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 encounteredstances 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.

Exploration of student perceptions of multicultural content in American Sign Language distance learning courses : a case study

“…The rejection of cultural perspectives alienated students from various cultural backgrounds and communities in that they were not seen as a member of a group that collectively celebrated or embraced popular beliefs or ideologies. The movement's proposal of cultural recognition and cultural citizenship to address inequalities in democratic states drew from group affiliations and cultural resources so marginalized groups are able to participate in autonomous societies (El-Haj & Skilton, 2017). Deeper structural inequalities are not addressed fully because multicultural education does not grasp an expanded view of historic and contemporary contexts and conditions.…”

“…What needed to be addressed is the reintroduction of identities pertaining to race, class, and ethnicity that are shaped by linguistic and cultural characteristics to challenge the traditional curriculum. El-Haj and Skilton (2017) stated that as long as unequal colonial power relations are not visible in an analysis, then we are unable to decipher the ways a colonizer is obscuring our understanding. Students who are directly impacted by supremacy suffer racial anxiety, which provokes a dissonance that stands in the way of academic achievement (Angod, 2015).…”