Transnational schooling and ethnic boundary making

• In Event: Dissertation workshop session
  In Special Session: Youth, Citizenship, and Belonging

Proposal

I am a doctoral candidate at Indiana University Bloomington under the advisory of Dr. Bradley Levinson and Dr. Dina Okamoto, currently at the data collection stage.

At a historical moment of celebrating 110 years of migratory fluxes between Brazil and Japan, which has been marked for its circularity, school communities in both countries find themselves in a similar situation of debating the adequacy and crafting efforts to meaningfully integrate Japanese-Brazilian (JB) students. Will JB youth in Brazil eventually lose their Japanese ethnic ways to become full Brazilians while those who stay in Japan will become Japanese? In the past two decades, ethnic Japanese schools for JB children in Brazil on the one hand, and ethnic Brazilian schools for JB children in Japan on the other hand, have called the attention of local communities and researchers. However, there has been less of an exploration of what these two phenomena have in common compared to the growth of individual case studies.

The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the larger discussion of how schools contribute to the integration of immigrant youth under the context of consensus in favor of multiculturalism. Through a comparative case study of schools across Brazil and Japan in communities with a significant presence of Japanese-Brazilians, I address the overall research question of to what extent school-level approaches of equity and inclusion in education surrounding Japanese-Brazilians entail negotiations of categorizing students as Japanese and/or Brazilian. Assuming that school personnel views and practices are shaped by institutionalized social and moral imperatives to foster educational environments favorable to diversity, my analysis specifically looks at how school officials and staff’s habits, policies, routines, and prevalent meanings and ideas about academic achievement and citizenship building correspond to processes of ethnic group formation within schools. Through this project, I would like readers to better understand how schools, social institutions charged with the role of ‘integrating’ immigrant-origin youth, also become social spaces of defining ethnic boundaries and categories.

Conventionally, we continue to assume that immigrant integration takes the form of assimilation, an acculturation process that flows in the direction of the minority becoming more like the majority group, in which schools play a central role (Alba and Nee 2003; Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Thus, for JBs in Brazil, this would mean Japanese becoming more Brazilian while in the case of JBs in Japan, Brazilians becoming more Japanese. However, the institutionalization of a multicultural consensus has changed the terms of assimilation as a process where the mainstream can also change to incorporate minority groups’ traits in a way that makes group differences less and less significant (Alba and Nee 2003). Nevertheless, we still know little of how exactly the long held conventional view of assimilation is challenged and replaced by other ways of understanding integration in practice, especially in schools (Carter 2012). In what instances can integration be described as the majority becoming more like the minority? What is the overall picture when we consider together, on one hand schools’ institutional mechanisms of norm diffusion, and on the other hand, the flows and directions of sociocultural norm diffusion across group boundaries? I borrow the concepts from the theories of ethnic boundary making (Wimmer 2013) and institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) to make sense of the similarities and differences of JB ethnic schools in Brazil and Japan.

To answer my research questions, I have designed a qualitative multi-sited ethnographic case study since it allows in depth analysis of each school sociocultural context as well as a comparative and an additional transnational analysis of school practices. I selected the cases for investigation through purposive sampling of schools with a significant presence of JBs in Brazil and Japan with variations in institutional context, resources and network alliances. Data collection consists of participatory observation of school events and daily activities, official school curriculum, calendar and media-shared materials in the past 5 years (document), and semi-structured interview with administrators, teachers and staff about the meaning they attach to their school. I organize data using codes for rules and mores of academic achievement and citizenship/character building and also codes for ethnic markers, symbols and narratives. I expect that institutional theory will explain similarities on how these two set of codes relate to each other across schools in the two countries but that ethnic boundary making theory will explain why and how they differ.

Author

• Anna Sera, Indiana University