"“We Don’t Have Diversity here, but Inequality, That’s in the Design of the Education System”: Diversification in Tunisian Teacher Narratives"

• In Event: Education, Social Class and Inequality in the Middle East and North Africa

Proposal

Is diversity an asset or a challenge in education? Does it make managing a classroom easier or harder? With increasing awareness of different needs and experiences of children from different ethnic, religious and migration backgrounds, attention has increased to issues of diversity in education. But how do people in different parts of the world react to the invocation of diversity that is commonly deployed in the global North? Is diversity another way to talk about inequality or a way to mask it and avoid difficult discussions about it? How can insights from contexts in the global South contribute to our understanding of diversity in education in the context of a global learning crisis exacerbated by COVID closures? In my research on education in Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia, I ask teachers how diversity, inequality and migration shape their experiences of the classroom. I focus here on Tunisia, the intersections of diversity and inequality in teacher narratives and how they can texture our understanding of both diversity and educational transformations in the global South.

Between September 2022 and June 2023, I interviewed over 60 Tunisian teachers from different parts of the country, in addition to union leaders, experts, researchers, former ministers and other stakeholders. When I asked teachers about forms of diversity (tanawu’) in the classroom and its impact on their work, teachers either stated that they have no diversity in the classroom or had to ask clarification questions as to what was meant by diversity. However, when asked about inequalities in the classroom, most teachers could comment on its central place in the student body and in their own experience as teachers. Invoking a salient ‘Western’ concept into concrete spaces in the global South, allows us to examine how school actors can redeploy notions of diversity to foreground questions around inequality. I show how teachers pointed to greater diversification in the abilities of students that has been driven by the defunding of education, exacerbated by COVID-19 school closures and deepened by increased tracking and privatization in the education system. I underline that teacher narratives on diversity illustrate a complex diversification/ homogenization where trends like “informal” private tutoring accentuate disparities within classrooms, whereas “formal” tracking and privatization increase homogenization along the lines of social class and student competences. Beyond social class background and financial ability, teachers also seized on questions of inequality to push back on classic distinctions like rural-urban and to foreground disparities more relevant to their context, in this case, regional (coastal vs. inland) inequality. I highlight that teachers constructed these processes of diversification/ homogenization negatively in terms of their impact on inequality, student learning outcomes and their management of classrooms. While diversity continues to be perceived as a “western” concept, asking about disparities, difference and inequality allows teachers to reflect on a range of relevant social differences that impact the learning of their students and their experience in the classroom.

Author

• Hania Sobhy, Max Planck Institute MPI-MMG