The education of the non-citizen child: migration, integration and time

• In Event: New theoretical perspectives on resilience & integration

Proposal

Background:
Migration and the movement of people is one of the greatest societal and humanitarian challenges of the 21st century. In 2015, international migration reached an all record peak with 244 million people residing in a country other than that in which they were born (IOM, 2015). The world today is on the move. Globalization has shaped new migration flows and, in turn, contributed to what is often characterized as hyper-diversity challenging modernist forms of membership that link civic belonging to a single nation space. Human mobility in general, but particularly forced migration, poses great political, economic and moral challenges to nation-states and their institutions, not least education. Moreover, while in the past, migration was seen as a linear process with a clear trajectory – from foreigner/stranger to citizen, the reality of migration today (whether forced or voluntary) is much more complex, and temporally diverse.
The number of children today who are on the move and who reside temporarily or not in countries other than their country of birth, represent one of the greatest challenges to education providers (whether official schools or informal educational organization) in this century. State education, which initially aimed to shape future national citizens, now needs to cater for a large population of children who can be considered in Benhabib’ (2004) sense as ‘non-citizens’. Such children cannot necessarily expect to live their adult lives in the country in which they or their families find themselves as temporary. They cannot expect to belong therefore in the full sense of word, even though the task of their school is precisely to socialize them into the conditions of belonging. In some case, their rights as children to mainstream schooling are denied. In many countries, asylum-seeking minors are not given access to mainstream schools or to its curriculum until they have spent a period of time in separate provisions learning the national language. In other cases, they are held in detention, in holding centers, and in the global south they are temporarily or permanently in refugee camps. The task of offering all migrant children their rights to education has become ever more complex.
The global movement of children therefore raise questions about what is the right thing to do in terms of educating this new generation and who should be doing it. Not only does this raise major ethical questions for the state and its institutions, but also for national and local communities. Calls for new forms of inclusion reflect considerable concerns about the levels of conflict, xenophobia and discrimination that such global movement brings forth in school systems. In such circumstances, the role of education becomes more rather than less important. All children have the right to an education. The question is whether that right is one which is recognized, and signifies in the changing dynamics of a globalized world on the move.
Aims and main argument:
The aim of this theoretical review paper is to examine how comparative and sociological research in the past decade have addressed these challenges, to identify some of the gaps in the existing literature and to offer new theoretical directions for research. Based on an extensive literature review I will identify two gaps in the existing research on education and migration.
First, is the tendency to use modernist notions of integration, assimilation and inclusion, that suited the reality of post-war migration but does not necessarily address the challenges of 21st migration. I will draw attention to the limitations of the language of multiculturalism as well as the problematics of the human capital approach underlying some of the research and policy discourses around integration and its focus on educational attainment (for example EENEE, 2016; MIPIX, 2015; OECD, 2015).
Second, I will examine the growing body of ethnographic research on the schooling experiences in particularly of asylum-seeking and refugee children and research into best practices. These studys have contributed greatly to the understanding of the reality of asylum-seeking and refugee children and shifted the discussion from indicators of integration, to the lived experiences of integration. However, they often lack a macro perspective that considers the policy contexts in which such experiences and practices take place as well as an attention to broader moral questions and challenges faced by education as a state institution. Based on this review, I would like to offer two new conceptual directions for the study of schooling and migration: the conceptual framework of time and temporality and the notion of the non-citizen.
This new reality of human mobility and the regulations accompanied it, is characterized by a different notion of time of migration. Where post-war migration had a more clear and linear migration trajectory, today's human mobility is characterized by temporariness and uncertainty. Time of migration and the temporalities that are attached to current forms of migration, shape the migrant experiences as well as state perception of them. Living in and through distinct temporalities is the reality of many migrants, particularly asylum-seekers, often kept in an uncertain limbo, at the crossroad between diverse bureaucratic temporalities, different professional calendars, varied intersectional rhythms, and socially and culturally (self)imposed time. Time also carries with it power and differentiation. Temporal differences between groups can create distance and hierarchies - who gets to stay? For how long? This observation invites us to look at how education provisions deal with this temporariness and how they might create hierarchies around time. We need to ask how different immigration statuses as well as notions of time and temporality attached to them affect the right to and in education migrant children.
Linked to this understanding of time and temporality, is the notion of the non-citizen. I will argue for the need to use the non-citizen as new category that embodies different forms of othering, including that which derives from the child’s status and migration experiences and trajectories. I put forward the need for an intersectional approach which takes into account the time dimension as well as othering processes of non-citizens.

Author

• Halleli Pinson, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev