Bruce Collet

Islam, national identity and public secondary education: perspectives from the Somali diaspora in Toronto, Canada

Public schools have historically been key sites where children learn of and adopt a common national identity. In states where multiculturalism plays a central role in the articulation of a national identity, schools actively recognize and support the diverse cultures of their students in fulfilling this function. Canada is a state where, via federal policy, multiculturalism has been identified as a fundamental element of the national ethos. Formal education has been a key area in which the government has implemented this policy. However, public education in Canada is also committed to secularism, and this has been a cause for resistance by diverse immigrant groups. This paper examines resistance among traditional Muslim groups to Toronto school policies and practices that reflect an avowedly secular orientation. It focuses on the experiences of one Muslim group in particular, Somali immigrants, and their encounters with school policies and practices that both supported and challenged their identities. In doing so, the paper exposes the schools as sites of countervailing policies and practices within which students must nonetheless forge new and meaningful identities.

Sites of Refuge: Refugees, Religiosity, and Public Schools in the United States

In this article the author examines public schools in the United States as sites where immigrants and refugees express their religious identities as part of their integration processes. In particular, the author examines the schools as “sites of refuge” for refugee students. Although public schools provide refugees with opportunity for study without regard to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion (areas of potential persecution under the 1951 UN Convention Regarding the Status of Refugees), owing to their liberal and secular nature they necessarily put constraints on the degree to which students may exercise their particularistic cultural identities. Religion is an area in which such constraints are often most apparent. The article analyzes Will Kymlicka’s theory of polyethnic group rights as a possible framework for both understanding migrant ethnic cultures and integration processes generally, as well as a defense for providing accommodations for the religious identities and religious expressions of immigrant and refugee students. With conditions, the author believes that, by guaranteeing the right to refugee students’ societal culture, polyethnic rights comprise a viable framework for supporting immigrants and refugees in their integration into the United States. However, the framework works only to the degree that it is consistent with and advances liberal ends, including student autonomy and freedom.

The securitisation of refugee flows and the schooling of refugees: examining the cases of North Koreans in South Korea and Iraqis in Jordan

Drawing on data collected in South Korea, Jordan and the USA, this paper examines the degree to which security concerns impact the schooling of North Korean refugees in South Korea and Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Operating from a framework examining the intersection of migration and securitisation, the authors find that accounts of negative images of and identity concealment among North Korean students present the most compelling linkages to a larger phenomenon of societal securitisation. At the same time, South Korean perceptions of North Koreans’ level of preparedness for working in a capitalist society present the most compelling linkages to economic securitisation. With respect to Christian Iraqi refugees in Jordan, plausible connections can be drawn between societal security and an Iraqi identity generally. With respect to economic concerns in Jordan, measures taken to restrict Iraqi integration into the labour force can be seen as security actions.

Challenges and Opportunities in Incorporating Comparative Research into Contemporary Teacher Education

Abstract This essay addresses the issue of incorporating comparative and international education research into teacher education by addressing how the field of comparative education is defined, the essential skills and knowledges that students must have in order to properly “consume” comparative research, the degree to which teacher education is presently equipped to effectively incorporate comparative research into its programming, and the changes needed to bring comparative research more squarely into the domain of teacher education. I argue that the study of comparative education research necessitates a foundational base, formed through serious and rigorous engagement with core courses in the social sciences and humanities as well as social foundations course in education. I advance that without this base, we run a greater risk of seeing comparative research become appropriated into a technocratic paradigm that governs much of what presently constitutes teacher education. The essay calls for the introduction of comparative education research into teacher education simultaneously with the advancement of the other social foundation courses, along with aggressive advocacy for a broader liberal arts core.

Muslim American University Students’ Perceptions of Islam and Democracy: Deconstructing the Dichotomy

The aftermath of 9/11 and the current surge of revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East have caused Muslim Americans to be either demonized or forgotten altogether, despite the significance of their everyday navigation of both Islamic and democratic values and unique efforts toward identity construction. The neglect of the Muslim American individual experience in the dominant discourse on Islam and democracy has stifled the voices of members of this marginalized population, thereby limiting their self-representation. Through the use of a phenomenological framework and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study complicates the dominant discourses on Islam and democracy by shedding light on the lived experiences of seven Muslim American university students and providing supplemental perspectives from their university professors. These participants constructed an alternative discourse that positioned the Islamic and democratic values of equality, respect, freedom, and education as compatible, albeit with some complications. The article concludes with suggestions toward better understanding and enactment of Islamic and democratic values, including attaining education and engaging in civic participation.

Educational gaps and their impact on Iraqi refugee students’ secondary schooling in the Greater Detroit, Michigan Area

In this piece we examine educational gaps among Iraqi refugee students while living in Iraq and while in transitional countries, challenges resulting from those educational gaps since they have arrived in the United States, and Iraqi students’ needs to overcome their challenges for school adjustment. Thirty Chaldean Iraqi refugees who attended various high schools in the greater Detroit area, their parents, and their teachers participated in interviews and focus groups. Educational gaps in Iraq are due to precarious conditions involved in access to schooling, and threats and dangers experienced as Chaldean religious minorities. Gaps in transitional countries are due to lack of access to schooling due to residency restrictions, discriminatory treatment, and financial difficulties. Iraqi students are highly anxious about academic failure and their ability to obtain a high school diploma. We recommend educational policies and practices that might best address the serious problem of educational gaps.

Introducing Our Invited Essay Series; “Critical Engagements with the Politics of ‘Extremism’ and Schooling”

Dear Readers: This issue kicks off a series of invited essays and responses involving the politics of “extremism” and schooling. Under the curatorship of Roozbeh Shirazi, an editor with the journal, the series aims to address the growing relationship between discourses of security, extremism, and Islamophobia as enacted within the theatre of schooling. The series hopes to promote engagement from the field with such questions as who defines what counts as “extremism”, what it means to teach about/against extremism, relations between the discourse of “youth radicalization” and the surveillance of brown and black youth bodies, and the conceptual and material reach of extant approaches to citizenship and citizenship education with respect to achieving social justice for youth from marginalized communities. Shirazi takes the lead in providing a very provoking if not provocative essay with his opening editorial, “When Schooling Becomes a Tactic of Security: Educating to Counter ‘Extremism’”. Here Shirazi probes the intersections between education reform and larger security imperatives to counter Islamist extremisms as well as to promote “moderation” in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Shirazi examines in particular how schooling has come to be seen as linked to the realization of security and racialized biopolitical objectives, and compares such working of education between domestic efforts within the United States, and international development efforts abroad. His essay provides a timely backdrop for our lead essay in the series, “Creating ‘Invited’ Spaces for Counter-Radicalization and Counter-Extremism Education,” by Adeela Arshad-Ayaz and M. Ayaz Naseem, which presents an articulation of how ‘invited spaces’ can foster inclusive and authentic participation and public discourse on issues related to extremism and radicalization. We hope that you might follow this series over the next three issues as we provide space for a critical and much needed examination.

Separated by Removal: The Impact of Parental Deportation on Latina/o Children’s Postsecondary Educational Goals

ABSTRACT This research examines the impact of parental deportation on Latino/a adolescents’ postsecondary aspirations. Based on interviews with students, their families, and site observations, the study finds that for some adolescents who held college aspirations prior to the deportation, this type of abrupt parental removal negatively affects their perception of safety and stability in their home and school environments (i.e., microsystem) (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Where this vulnerability is not countered with emotional, economic, and institutional support, it can hinder their development of the social capital (Coleman, 1988; Stanton-Salazar, 2001) that would be conducive to their higher educational aspirations.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Probing the Nexus of Migration, Religion, and Education

Religion is on the move. In 2012, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life published Faith on the Move: The Religious Affiliations of International Migrants, a report and accompanying database detailing migration patterns among seven major religious groups: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, adherents of other religious traditions, and the religiously unaffiliated (Pew Research Center, 2012). The report was one part of the Pew– Templeton Global Religious Futures Project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. According to the report, in 2010 there were about 214 million international migrants living around the world, or roughly 3% of the world’s population. This number represents a dramatic rise in international migration that has taken place over the past fifty years (in 1960 the number was roughly 80 million). Migrants do not leave their religions behind. In fact, as the report points out, religious persecution and strife have at times been major causes of migration. Beyond this, religion very often plays a significant role in people’s decisions to leave their countries of birth, as well as their decisions on where to go. This special issue of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education examines the intersection of migration, religion, and schooling. Religion continues to have salience as a fundamental basis for identity and belonging, despite predictions of a final “global triumph” of liberal democracy and secularization in the post-Cold War era; and the religious affiliations of migrants have important connections to education. For instance, religiously persecuted refugees may utilize their cultural (and specifically religious) capital to their advantage in schooling in host societies that privilege rather than severely disadvantage their faith traditions. Diasporic communities may also

Refugee Education as a Gauge of Liberal Multiculturalism

Will Kymlicka (2007) writes of a global “veritable revolution” in relations between states and ethnocultural minorities, as advanced by new multicultural models of state and citizenship. Schools represent key transformational sites in this revolution, as they constitute spaces where minority groups might receive greater school access, identity recognition and accommodation for their particular needs.