Fresh grounds: African migrants in a South African primary school (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
As much as there are reasons for optimism as one thinks about changes in South Africa, Africa, and the United States in relation to the transcendence of racial differentiation and hierarchy, this book is a reminder of how both harrowing and incomplete that journey is. This book, a crucial addition from the Global South to the scholarship on immigrant students\u27 schooling, depicts how salient and fraught racial identity, both asserted and ascribed, continues to be for the negotiation of school in South Africa. Immigrant students are loathed and marginalized for their accents and \u27foreign\u27 ways, and yet they are also stereotyped and viewed jealously as more serious and committed students than their native-born Black peers
Cambridge Journal of Education Anti‐racism and the 'New' South African Educational Order
This article traces the desegregation of South African schools, particularly within the Gauteng region, from 1990Gauteng region, from to 1996. It argues that there is a discernible shift from 'race' to ethnicity in the educational discourses of South Africa and that at school level the response to ethnicity has been predominantly assimilationist. Attempts to move towards a more multicultural way of operating are affected by conceptions of identity as stereotyped, homogenised and generalised, leading to 'bad' multicultural approaches being adopted. Simultaneously, within official enunciations at national level, a consistent anti-racist stance is emphasised in order to 'redress' apartheid's legacies. I argue that such initiatives are limited due to their structurally functionalist underpinnings and their failure to address the complexity of identities contained within the classifications of 'black' and 'white'. I argue that, on both the macro and the micro level, questions of identity and difference are central in developing a school (and societal) environment that is not only free from racism, but other forms of discrimination too.
2016 Theorising the (de)construction of ethnic stigma in compulsory education
Until recently confined to a limited number of mainly Anglo-Saxon countries, anti-racist policies are now being formulated across Western Europe, spurred in part by the top-down influence of EU and global human rights institutions. However, psychological and sociological research on ethnic prejudice suggests that current initiatives seldom address its deep political roots, placing on isolated bodies and interventions the burden of counteracting vastly superior structural forces. This paper examines the unfolding of such a paradox in the realm of primary and secondary education, where notions of interculturalism have become part of mainstream policy and practice. Based on a synthesis of the empirical literature, it argues that biased curricula, overwhelmingly White teachers and inter-school ethnic segregation provide a fertile ground for the development of racist attitudes among children. It then goes on to show that education policies generally ignore, exacerbate or inadequately address these cross-national trends, even when they are explicitly singled out as impediments to migrant integration, social cohesion or equal opportunities. Finally, it outlines the far-ranging reforms that would be necessary in order to establish genuinely anti-racist education systems, as well the political challenges and opportunities for such a transformation.
Fragmented ideologies: Accounts of educational failure and positive discrimination
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 1989
This paper reports a discourse analytic study whichforms pari of a larger project concerned with the way white majority group members in New Zealand make sense ofrace and 'race relations'. Itsfocus is on accounts of educational inequality and criticisms of positive discrimination programmes. The analysis documents (a) the way talk on these topics is produced using pre-existing resources (the 'togetherness repertoire' and the 'meritocratic model of education'); (b) the way it subtly orientates to pragmatic constraints such äs issues of potential blame and justification; (c) the fragmented nature of participants' ordinary reasoning about social issues. This paper is derived from a broader project concerned with racism and specifically with the discourses of white majority group members in New Zealand äs they make sense of 'race relations' in that country (Potter and Wetherell, 1988a, 1988b; Wetherell and Potter, 1986; 1988a, 1988b, forthcoming). One of the principal aims of this project was to examine how situations of exploitation, discrimination and unequal power are legitimated. As Thompson has argued, 'to study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning (signification) serves to sustain relations of dominatiorf (1984: 131, emphasis in original). This research can be seen äs part of a growing body of work on the nature and organization of racist discourse more generally (