Migrants and Refugees in school curricula and textbooks: moving frontiers to progress Human Rights and Peace Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Intersections of policy and practice in global migration

Proposal

Our research aims at studying the presence and representation of migrant and refugee populations in school curricula and textbooks, seeking to understand current narratives and the way it contribute or challenge human rights and peace education. We will explore how school curricula and textbooks reinforce, resist or contest current mainstream migration discourses, mapping how migration and particularly migrants, refugees and displaced persons are being represented, misrepresented, or underrepresented. In order to build data and evidence, we will analyze two national cases, Colombia and El Salvador, with a particular emphasis at secondary level resources.
Migrants, refugees, and displaced persons compose a paradigmatic group to understand current challenges of guaranteeing the right to education for all. Besides contributing to a broad understanding of obstacles and possibilities related, points out a broad understanding on how our education systems are coping with diversity, as they challenge the homogenous paradigm that had prevailed over the centuries. Moreover, the case of human mobility mobilizes several emerging challenges, such as the new forms of hate-speech and racisms, national or identity-based violence and discriminations, the rise of authoritarianism and new forms of populisms, polarization of the political debate, spread of fake news as a strategy of power disputes, all phenomena intensified by COVID-19 sanitary crises and our uncertain times, topics of high interest of our research.
Current discourses about migration – as well as about migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and displaced persons themselves – are being built by a variety of dimensions that interact in a complex manner, in which we can include media, legislations, policy debate at international, national and local levels and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law (Santamaria, 2002; Bartlett, 2015). Such groups are frequently represented as an eminent “danger” that threats local populations, as a result of multiple crises, as victims without agency capacity, or even unwanted workers, and the many possible ways to see such a group shape society’s perceptions and attitudes (Author, 2019).
Schools are at the heart of such dynamic, and curricula and textbooks have a key role to play. They can counter stereotypes, reduce prejudice, and develop immigrants’ sense of belonging when reflecting diversity to support teachers, and, by contrast, inappropriate textbook images and descriptions can make students from different cultures feel excluded or misrepresented (UNESCO, 2019). Curricula and textbooks transmit and promote a society’s explicitly and tacitly valued perspectives, principles, social aspirations and identities. Being a social and political construction, it reflects the disputes around the ultimate purpose of education systems (Ball, 2001; Freire, 2019).
Drawing on critical pedagogy studies (Apple, 2013, 2014, 2019; Giroux, 1995, 2023; Gomes, 2012), our proposal considers that curricula had become one of the most relevant social territories on the dispute about what is meaningful and validated knowledge – and thus the ultimate purpose of education systems. Such debate has been historically present in the struggle for the realization of the right to education from an emancipatory perspective, along with more recent claims for epistemic justice and decolonization of the curricula (Gomes, 2012) at national, regional or global levels. It implies conflict, confrontation, negotiations around the acknowledge of other worldviews to be taken into consideration.
The 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report, Migration, Displacement and Education pointed out that sensitive curricula is key in addressing negative attitudes towards immigrants and refugees and thus are needed more than ever: “with migration and displacement becoming hot political topics, education is key to providing citizens with a critical understanding of the issues involved” (Ibid, p. 6). The same report affirms that modern textbooks continue to omit contentious migration-related issues. More than including such topic on the curricula, the key point seems to be how it has been done and possible ways to advance in more appropriate narratives.
In both countries of analysis, the conflict-affected and violent scenario interact in a complex manner with migration and particularly forced displacement, presenting commonalities such as a heavy negative impact on children and youth. In Colombia, after decades of armed conflict, the combination of the historical internally displaced population with recent flows of Venezuelans emerges as a central issue in the middle of political, social, and economic problems, coupled with widespread insecurity and violence. In El Salvador, children and youth particularly returned from the United States face risk of violence and stigma, as well as the pressure of gang violence that has made their country one of the most dangerous places in the world.
Our overarching question breaks down into a further set of sub-questions, such as: how positive or negative are the images associated to them, its relation with violence and danger, if their voices and perceptions are taken into account, if their contributions to science, arts among other fields are acknowledged. Also the differences in representing white and non-white migrants, as well as migrant girls and women. An issue of major concern is the build up of the representation of youth migrants as agents of violence, process related to the stigmatization of such a group.
Our methodological approach is based on critical discourse analysis, drawing on a selected sample of key policy documents and textbooks from both countries: 46 textbooks from Colombia and 20 from El Salvador were analyzed, from collections currently adopted to Social Sciences (Colombia) or Social and Civic Studies (El Salvador) classes, at secondary level in public schools.
Overall, the selected books present a clear homogeneous narrative concerning human mobility. While it reproduces extracts of the mainstream global migration discourse – with its contradictions and “unresolved issues”, it also sheds light to hidden aspects and concerns from origin societies, the latter particularly related the emigration to the US and Europe and its impact on people’s lives.

Author

• Giovanna Modé Magalhães, George Eckert Institute Leibniz Germany, University of São Paulo Brazil