Teaching and Learning with Migrant Youth: Towards a Pedagogy of the Meanwhile

• In Event: Pedagogies of Migration: Teaching and Learning across Global Contexts

Proposal

In this (mostly) conceptual paper, I revisit a critical research study centered on migrant youths’ digital storytelling that was conducted in 2018-2019 with newcomer migrant youth in two French public high schools in metropolitan Paris to propose and explore the notion of a pedagogy of the meanwhile. The lives of newcomer migrant youth, especially those who are language learners, unfolds within several temporalities simultaneously: there is the open-ended temporality of displacement, arrival, and ongoing adjustment; there is a timeframe of language acquisition, habituation to social norms, and spatial learning; and then, there is the educational institution’s regimented timeframe of the school year and acquisition of grade-specific content. In the centralized French educational system, the primary aim of schooling for immigrant youth is “integration.” Integration is state pedagogical project that both has continuities with France’s colonial ‘mission civilisatrice,’ and leaves few openings in teachers’ instructional time and content for collective, critical inquiry that centers migrant youth as holders of knowledge, and agentic producers of knowledge.

The absence of these inquiry spaces is more pronounced when considered against the normalization of xenophobic--and anti-Muslim in particular—policies and public sentiments within a political system that professes a colorblind political egalitarianism. Taken together, these conditions seemingly foreclose the possibility of critical, humanizing pedagogies for immigrant youth and youth of postcolonial origin. To explore the possibility of educators and learners enacting political change within illiberal political and institutional settings, I utilize Asef Bayat’s (2010) theorization of the art of presence. Drawing upon the digital storytelling project data and subsequent interviews with teachers, I argue that within the political present in France, pedagogical and epistemic moves towards an anti-racist, anti-colonial future demand a rethinking of time and pedagogical temporalities.

Bayat, A. (2010). Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Author

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota