Schooling Citizen Identity Amid Conflict Migration and Displacement in Jordan: Citizen Ontologies of Syrian Refugees and Jordanians in Double-shift Schools

• In Event: Towards a transformation in teaching and schooling: Movements from the Middle East

Proposal

Globally, the ontological positions and conditions in which children and youth build their citizen identities are not well understood. Increasingly, Arab young people are being called upon to develop civic identities amid poverty, forced migration, displacement, and unrest. Syrians continue to be the largest forcibly displaced population in the world (UNHCR, 2020). Syrians compose over 25% of the total global refugee population in the wake of the 10-year Syrian crisis (Concern Worldwide US, 2020). Jordan, along with Turkey and Lebanon, has the greatest influx of Syrian refugees in the world. Jordan has received more than one million refugees over the last decade, with 660,00 Syrian refugees registered with the UN Refugee Agency (Christophersen, 2020), though the actual number living in Jordan is much higher. School dropout rates among Syrian refugees are twice the national average in Jordan compared to other host countries. The double-shift education system in Jordan, whereby Jordanian students are taught in the morning and Syrian refugee students in the afternoon, produces temporal separation (UNESCO, 2018), with students receiving fewer instructional hours than those in public schools on a regular schedule (Culbertson & Constant, 2015; Human Rights Watch, 2016).

Schools are critical sites for interrogating what, and how, systems of identity are upheld or altered by Arab children and youth. This paper considers the gaps in, and challenges to, social justice, equity, and inclusion for Syrian refugee students in Jordan’s double-shift public schools. Through qualitative inquiry (both empirical and conceptual), this paper traces the socio-civic ontologies of domestic Jordanian and Syrian refugee schoolchildren (aged 10-18) in Grades 5-11 in 10 public schools in Amman, of which nine are double-shift. Focus group interviews are carefully planned discussions designed to ascertain the perceptions of children and youth on a defined area of research interest in a non-threatening environment (Krueger & Casey, 2009). I conducted a total of 38 focus groups with 292 students (i.e., 166 girls and 126 boys). Of that total, 172 were Jordanian (domestic) students and 120 Syrian (refugee) students. The findings reveal the emergent citizen identities of school-aged Syrian refugee and Jordanian girls and boys, the role of schooling in citizen identity formation, and how students’ citizen ontologies converge or diverge by gender and/or by country of origin. Overall, Syrian refugee students (both male and female) do not feel as included in schooling and society as Jordanian students, despite holding a shared Arab-Islamic citizen identity. With no path to formal citizenship for Syrians who are more likely to stay than leave Jordan, this poses a major challenge for sustaining social cohesion and peace in Jordan long-term.

Because Arab children are spoken about (though often not heard) in national and international development literature and the express target of educational policy mandates, it is necessary to draw upon student voice to disclose the ways children and youth view their civic identities and the role formal schooling plays in creating those identities. Students’ citizen identities are being fashioned amid conflict and displacement and through a confluence of influential identity makers (i.e., ethnicity, religion, culture, and state). Examining young peoples’ citizen ontologies as informed by Arab‐Islamic perspectives signifies a major conceptual turn for the field of comparative and international education by going beyond Western philosophical traditions that have largely framed citizenship discourses and educational policy directions. To citizen identity, I apply theoretically apply process philosophy—a strand of philosophy centered on ontology and concerned with the dynamic sense of being as becoming or occurrence. Process philosophy through a critical approach addresses the dialectical nature of citizen identity, including its convergences and contradictions (Barakat, 1990). This paper also considers the value of process philosophy research into schoolchildren’s citizen identities, which represents a departure from largely political framings of citizenship studies to date.

Childhood and adolescence are significant life stages when students’ personalities and perceptions of self and society are being developed and identities formed as they assign and connect meanings to their own existence. The theoretical position supported by the sociology of childhood is that children are social actors whose lifeworlds, informed by social values and personal perspectives, must be studied qualitatively (Gillett-Swan, 2018; Oswell, 2013; Wyness, 2012). Qualitative interpretive research is premised on the notion that social reality is not objective but rather shaped by human experiences and ontological social contexts (Wellington & Szczerbinski, 2007). Thus, the ontology of being (process philosophy) is used as a conceptual bridge to bring markers of identity (i.e., religion, ethnicity, culture, and gender) into holistic coherence to identify and discuss the emergent citizen identities of some urban Arab schoolchildren and youth.

The contribution represents scholarly originality, as it is rare for a female Western academic to be granted access to Jordan’s public (government) schools, much less one that attends to marginalized youth in the host country’s formal education system. The intent of the research findings is to help direct educational policy toward a more equitable schooling system that dismantles existing power disparities for Arab youth who are most impacted by educational policy, programming, and pedagogy. The timeliness and importance of the paper’s topic and population—combined with strategic world locale and scarce research on Arab children and youth—makes scholarship on citizen identity formation of immediate interest and demand, illuminating how formal education might foster awareness, belonging, and compassion to combat social, economic, and political injustices for Syrian refugee students in Jordan. To summarize, the paper moves beyond Western philosophical traditions and solely political frameworks to understand the Arab-Islamic ontologies embedded in student discourse, a narrative that is currently missing from citizenship discourse at large.

Author

• Patricia Kubow, Indiana University - Bloomington