Immigration and emigration: Canadian and Mexican youth making sense of a globalized conflict

Abstract

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth who attend schools located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in México, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. In the Canadian context, participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. In the Mexican context, emigration was understood as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, which often brings about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify the tensions between these dominant narratives about issues of transnational mobilityusually also present in intended curriculum-and students' first-hand, every day, local-globalized citizenship experiences with ('in' and 'out') migration in each setting. In addition, we examine youths' own imaginaries of citizenship, contrasting the sense of agency and identity positions they express in each of these differently situated but structurally connected contexts in the global pattern of migration. In doing so, this work shows the limited opportunities youth have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences and positions in the world with the power imbalances and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration is crucial for educational efforts in citizenship education on global issues.Migration is a window into the concrete realities of globalization-including conflicts between those who move and those who stay, competition for employment, movement of capital in search of cheap labor, and struggles for citizenship. Dominant discourses of mobility and education are epitomized by demands for global knowledge economy capabilities and by depoliticized notions of humanitarian ethics. However, young people's actual political, economic, and socio-cultural concerns and experiences of transnational mobility vary from place to place, revealing tensions with the usual intended school curriculum explaining this globalized world.In this paper, we explore how understandings of global mobility take different shape for youth in underprivileged spaces in urban Canada (global North, receiving immigrants) and México (global South, sending emigrants). Comparing the ways these youth locate themselves in relation to their actual experiences with migration-a shared global event, linked with important social conflicts in both contexts-, we argue, reveals something of how they imagine their own and others' citizenship in the face of transnational phenomena. This allows us to localize the experience of globalization in relation to specific spaces of citizenship, and thereby to challenge typical curriculum notions of globalization driven by hegemonic economic or cosmopolitan goals.

El fenómeno transnacional en el campo educativo chileno. Enfoques y conceptos para una agenda de investigación pendiente

“…Si bien los enfoques y conceptos claves que hemos descrito parecieran apuntar a dimensiones prescriptivas y estructurales de los sistemas educativos educativas, sostenemos que la transnacionalización como fenómeno tiene unas consecuencias simbólicamente enredadas en la experiencia escolar, tanto de profesores y como estudiantes. Temas como la receptividad del estudiantado frente a las pruebas estandarizadas internacionales, con sus implicancias psicológicas y para el aprendizaje, la inmigración y la movilidad de saberes en aulas cada vez más pluriculturales (Nieto y Bickmore, 2017), así como los desaf íos didácticos que implica para el profesorado el abordaje de temas globales como los derechos humanos y el calentamiento global, son facetas no ponderadas aun ni por la política ni por la investigación educativa local. Esto debe desafiar a la investigación a revisitar los paradigmas cualitativos para explorar en las concepciones, prácticas y discursos transnacionales que tienen lugar en el aula y en la socialización escolar de los jóvenes.…”

Impeding or Enriching Education for Just Peace? Teachers' Implemented Curricula in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada

“…Next, focus group workshops with multiple groups of students per school (about five per group, separated by grade level) elicited these young people's understandings of various locally-relevant social conflicts, their causes, and what they thought citizens could do to transform them. Facilitators also invited student groups to offer (anonymous) perspectives and suggestions to their teachers about curriculum they considered relevant to the conflict concerns in their lived experience (see Bickmore, 2018;Bickmore, Awad, & Radjenovic, 2017;Nieto & Bickmore, 2017). These results were reported (in anonymized summaries) back to teacher focus groups to elicit joint reflection in each setting.…”

Hope amid violence: youths’ agency and learning experiences to transform social conflicts in non-democratic settings

“…The body of scholarly literature on the intersection of peacebuilding, education and youth agency in the Global South countries has been growing (see Bajaj and Hantzopoulos, 2016;Bellino et al, 2017;Davies, 2017;Higgins and Novelli, 2020;Lopes Cardozo et al, 2016). More recently studies have also tried to redress the absence of youths' voices and life experiences regarding their understanding and expression of various social conflicts and their agency in response to them (for example, Bellino, 2018;Nieto and Bickmore, 2017;Pruitt, 2013). However, as mentioned earlier, such studies are scarce in Middle Eastern countries, particularly in Iran.…”