Thea Renda Abu El-Haj

Race, Politics, and Arab American Youth Shifting Frameworks for Conceptualizing Educational Equity

Educators concerned with creating equitable school environments for Arab American students must focus on how contemporary global and national politics shape the lives of these youth and their families. Arab immigrants and Arab American citizens alike experience specific forms of racial oppression that hold implications for school curricula, practices, and policies. Practitioners committed to social justice must assess how schools teach about culture, educate students for knowledgeable deliberation of global politics, and support students and teachers to explore the passions of patriotism. The questions raised by the education of Arab American youth have profound implications for teaching for social justice in a world characterized by global interdependence and increasing transnational migration. No longer can national boundaries mark the limit of concern for social justice. Educating for social justice requires that we teach youth to confront racial, economic, social, and political injustices within and beyond the borders of nation-states.

Realizing the Equity-Minded Aspirations of Detracking and Inclusion: Toward a Capacity-Oriented Framework for Teacher Education

Abstract Inclusion and detracking policies seek to remedy the pervasive inequality of educational opportunities in U.S. schools by building classrooms that are integrated across the lines of race/ethnicity, class, and disability and that offer all students access to a rich and challenging curriculum. In practice, however, teachers often struggle with the implementation of these reforms. Drawing on ethnographic research in detracked and inclusion classrooms, this article analyzes the nature and sources of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous settings. It argues that the implementation of these policies is not often accompanied by a serious interrogation of the taken-for-granted understandings of ability, standards, and structural inequality that pervade educational discourse inside schools. This failure to challenge dominant discourse about these three issues is at the root of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in detracked and inclusion classrooms. Drawing on lessons learned from research, the authors propose a capacity-oriented framework for teacher education that might better prepare teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous classrooms to meet the equity-minded goals of these reforms.

Confronting the Urban Civic Opportunity Gap Integrating Youth Participatory Action Research Into Teacher Education

This article considers how youth participatory action research (YPAR) can be used to build the civic teaching capacities of preservice teachers working in urban settings. In the final semester of an urban-focused teacher education program, preservice teachers led YPAR programs in the urban schools in which they student-taught the previous semester. This article analyzes what preservice teachers learn through the process of YPAR. Specifically, we found that YPAR supported teacher learning in three areas: cultivating student-centered teaching practices, observing and documenting students’ strengths and capacities, and developing new understandings of the structural inequalities that shaped the lives of the students in urban schools. Drawing on data collected over the past 6 years, we argue that leading children and young people in participatory action research projects can contribute to the creation of the transformative civic educators so sorely needed in urban settings.

Whose race problem? Tracking patterns of racial denial in US and European educational discourses on Muslim youth

ABSTRACT In this paper, the authors focus on everyday narrations of the nation as they are taken up by educators in schools in the United States, Denmark and Spain. As the primary institutions within which children from im/migrant communities are incorporated into the nation-state, schools are the key sites within which young people learn the languages and practices of national belonging and citizenship. Comparing ethnographic case studies in the United States, Denmark and Spain, the authors trace the nationalist storylines that serve to frame Muslim youth as particular kinds of racialized and “impossible subjects”. Across national contexts, the authors document similar, often almost verbatim, stories that educators narrated about the disjuncture between liberal ideals of the nation, and what they imagined to be true of Muslim im/migrant youth. They theorize that, despite differences in US and European approaches to immigration, there are consonances in the ways that Muslims are positioned as racialized Others across liberal democracies because of the very ways that western liberalism has constructed notions of individualism and tolerance. These seemingly benign discourses of liberalism in schools provide the conditions of possibility for schools’ imposition of exclusionary nationalist values while keeping a safe distance from charges of racism. Thus, we show how liberalisms imbrication with nationalism, and its promotion of goals conceived of as inherently humanist and universal, occlude the racial logics that ultimately restrict human freedom for Muslim youth.

Toward an awareness of the “colonial present” in education: Focusing on interdependence and inequity in the context of global migration

ABSTRACT Across the world, the number of displaced people has risen to unprecedented levels. In the United States, rightwing politicians call for closing borders to Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. These conditions lead the authors to ask how to educate with and for immigrant students who are positioned as enemy aliens – “impossible subjects” – within their new nation? We take a comparative approach, looking across our studies with Palestinian immigrant and Cambodian refugee youth in the US to think about how their experiences in US schools can inform an education for justice. In looking across two ethnographies, done more than a decade apart from each other, we illustrate the remarkable similarities between discourses about these different groups of students. In this article, we focus on three stances toward immigrant incorporation that the young people in our research studies encountered – stances through which they learn about the meanings of and expectations for citizenship and belonging. Our argument is that despite the differences between these stances, all three erase the “colonial present” that shapes the lives of immigrant youth and their families. We call for an education that decentres the nation, and focuses attention on the co-dependent inequities at the centre of our global interdependence.