SYNTHESIS Research Design for Thematic Work Package 5 (Intercultural Education) State of the Art Literature Review on Thematic Work Package Several recent studies on migration focus on the immigration experiences of women and argue that immigration is a gendered experience (Lutz 1997, Hirsch 1999; Anderson 2000; Parreñas 2001, 2005; Yeates 2005). The results of these studies are indispensable for integration policy. By mapping the ways in which the intersection of gender and migration produces forms of marginality, these studies help policy makers to focus on the particular needs of particular groups of migrants in particular contexts. Some of these studies address the question of ‘transnational mothering’ and explore the impact of female migration on children left behind while also exploring how this distant negotiation of mothering enables new forms of female agency. Research on female migration has been accompanied by a new integration policy interest in women at the EU Level. Acknowledging that women are now a majority of the immigrant population in the EU COM 2007 (512), points out that addressing their specific needs is increasingly reflected in gender mainstreaming mechanisms such as the Roadmap for Equality between Women and Men 2006-2010. Despite the acknowledgement that gender matters and that migrant experience must examined as a gendered experience, the experiences of migrant children are not framed as gendered experiences. The gendered school experiences of migrant children girls, like migrant children, are left out of most policy frames for integration since migrant children are either perceived as accompanying ‘luggage’ for adult migrants or offspring of migration itself—i.e., children born in the host country by migrant—or at least one migrant—parents. COM 2007 (512) states that ‘Efforts in education are critical to preparing immigrants, and particularly their descendants, to be more successful and more active participants in society’ (p. 14) acknowledges that in the case of children, “[t]ackling integration challenges at a very early stage is a key approach for successful outcomes” (reception programmes for newly-arrived young immigrants and their families, teaching support during an initial period, intercultural mediators, are cited as examples of such tackling. At the same time, however, the Communication assumes that integration “is a spontaneous process especially for children.” A survey of integration measures for immigrant children adopted in EU countries (Eurydice 2004) shows that that the understanding of integration as a “spontaneous process” is prevalent in educational policy. This hypothesis resonates with the language immersion theory which seems to inform to a large extent school arrangements for the teaching of the national language (also the language of instruction) to migrant children. In other words, it is assumed that “immersion” in the linguistic environment of the mainstream classroom will enable the acquisition of the new language. The seemingly gender-neutral approach to migrant children’s integration and intercultural education often serves to replicate social mirroring. For example, COM (2005) 389 elaborates on integration policy as “addressing effectively migrant youth delinquency.” Given the fact that male adolescents and male youth are more likely than females to face disciplinary problems in schools and to develop delinquency, the framing of delinquency as a privileged terrain implicates the intensification of the focus on boys and the sidestepping of latent forms of social exclusion and ethnic bullying experienced by migrant girls. Such kind of a gendered approach to migrant children’s needs frames specific needs but at the same time replicates the view that girls face less problems and thus do not constitute a priority for integration policies and intercultural education (this view is further normalized by the fact that girls outperform boys in terms of academic achievements). Thus intercultural interactions are often gendered by researchers and policy makers in ways that confirm gender norms and boundaries. It is quite a paradox that girls become visible in intercultural discourse only when they are “veiled”. The headscarf controversy in France is cited and extrapolated as the paradigmatic example of ethnic gendering which reveals the unavoidable conflict between assimilation policies and migrants’ claims of incommensurable ethnic/religious difference. Again, the frequent citation of this case replicates the view that girls and women matter as carriers of incommensurable ethnic difference (for example, in the Entzinger Report on Integration Benchmarks the citation of this controversy is the only instance where gender is invoked as a factor affecting cultural assimilation). Such readings of the ethnic construction of gender assume that, in cases of displacement and migration, gender and ethnic norms overlap and reinforce each other in ways that render ethic fundamentalism and female subordination indistinguishable migration symptoms. The impact of this reading of gendered ethnicity to integration policy has been exposed and questioned by Anna C. Korteweg (2005, 2006). Assessing how gender differences have been managed both in emancipation and immigrant integration policies in the Netherlands, Korteweg argues that the way gender differences are managed by policy makers seems to reinforce perceptions of the gendered practices of minority women and girls that have given rise to calls for strong forms of assimilation (for example, she explains how new language and cultural competency requirements for new immigrants are informed by the belief that gender differences are a major obstacle to immigrant’s ability to integrate into Dutch society (Korteweg 2005). Korteweg’s analysis suggests that the shift from the categorical approach to gender (gender as a control group) to the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and migration needs to understand the gendered construction of migrant experience. In other words, in a migration-reintegration context, gender and ethnicity do not overlap to reinforce each other but interact in more dynamic ways. Focusing on the interaction of gender and ethnicity among migrants of young age suggests that migrant girls do act as agents of transculturation and not as symbols of ethnic resistance. This line of research suggests that immigrant girls appear to have more flexibility in constructing an ethnic identity compared to boys (Olsen, 1997; Rumbaut, 1996; Waters, 1999). For example, Waters (1997) found that Caribbean girls seemed to have more leeway in identity formation than their male counterparts, who tend to face more pressure to form a racial identity due to perceptions of discrimination and unfair treatment from the mainstream society. Similarly, both Rumbaut (1996) and Olsen (1997) found that immigrant girls were more likely than boys to choose "additive" or "hyphenated identities," indicating attempts to bridge the two cultures (Qin 2006: 14). In summary, this line of research suggests that the boundaries between ethnic identities appear to be less fluid and less permeable for migrant boys than for migrant girls. Boys seem to have more difficulty in assuming bicultural competencies and making successful bicultural adjustments. There seems to be more alignment between schooling and femininity while masculinity and schooling are perceived as oppositional (Qin 2006: 14). A different line of research, however, suggests that migration puts on the shoulders of migrant girls the responsibility to serve as “keepers of the culture,” or even, keepers of family. Espiritu’s study (1997), for example, identifies Filipina girls as “keepers of the culture.” It would be a mistake, however, to assume, as it is often done with the headscarf case in France, that such gendering of the migration experience is rooted in traditional values and gender norms rooted in native cultures. The burden to serve as keepers of culture is rather a response to demands and cultural changes ensuing from the transnational experience of migration. In countries of origin, girls were considered children; in the host country, without extended family and community to shield them from labour demands, migrant girls are expected to help the family succeed (take up parenting roles for younger siblings, assuming household chores). Challenging the view of migrant girls as cultural mediators, this line of research suggests that competing ethnic ties and assimilation forces often result in acculturative stress. Unlike the strategic enactment of the hyphenated identity, the experience of the “bifurcated self” is not always empowering for girls since it limits their perceived options for the future—their “possible selves”. How can we avoid cultural essentialism without disposing all together the reflexivity of cultural analysis? How can we avert the critical gaze from the racial object/migrant to the racial subject without uprooting racism from its social and cultural context and presenting the racist subject as a self-determined agent? Rather than choosing between these two ends as if they led to competitive and mutually exclusive goals and practices, research methodology must sustain the tension between two different tasks: on the one hand, placing culture on stage, analyzing it as a play of semiotics; on the other hand, averting the gaze from the “other” student to the processes and codes of racialization. At the same time, there are two preconditions that such an approach should meet in order not to collapse into a disengaged formalist analysis: first, the asymmetrical power relations of the inter-cultural encounter must be acknowledged; second, while engaged in the interpretation of cultural interactions, researchers must recognize that they are already implicated themselves in relations of power. Topic Area of Research The concepts intercultural education, integration of migrant students, enhancing cultural diversity and promoting cultural dialogue are often used interchangeably in educational discourse at the policy level, in teacher education training, in curriculum studies and in guidelines for the combating of racism and ethnic conflict in schools. Though cultural dialogue, integration and combating of exclusion and racism are used as guiding ideals in promoting intercultural education, their understanding as both processes and ideals often remains grounded on an essentialist understanding culture and an assimilationist understanding of migrant identity development. Culture is often understood as static and homogeneous, cultural norms as confined and confining scripts of action strongboxes of identity. This “ontic” notion of culture implicates an understanding of intercultural education as a response to the inevitable conflicts between the culture of migrant or minority students and school norms. In other words, the intercultural is understood in terms of dyadism and polarity: as inter-cultural, i.e., a relation, conflict, convergence between two pre-existing sets of norms, belief systems and worldviews. This dyadism is also replicated by/in educational categorizations of students (migrant students vs native students), current and “previous culture” (the culture migrant students had before migration occurred vs. the culture of the host community) as well as understandings of migration itself as a teleological and linear trajectory (from the country of origin to the host country). From this perspective, ethnicization is understood as migrant students’ defence to what they perceive as risk of assimilation and a reaction against their perceived misrecognition of their collective identities by majority students. Furthermore, gender is seen as a dimension that increases cultural resistant to change and ethnic gendering is usually associated with migrant students: gender is understood as a catalyst which accentuates ethnicization and makes cultural differences even more incommensurable with school integration. The challenge for this thematic area is to reframe interculturalism as a terrain, a contact zone and an interaction that affects all students, migrants and non-migrants. Instead of assuming that ethnic borders and processes of ethicization and heteroethicization are inevitable, we will explore how ethnic borders are semiotically produced in the context of intercultural interactions between migrant and non-migrant, migrant and migrant, native and native students across a range of school areans. From this perspective, we can explore how ethic identities and gender norms are renegotiated by all students when they engage in zones of transculturation, that is, kinds and spaces of interactive practice where students appropriate and re-appropriate ethnic gendering and gendered ethnicities in ways that enhance their agency. Goal of the research Our goal is to deconstruct essentialist understanding of culture and assimilationist understandings of cultural change, to explore whether intercultural interactions in schools create possibilities for the performative destabilization of gender norms and ethnic boundaries and to reframe intercultural education in ways that takes the burden of identity away from migrant and national/ethnic minority students, and renders visible the implication of educational institutions and school actors in the mediation of ethnic borders and conflict. This goal will be reenacted in regards to three interacting fields: First, at an institutional level, to explore (a) national level policies and measures for integration, (b) educational institutions’ responses to integration policies and (c) semiotics and performativity of cultural differences in ‘dense’ school environments and school arenas. Second, to explore (a) the institutionalization and state regulation of intercultural education, (b) processes of nation state building, (c) the relation between processes of racialization of and ethicization in school settings by migrant and national/ethnic minority students and educational national anxiety. National anxiety, racialization and ethnicization are framed as gendered processes. Third, to understand the gender dimensions of cultural misrecognition, ethnic borders and racialization and to explore whether intercultural interactions create culturally hybrid interfaces which are hospitable (or inimical) to students’ renegotiation of gender norms. Hypothesis Schools are not culturally homogeneous, politically neutral or socially harmonious places which just receive and accommodate migrant and/or national/ethnic minority students. Schools are already terrains of political debate, social tension and cultural change but their receptivity to cultural interaction is further radicalized when schools are turned into primary meeting point between non-migrant and migrant, majority and minority populations. Intercultural interactions in school settings can both crystallize and destabilize ethnic borders and gender norms. The fact that school settings in general and school arenas in particular are in-between public places (they combine conditions of exposure with conditions of intimacy) allows the possibility for unique kind of performativity. In both intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic relationships identities are performed in ways that combine repetition and variation, serious and non-serious citation of norms. Intercultural interactions are not territorialized in typical classroom environments where formal forms of teaching and learning are taking place. Intercultural interactions occur in the school yard, in washrooms, along the borders of the school yard, in parents association meetings, etc. Youth cultures often implicate forms of cultural re-appropriation and hybridization and gender is both the element and target of these cultural processes. Schools are national state ideology apparatuses invested with the mission to reproduce dominant national cultures and contain multicultural education within the ideological limits of national building. At the same time, however, the intercultural interactions which take place in school settings constitute hybrid stages where gender identities are national/ethnic boundaries are both replayed and displaced. Schools as apparatuses operate on students and teachers, regulate identities, control and contain cultural interactions; on the other hand, intercultural interactions and conflicts as new sites of overdetermined cultural practice where students and teachers, in acting-out identities and norms in hybrid contexts they are also inaugurating intercultural public spheres where a new politics of post-nationalist belongingness are enacted. Objectives To explore how the implementation of measures for migrant students implicates “states of exception” which sometimes limit the opportunities for intercultural interaction and the challenge of gender norms but some other times create possibilities for multicultural schools to operate more autonomously and evade forms of governmentality exercised by the state. To reclaim the fragility of intercultural relations as a condition for agonistic democracy in multicultural schools. To record how (a) ethnicity is “gendered” and (b) gender is “ethnicised” in schools and to explore how the multicultural or monocultural profiles of schools and communities relate to the performative re-enactment of national, ethnic, gender identities in different school settings and school arenas. To examine how intercultural interaction is organized around axes of gendered ethnicity, migrant/non-migrant and national majority/national minority status (selection of events) To explore how students (all) and teachers’ use of concepts such as culture, cultural difference, cultural deficit, otherness, race, immigration, “we/them” is troubled when they are encouraged to provide thick descriptions of specific events of conflict and processes of racialization and cultural hybridization. To explore how the transnational experience of both migrant and non-migrant, national minority and national minority students (a) influences their understanding of culture, cultural difference and gender norms and (b) inspires the performative (in Butler’s sense) iteration (and destabilization) of gendered ethnic performances of identity (in other words, how students “play gender” in order to challenge ethnic borders and “play ethnicity” to challenge gender norms. To engage teachers and school administrators in a critical discussion of intercultural education in ways that destabilize essentialist understanding of culture. To reframe intercultural dialogue in terms of critical pedagogy. This means, to enable students, in Freire’s terms, to recognize themselves as “being with the world and with others” rather than “being in the world”, to understand that limit situations are socially constructed rather than culturally inevitable and that ethnic conflict, bullying and other forms violence are not inevitable effects of personal psychological deficit and racist attitudes but rather related to global injustice. . Basic Outline Basic premises and concepts Premises EU, National and School level policies of intercultural education are grounded on essentialist understanding of culture The implementation of immigrant student integration measures establishes and normalizes “states of exception” (Agamben). Learning about the culture of others and intercultural interaction is regulated by these “states of exception”, and students and teachers are alienated from political thinking and agency. Intercultural interaction is mediated by cultural semiotics Intercultural interaction creates the possibility for the performative re-iteration and negotiation of ethnicity in general and gendered ethnicity in particular. The narrativization and intercultural analysis of critical school events from culturalist approaches to difference and creates possibilities for connecting pedagogy to global politics of justice. Concepts transculturation (Pratt) internal exclusion, state of exception (Agamben) ethnic gendering and gendered ethnicity Hybridity (Bakhtin, Stuart Hall) thick interpretation (Geertz) critical pedagogy (Freire; Giroux) Performativity, re-iteration (Butler) Precariousness Territorialization/deterritorialization/density/minoritization (Deleuze) Basic research questions How is intercultural education understood, institutionalized and implemented in different national contexts? Are there patterns of similarity in the genealogies of multicultural schools examined in the three different national contexts? How do school politics and urban interactions interact to create exclusions for migrant students? How do poverty and migration intersect in intensifying the precariousness of public schools in downtrodden urban areas? How are politics and policies of multicultural education transferred, modified and negotiated in the particular schools? How do issues of national identity and national politics affect the definition and implementation of intercultural education in specific schools and. vice versa, how multicultural schools negotiate dominant national discourses. In which ways are gender identities and norms “troubled” or solidified by processes of racialization and ethnicization in schools with migrants and/or National/ethnic minority students? National case studies Cyprus The national case study of Cyprus will include a comparative analysis of 4 different schools, each one located in a different district, and each one embodying a different history of multicultural becoming. Two of these schools are elementary schools which are considered multicultural schools (high enrolments of migrant students) and are included in educational priority zones, and the other two are secondary schools where measures for migrant students are framed and implemented under the regime of “exemption”. These schools are The Phaneromeni Elementary school in Nicosia, the 18th Elementary school in Limassol, the Archbishop Macarios Leceum in Larnaka and the Ayios Theodoros Gymnasium of Paphos. Greece The national case of Greece will focus on the 49th Primary School of Athens, Ag. Asomaton 37-39. The research will be conducted with the collaboration of Vasso Nikolaou, 6th grade teacher, in whose classroom I will be doing participant observation during Phase II and Phase IV of the research. The school is located in a downgraded inner city neighbourhood of Athens, where mostly poor Greeks, migrants and refugees reside. The student population comprises approximately 100 students; 1/5 of the student population is Greek, and the rest are Albanians, Afghanis and Chinese, with the majority being Albanian. The percentage of boys and girls is about equal. The school presents an interesting case study because it has become the nexus of wider processes of social transformation linking educational with migration, refugee and asylum and urban regeneration politics. As such it represents an example of intercultural communication that permeates but also transcends school, classroom and curriculum boundaries, allowing us to study the issue of multiculturalism from multiple perspectives, linked but not restricted to the formal implementation of intercultural educational policies. FYROM The national sase study will be on a unique secondary school in Skopje – Cvetan Dimov. This is secondary school situated in the multicultural part of the city, and it is school where students from different ethnic groups learn together, what makes truly the unique place for genuine examples of intercultural relations and negotiation of gender, ethnic and other identities. The educational process is practiced on two languages concerning the two dominant majorities in the local community Macedonian and Albanian. However in both language shifts there are mixed ethnic classes. Research Methodology Critical ethnography constitutes the backbone of Research Methodology. We will start with participatory observation and non-structured interviews and multi-media data will be used to produce codifications which, in turn, will be used to elicit the re-narrativization, thick description and critical analysis of events of intercultural interaction (e.g., events of conflict, racist bullying, cultural mediation/translation, transculturation) and institutional frameworks (e.g., how is the admission and placement of migrant students regulated in the specific school/classroom). In distantiating itself from naturalistic inquiry, this latter part research will effect a deliberate (rather than incidental) intervention in the research field, It will destabilize dominant understanding of racialization and ethnicization, blind the intercultural gaze on the migrant/ethnic students and create possibilities for reinterpreting all actors engagements in cultural practices. Data collection (e.g. questionnaires, participant observation, focus groups etc.) A. Survey A survey will be prepared in order to codify the demographic compositions of schools, to record multicultural policies/measures, and to select the schools where field work will be carried out. B. Participatory Ethnography (“LEVEL ONE DATA/CODIFICATIONS”) (the aim is to collect student narratives, witness record and codify critical events, understand how National Policies / Measures are implemented in the particular school/classroom) Observation Before collecting personal narratives the research must establish rapport with the class/school where the case study will be contacted. The researcher’s ccess and mobility across a range of school setting and arenas in vital, for this reason some of the methodologies and the scale of the research can be modified. Observation aims to the location of the particular, the scene/picture/setting/arrangement that will work as a catalyst for triggering students’ and teachers’ responses in interviews. Observation also aims to locating different settings and arenas of intercultural interaction in order to attend and document student interations in these multiple settings, as well as phrase questions accordingly. non-structured interviews with students: In the context of these interviews we will encourage students to describe/narrate critical events that took place in the past, events which are part of the collective memory of the class or a group of the class (e.g,, migrant student can narrate its first day at that school, a non-migrant student can narrate a “fight” that took place in the playground; what we aim to get here are not reliable data/objective descriptions but instead thick descriptions which are layered by meanings which the participants bring to the narration of the event). Non-structured interviews will be conducted with teachers and administrators (where this is possible) in order to record their understandings of intercultural education, what/whom they frame as “problem”. C. FOCUS GROUPS Focus groups will be diverse (migrant and non-migrant students) (If the research will be conducted at a school level and not a classroom level, then teacher focus groups will also be formed; if not, then in-depth interviews will be conducted with the classroom teacher). Focus groups will work on two levels: (a) Student focus groups analyze the codifications produced on the basis of data collected though participatory ethnography. Our purpose at this level is to produce and not simply to collect data. The interactions between students are vital and must be encouraged. Each student comment/response/pause/silence can be framed as a topic for further analysis (DISCUSSIONS RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED AS “LEVEL TWO DATA”) (a) Student focus groups analyze excerpts from “LEVEL TWO DATA”. This time our aim is to confront students by organizing “LEVEL TWO DATA” in ways that reveal contradictions, discontinuities and silences on some issues; The students will be presented with specific questions: E.g., “what went wrong in this event…” or “if this event (pointing to a specific codification) was narrated by M (male) student and not a F (female) student, a M (migrant) and a NM (non migrant) student, how would the story be presented? Data analysis and interpretation (e.g. discourse analysis, content analysis, statistical analysis etc.) Data analysis and interpretation will be developed through: critical discourse analysis of interviews and focus group data; reflexive analysis of fieldwork diary and personal research notes; and, if visual data is recorded, analysis of visual representations as well. Timeframe of Research Phase I: Literature and Policy Review (January 2009 – March 2009) Phase II: Fieldwork (April 2009 – June 2009) Phase III: Preliminary Analysis (June 2009 – September 2009) Phase IV: Fieldwork II (September 2009 – November 2009) Phase V: Analysis and Final Report (November 2009 – February 2010) Research Team per Partner Cyprus Zelia Gregoriou Coordinator Zelia Gregoriou and Sylvia Michael Expert Researchers Yiorgos Stoyias and Rena Hoplarou Researchers in Phaneromeni School (Nicosia) Vera Paschali Researcher in 18th Elementary School (Limassol) Kalipso Charalambous Researcher in Ayios Theodoros Gymnasium (Paphos) Sylvia Michael Researcher in Archbishop Makarios Leceum (Larnaka) Greece Alexandra Zavos FYROM Ana Blazeva Viktorija Borovsk Backbround Readings Barrett, James and David Roediger (1997). In between Peoples: Race, Nationality, And the 'New Immigrant' Working Class, Journal of American Ethnic History 16: 3-44. 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