Jessica Walton

Identifying and developing effective approaches to foster intercultural understanding in schools

This paper provides a systematic review of education literature focused on identifying school-based approaches for developing students’ intercultural understanding. Studies were assessed using selection criteria and then critically appraised for study quality. A key finding from the review is that developing students’ intercultural understanding beyond cultural awareness requires students and teachers to take a critical approach toward cultural diversity, as well as the opportunity for ongoing intercultural and intergroup contact. Studies reported that only building cultural awareness and knowledge is not enough to promote long-term changes in attitudes. There is a need for more rigorously evaluated longitudinal school-based interventions. Finally, studies consistently call for investment in teachers’ professional and personal intercultural capabilities. The paper concludes by calling for school-based interventions that are informed by best practice approaches at a whole school level in order to effectively develop students’ intercultural attitudes and skills.

You Are Not Born Being Racist, Are You? Discussing Racism with Primary Aged-Children.

Ethnic-racial socialisation is broadly described as processes by which both minority and majority children and young people learn about and negotiate racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. This article extends the existing ethnic-racial socialisation literature in three significant ways: (1) it explores ways children make sense of their experiences of racial and ethnic diversity and racism; (2) it considers ways children identify racism and make distinctions between racism and racialisation; and (3) it examines teacher and parent ethnic-racial socialisation messages about race, ethnicity and racism with children. This research is based on classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents and students aged 8–12 years attending four Australian metropolitan primary schools. The findings reveal that both teachers and parents tended to discuss racism reactively rather than proactively. The extent to which racism was discussed in classroom settings depended on: teachers’ personal and professional capability; awareness of racism and its perceived relevance based on student and community experiences; and whether they felt supported in the broader school and community context. For parents, key drivers for talking about racism were their children’s experiences and racial issues reported in the media. For both parents and teachers, a key issue in these discussions was determining whether something constituted either racism or racialisation. Strategies on how ethnic-racial socialisation within the school system can be improved are discussed.

Supporting the Interests of Intercountry Adoptees beyond Childhood: Access to Adoption Information and Identity

Drawing on select examples of adoption policy, this article considers key assumptions in discourse about ‘the best interests of the child’. The central argument is that the life-long impact of adoption needs to be recognised so that the long-term interests of adoptees are met, and not only when they are children. Based on doctoral research into the experiences of adult Korean adoptees in the United States and Australia, this article argues that currently post-adoption services are geared to adoptive parents and the adoptee-as-child and do not adequately address the needs of adoptees beyond childhood. Accurate and accessible information is important for adoptees as they try to understand their past and make sense of their identities.

Feeling It: Understanding Korean Adoptees’ Experiences of Embodied Identity

This paper examines the ways in which transnational Korean adoptees experience identity as an embodied subjective process that is simultaneously contested and objectified by social perceptions of their bodies in their adoptive countries and South Korea. To analyse these lived experiences, I draw primarily on embodiment theories such as Budgeons [(2003). Identity as an embodied event. Body and society, 9, 35–55] sociological concept of ‘body as event’ and Csordas’ [(2002). Body/meaning/healing. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan] cultural phenomenological view of the body not as an object but as a ‘subject of culture’. To analyse processes of (re)embodiment, I draw on Ahmeds [(2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8, 149–168] concepts of ‘space’ and ‘whiteness’. Based on ethnographic data in South Korea and semi-structured interviews with 22 adult Korean adoptees, this paper demonstrates how Korean adoptees’ embodied identities are lived in relation to racialised experiences of belonging and Otherness.

Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

Abstract The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.

Fostering intercultural understanding through secondary school experiences of cultural immersion

In parallel with many nations’ education policies, national education policies in Australia seek to foster students’ intercultural understanding. Due to Australia’s location in the Asia-Pacific region, the Australian government has focused on students becoming “Asia literate” to support Australia’s economic and cultural engagement with Asian countries. Drawing on Allport’s optimal contact principles and key factors supporting intercultural understanding, this study examines two “sister school” cultural immersion trips in Indonesia and East Timor to explore ways in which their different approaches supported positive intergroup contact and helped foster intercultural understanding among students. Focus groups and interviews with school project teams and analysis of both researcher and teacher project field notes and documents suggested that these schools’ programmes could be mapped onto Allport’s contact principles in different ways. The paper concludes with promising approaches that can help to inform sister school programmes.

The politics of conditional citizenship in South Korea: an analysis of the print media

ABSTRACT This article shows how the meaning of citizenship has changed in South Korea since the partial emergence of a multicultural society in the past two decades. It does so by analysing how newspaper editorials have discussed multiculturalism, which is a multifaceted concept but one which weighs heavily on notions of citizenship. There is often a consensus about citizenship in mono-ethnic and homogeneous societies, even if it is not always clearly articulated or expressed. Societal and demographic change, however, require such societies to change or at least revisit notions of citizenship. The article shows that the print media places the onus on migrants to adapt to society, but also on Koreans to accept the “inevitable reality” of multiculturalism. Editorials advocate a form of conditional citizenship, whereby migrants are incorporated into society without disrupting current notions of what it means to be a South Korean.

’I am Korean’: contested belonging in a ‘multicultural’ Korea

This chapter examines the politics of belonging through the inter-ethnic relations of primary school children in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data of 11–12 year olds from monoethnic and multiethnic Korean family backgrounds, this chapter examines multiethnic and monoethnic children’s experiences of racialised difference in the forced togetherness of school, how children navigate feelings of contested belonging, and their experiences of peer sociality, rejection and marginalisation. Going beyond multicultural education, cultural or linguistic assimilation and an imagined national Korean identity, this chapter argues for an affective understanding of belonging in a society grappling with the meaning of belonging in the face of increasing racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, past and present nation-building, and intensifying globalisation.

The relationality of race in education research

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas. The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged. The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.

Adopted territory: Transnational Korean adoptees and the politics of belonging

material change surface in several occasions along the volume. By saying this, am I conceding too much to the myth of ‘primitive purity’, or acknowledging the ‘good savage’/‘bad savage’ dichotomy? I do not believe so. To say that the goods and techniques brought by colonisers had effects on the colonised does not amount to saying that the colonised were perverted or depraved in the process. Social change does not mean depravation, transformation does not mean ‘impurity’. These points are also part of Dousset’s argument. Minimizing the impact of technologies and goods contributes to proving this point, albeit partially. Mythes, missiles et cannibales raises interesting questions. It would be good to find more detailed accounts of how social structures take advantage of material parameters: What is modified and how? How do local actors perceive material benefits and needs in colonial situations? To which extend were colonizers aware of the social consequences of their technological input? Did Australian colonial governments and missions manipulate these factors consciously, rather than blindly provide goods in a bid to obtain power, or avoid doing so in the fear of perverting ‘noble savages’? In conclusion,Mythes, missiles et cannibales is an important critical contribution to our understanding of colonial interactions, in Australia and elsewhere, and it would be good to see Dousset’s volume translated into English. Dousset clearly articulates and deconstructs colonial ideology, connecting it with historical facts. With respect to this deconstruction, the book opens up important questions to be addressed in future research.