life (see also, Abu El-Haj, Kaloustian, Bonet, and Chatila, 2018). In the example above, Hala insisted on the dignity of her and her peers’ personhood, against the subtle and not so subtle everyday discourses through which these young children were being educated into social liminality, as a potentially permanent, rather than a temporary state (see also Riggan, 2006). This paper draws on a four-year ethnographic study of one Lebanese public kindergarten school that serves the most vulnerable children in Lebanon—Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian children who face daily the insecurities of poverty, displacement, and political violence.

Across the world, optimistic educational policy discourses promote early childhood education as a key strategy for combating poverty and for building bright futures for the most vulnerable members of society. Analyzing the practices of everyday life across multiple classrooms in one school, we explore the critical disjuncture between the optimistic goals of official ECE policy, and the embedded, affective lessons about their liminal social positions that the kindergarteners are learning through the quotidian discourses and practices of everyday life. We argue that a globally circulating culture of poverty discourse (see McDermott & Vossoughi, 2020)—a discourse birthed so many decades ago in a completely different setting—continues to find traction in everyday talk about children and their families in Lebanon in the 21st century. Moreover, we suggest that “culture of poverty” discourse implicitly undergirds global ECE policy, circulates in teachers’ explanations for children’s vulnerability and marginality, and most important, is embedded in everyday interactions with the children about seemingly banal topics such as the children’s snacks, or illnesses. However, we pay particular attention to moments when children alternately reinforce or renounce these productions of their own, their peers’, and their families’ liminality. We argue that these re-articulations and refusals of liminality signal the everyday production of the affective dimensions of citizenship through which young children learn about, and contest their social positions. We argue that transformative ECE can only occur when we make visible the implicit assumptions about normative childhoods embedded in global ECE policy.

Authors

• Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College, Columbia University

• Samira Chatila, University of Minnesota