the pedagogical solution? · 2019. 9. 23. · journey. i ask one of the young audience members...

The Pedagogical Solution?

A commonsensical inquiry into the teaching of migration and asylum

Avantika Taneja 275407 MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies 15 September, 2010

Word Count: 10,206

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London)

DISSERTATION DECLARATION

Please note - No dissertation will be accepted for marking unless it is accompanied by this signed declaration.

Student Surname: Taneja

First name: Avantika

Student ID number: 275407

Name of Programme of Study: MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies

I have read and understood regulation 17.9 (Regulations for Students of SOAS) concerning plagiarism*. I undertake that all material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person(s). I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. I give permission for a copy of my dissertation to be held at the School’s discretion, following final examination, to be made available for reference.

Signature: ……………………………………………… Date …………………………

I give permission for a copy of my dissertation to be held for reference, at the School discretion.

Signature: ……………………………………………… Date …………………………

Abstract

Left-leaning broadsheets, grassroots refugee organisations and cultural productions that portray individual narratives are among the efforts Kushner (2003: 261) references as an isolated and systematically silenced “opposition” to contemporary discourse on asylum. This counter-discourse, in its particular manifestation as an educational goal, is broadly the subject of my investigation. I ask whom, to what extent, and to what end, has pursued Kundnani’s (2001: 59) prescriptions that “the new racism against asylum seekers must be shattered by the practical work of pulling apart its claim to be ‘common sense’” and that “we need initiatives in schools to explain to young people from where and why refugees come”. I am concerned with educational interventions that have been encoded as curricular materials that aim to tackle issues of migration and asylum for children and young people. Concurrently, my project contemplates the ideological underpinnings of what might be termed “the pedagogical solution”, that is, the tendency to see curricular interventions as the response to injustices and what this implies about dominant conceptions of youth. I am interested in how this intersects with theoretical strands of critical pedagogy to resist a static view of the nation across time and space.

Contents

The opening scenes 1

A commonsensical inquiry

3

The coded and encoded curriculum

6

Teaching conformity, teaching controversy

9

An emerging genre

15

The target audience: to validate or educate?

21

Migration and asylum: a bounded form of knowledge

26

Discourse analysis as critical consciousness

30

Children as narrators, children as pedagogues

33

The Pedagogical Solution?

37

References

39

Appendix A: Profiles of informants Appendix B: Sample interview questions

43 44

Avantika Taneja (275407)

1

The opening scenes

It is general election season in the UK this year. The programme I work for at the

Citizenship Foundation1 is holding a “Dear Prime Minister” letter-writing competition put

out to English primary schools. Out of hundreds of entrants, a large number voice their

concerns about racism. They represent a unified voice opposed to racism, imploring the (at

the time undetermined) Prime Minister to combat it. At the same time, a select few pupils

choose immigration as their most pressing issue to write about. But it is dissociated from

their peers’ concerns about racism.

“This country does not feel the same anymore”, declares an 11-year-old from Walsall, “other

airports around the world make it hard for foreigners to get into their country and I agree

with that policy”. Another pupil from Leeds, also in favour of heightened border control, is

“writing to inform [the Prime Minister] about [her] ideas and suggestions on how to stop the

unbelievable unfair aspect of immigration �”, unfair because as two young girls from Alton

express, “people think they can just come to [our] country and don’t go to work and get

benefits for nothing. We think that we can stop immigrants from coming to Great Britain by

using the Australian method”.

In June this year, I am sitting behind a group of Year 3 pupils from a Dalston primary school

at a small, independent theatre production entitled “Boy with a Suitcase” (2010). Young Naz

is being smuggled from his conflict-steeped ambiguous country of origin to London, the

1 As stated on its website, “the Citizenship Foundation is an independent education and participation charity

that exists to encourage and enable individuals to play an effective role in democratic society”.


2

“land of milk and honey” and encounters a number of obstacles and adventures on his

journey. I ask one of the young audience members whether she thinks Naz’s story is happy

or sad. Her response is nuanced. She answers matter-of-factly: “both.”

It is Refugee Week 2010. I am volunteering at the Museum of Immigration and Diversity in

Spitalfields (2010) to host a flurry of visitors during rare public opening days. A religious

education teacher in Essex is simultaneously moved and troubled. “I think you are

preaching to the converted”, she expresses on her way out the door. “What I would really

like is for my students to be here. They are the ones whose stereotypes need to be

challenged.”

In late July, I am among the audience at a performance by a human rights theatre group

called “On a Clear Day You Can See Dover” (2010). Actors are reading from an ethnographic

screenplay documenting the perilous journeys of immigrants in Calais aspiring for the iconic

White Cliffs of this country. After the show, an audience member poses her questions to the

panel: “What is the solution, then? Is it this performance times a hundred? A thousand?

Whose minds do we have to change?”


3

A commonsensical inquiry

“But, above all, the new racism against asylum seekers must be shattered by the practical work of pulling apart its claim to be ‘common sense’...We need initiatives in schools to explain to young people from where and why refugees come” (Kundnani, 2001: 59).

The series of questions posed in the human rights performance are seldom asked so

candidly. Perhaps because they are largely rhetorical. Perhaps because they presume to

name the rather slippery notion of “the problem” and label it as such. Perhaps because the

answers are often too broad, too vague or too unattainable. But these types of questions –

and their proposed answers - are the thrust behind my inquiry. They are questions that

resonate widely with whom Kushner (2003: 261) references as an isolated and systematically

silenced “opposition” to contemporary discourse on asylum. This counter-discourse,

however marginalised it may be, is broadly the subject of my investigation—but in its

particular manifestation as an educational goal.

Kushner’s claim is premised upon the disarticulation seen in some of the children’s letters

above: “In the early twenty first century the expression of overt racism is anathema, and

Britain has perhaps the strongest anti-racist, anti-discrimination legislation in the world.

Paradoxically, at the same time, a sustained and unrestrained campaign against asylum

seekers has achieved respectability throughout British society, culture and politics” (ibid:

257). A further paradox runs parallel to this discursive separation. There is a discursive

conflation, where a multiplicity of cross-border movements on their various continua of

categorisation–forced/voluntary, economic/political, mass/individual,


4

temporary/permanent, legal/illegal and so on – get conflated into the politics of asylum

determination, the so-called law and order “asylum problem” in Kundnani’s words (2001:

44).

Kushner (2003: 261) cites left-leaning broadsheets, grassroots refugee organisations and

cultural productions that portray individual narratives, as evidence of efforts to undermine

tabloid mythologies about asylum seekers and refugees, the current shorthand for migration

at large. What these initiatives have in common, perhaps, is their tendency towards the

catch-all “solution” to social injustice within this counter-discourse: raising awareness,

changing attitudes, unravelling mythologies. But this goal, as feeble as it may be, presents at

least a partial response to Kundnani’s call to arms for a radical anti-racism. He declares that

“...above all, the new racism against asylum seekers must be shattered by the practical work

of pulling apart its claim to be ‘common sense’” (2001: 59). Among the institutions he calls

upon to mobilise, the first is schools.

My exploration, then, has at its heart Kundani’s prescription: “we need initiatives in schools

to explain to young people from where and why refugees come” (ibid). It is, in a way, a

commonsensical approach. If the “problem” is widespread misconception—that is, a

combination of the discursive disarticulation of anti-racism and immigration with the

simultaneous discursive conflation of all forms of migration into a question of resources and

legitimacy—and these discourses are systematically divorced from empirical realities,

then the “solution” must be the dissemination of information. And this is most efficiently

achieved through the apparatus of the education system. It is the logic of mass media in

reverse. Indeed, “the role of mass media as a disseminator of information makes it a key

political actor” (Kaye, 1998: 164). The same might be said about the National Curriculum.


5

Thus I am interested in who, to what extent, and to what end, has taken Kundnani’s

prescription to heart. I am concerned with the kinds of educational interventions that have

been encoded as curricular materials: learning resources that aim to tackle issues of

migration and asylum for children and young people. I will consider whether there is

ideological space for their content within the National Curriculum, and what is their

potential to unravel the common sense notions on which the popular racism against asylum

seekers is founded, in Kundani’s terms. I aim to reflect on how a counter-discourse, in the

forms of curricular media productions operating within a specifically national institution,

might resist a static view of the world across time and space that sees displacement as

anomalous within the “national order of things”, the common sense notion described by, for

instance, Malkki (1995), which undergirds all questions of entitlement of the displaced to the

national territory.

Concurrently, this project contemplates the ideological underpinnings of what might be

termed “the pedagogical solution”, that is, the tendency to see curricular interventions as the

response to injustices and what this implies about dominant conceptions of youth. I am

interested in how this intersects with theoretical strands of critical pedagogy that resist

Marxist and modernist perspectives of education, as one informant defines it, “getting people

to understand their own context, critique it, and then seek to change it” (Fletcher-Wood,

2010; Freire, 1996).


6

The coded and encoded curriculum

My pursuit of this inquiry itself has to be situated. My investigative impulse is rooted in my

own educational experience of an anthropology of migration and diaspora. Having been

immersed in a pedagogy that aims to unravel the naturalised notions to which Kundnani

implicitly refers, my instinct is to ask, how can this revelatory experience of ‘unlearning’ be

replicated? And why not earlier in the life span?

My views are further informed by my position as a practitioner within the field of citizenship

education. I have a tendency to venerate the capacities of children. Hence, for me, like many

of the authors cited and my informants, children, as a sociological category, become the

ideological site of change. I am, like my informants, embedded in a separate discourse about

the purpose of national education systems, the pedagogical imperatives of teachers, the

constraints of the school day, and the battle for the coveted territory of the alternative mass

medium: the National Curriculum. As somewhat of a “native” ethnographer, then, my

project is almost inextricable from my own bias towards the “pedagogical solution”, a view

that of course presumes “the problem”.

My interest, though, inherits some of the practice of anthropological analysis. Scholars of

migration and diaspora that investigate educational issues, it seems to me, are primarily

concerned with the achievement gap –the systematic underachievement of so called

minorities–and its contested causes. But another major preoccupation of social scientists is

curriculum, or the educational content, itself. Curricula, and particularly the National

Curriculum, as the codified part of an often incoherent education system, become the site of

inquiry, in my opinion, because of the textuality of both its content and its objectives. In its

written tangibility, curriculum becomes an object of study, and often critique. Analysts such


7

as Crawford (1995), Sherwood (1999) and Tomlinson (2005), among others, treat the

content of the curriculum and representations within history textbooks, lesson plans and

literary texts, for example, as markers of a state-endorsed national narrative that tells the

history of the dominant group.

In this way, curriculum can be considered a media production, often created by those in

power. Similarly, the contested causal relationship and power differential between the state,

mass media, and public opinion, discussed extensively by analysts of the role of tabloid

media in ‘the asylum debate’ (Kundani, 2001; Kushner, 2003; Kaye, 1998) might also apply

to school curriculum as well. What are the multi-directional causalities between state,

curricular content, and a more youthful public opinion, one that might persist across the life

span to become public opinion in the electoral sense? Hence an undertaking to “alter public

opinion” understandably finds its locus of intervention at the curricular level.

The teaching of migration and asylum at the primary and secondary level in the UK,

however, appears to be undertheorised. A very contained body of literature is comprised of

context-specific case studies evaluating particular interventions, but there is, to my

knowledge, only one author (Rutter, 2005) that makes the explicit link between the vast

body of child development literature on the particular educational needs of minority,

migrant and refugee children and observational study of the teaching of global and local

issues of migration. Alternately, some theorising about the teaching of asylum and migration

features in scholarship regarding the teaching of controversial issues where teaching about

immigration or a variant on the theme is less about a specifically anti-racist thrust and more

about its topicality.

Any textual analysis of curriculum, however, takes as a premise that when used, what is

written is what is taught, and what is taught is what is learned. But as the most influential

schools of thought in media studies have considered, texts are “encoded” and “decoded” on

many levels rather than passively absorbed in their intact form by a heterogeneous audience


8

(Hall, 1980). As my own experience in the field of citizenship education suggests, what is

encoded in the National Curriculum and other educational interventions, is far from

representative of the empirical realities of the classroom and the playground. At a basic

level, there are the variables usually considered in audience analysis, the “social positioning”

of the audience in various intersecting continua of power and difference such as race, class

and gender and of most analytic relevance in this case, age. But, as well, curricula are

uniquely mediated through teachers to reach their target audience.

Thus, my focus on the textual representations in learning resources that are thematically

focused on issues of migration and asylum will consider the intent of the producers and

where possible, any evidence of its consumption and polysemic interpretations. Much

happens in an educational context that is often beyond the reach of the social researcher,

what educational sociologists term the “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, 1995).

Hence, although the voices of pupils would be more appropriate to an ethnographic inquiry,

within the limited scope of my research, I rely on a small number of informants who are

educators in the broadest sense, to grapple with some of the aspects of the hidden

curriculum. Although the remit of circulation varies in geographic unit depending on the

curricular resource, ranging from local authority to national or European level, because the

evaluative case studies and the experiences of my informants focus on the particularities of

English schools within a devolved national system, I will limit my consideration to this

geography. However, despite the wide developmental range, I will consider both resources

directed at primary and secondary students less as a comparative exercise, but rather to

encompass more texts and the varied expertise of my informants (see Appendix A and

Appendix B).


9

Teaching conformity, teaching controversy

“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either

functions ... to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into

the logic of the present system...or it becomes...the means by which men and

women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to

participate in the transformation of their world” (Shaull, 1996: 16).

The thrust of my inquiry, the extent to which curricular interventions can change attitudes,

is in some ways a proxy debate for the potential of education to undermine dominant

discourses. National education systems, however, are an arm of the state. As Marxist

theories of education would stipulate, mass public education is necessary for the continuity

of a capitalist economy as well as for the ideological reproduction of society (Althusser, 1969:

88-89). For the modernist theorist, education is the vehicle for generating “nation”, for

continuing the foundational myth that ties a cohesive population to its “natural” territory.

According to Smith (1995: 92), the crucial point is that the mass education system which

“inculcates these common [national] values and outlooks is a state system under state

control”. On the other hand, the state has been forced to reckon with its conception of nation

as ethnically/racially/religiously homogenous and the turbulent path towards a sense of

plural nationhood and this has had a trickle-down effect on schools. Schools have variously

been the target for assimilationist, integrationist or multiculturalist initiatives in the

“management” of diversity (Troyna, 1988).

In conjunction, “education in democratic states has always been, either explicitly or

implicitly, about strengthening democracy” (Osler and Starkey,2005: 1). Because democratic


10

ideals rest on the citizen/state contract of reciprocal rights and responsibilities, state-

sponsored education becomes, in Osler and Starkey’s terms, “a way of preparing young

people to understand the society in which they live...and to contribute to it in various

ways...for their future roles as citizens” (ibid). In England, this ideological position on

education has been encoded in the citizenship curriculum.

Citizenship education, as a statutory subject in the secondary curriculum, was initially

conceptualised by Bernard Crick, its main architect, as three interdependent strands: social

and moral responsibility, community involvement, and political literacy that “in habitual

interaction constitutes active citizenship” (Meer & Modood, 2009: 66). Despite its

contentious and debated relationship with a more nationalist view of education, to be

discussed further, it is widely acknowledged that “teaching about citizenship necessarily

involves teaching about controversial issues” (ibid). This offers up the possibility, then, that

in the state-endorsed space for teaching about “controversy”, we might see the emergence of

teaching about migration and asylum.

Claire and Holden (2007: 5) catalogue the various criteria named by other authors that

qualify an issue as controversial. Cross-cutting criteria include visibility in mass media, the

involvement of value judgements resulting in divergent opinions, explanations and therefore

solutions (Wellington, 1986:3; Stradling et al, 1984 in Claire and Holden, 2007: 5).

Richardson (1986: 27 in ibid) presents a reflexive debate, suggesting that the labelling of

controversy is itself politically charged with some interests served by maintaining that a

debate exists while other interests seek to conceal it. I would add, as well, that the framing of

the debate, the particular element being debated, might serve certain interests. In the case of

the “asylum debate”, Kushner (2003: 262), among others, has argued that asylum seekers

“rather than representing any real threat...have become scapegoats for those anxious about

the world around them, about contemporary concerns such as health provision and job

security”. The controversy is named as one of limited resources and legitimacy in popular


11

discourse, which proponents of the counter-discourse would say exonerates the state of its

responsibilities. To what extent, then, does this particular “controversy” trickle down to the

school level?

***

Issues surrounding migration and asylum, under the label of ‘immigration’, feature both as

examples of controversial issues offered by authors offering guidance to educators (Claire &

Holden, 2007; Huddleston, 2003; Short, 1988), appearing alongside war, gay marriage,

abortion, the European Union and so on, as well as in case studies and examples of issues of

concern that emerged organically from students. Unsurprisingly, because of broadly

overlapping cause and underlying power structures of social phenomena considered to be

controversial and relevant to the classroom, discussion around migration might be arrived at

more incidentally through the prism of other issues, often those relating to race as the catch-

all marker for social difference.

Huddleston (2003: 1) opens his brief with the implication that not teaching about

controversial issues perpetuates popular racisms: “Groups denigrated in tabloid newspapers

provide young people with the terms of abuse they apply to their peers in the playground or

on the street. Hence the derogatory use by children of terms like ‘asylum seeker’, or ‘gay’.”

Claire and Holden (2007: 6) continue in this strain, categorising migration and asylum as

localised issues of cultural contact, rather than one of global scale. “As the research with

children shows, local issues in the news such as housing and immigration can be debated, as

can global issues such as damage to the environment or international conflict”.

Short (1988: 22-23), writing in the 1980’s, claims that upper end primary pupils, even those

in “all-white” environments, have a sophisticated understanding of structural and individual

racism, a claim based upon a written task in which pupils were asked to imagine themselves

having recently entered Britain from the West Indies or Indian subcontinent. However, the

terms “migrant” and/or “immigration” are conspicuously absent, reflective of a historical


12

moment when racism levied against newcomers and the Black British population were one

and the same.

Thus the contained body of literature theorising about the teaching of controversial issues

touches upon immigration indirectly or as one such issue in a menu of local and global

anxieties. But the theorising about the teaching of migration and asylum, in particular, and

its link to anti-racist initiatives, is limited. Only Rutter’s (2005) chapter on using citizenship

education to challenge popular discourses about “the alien” presents the socio-historical

context of the asylum issue combined with the everyday encounters of refugee and asylum-

seeking children with racism in schools. She makes a comprehensive set of

recommendations for curricular initiatives as well as other school wide changes for

challenging popular racism against asylum seekers. Implicit in these discussions of why it is

important to teach children about controversy, however, are contested conceptions of

children and young people’s developmental readiness.

***

Recent research interviewing primary age children in inner London schools (Holden, 2001 in

Claire and Holden, 2007: 4) “revealed just how much children absorb from the media, from

the conversations they overhear...in short, controversy is part of their everyday lives”.

Huddleston (2003: 1) echoes this, stating that in an age of mass media and electronic

communication, children are graphically influenced by the images and information they

receive.

Earlier literature attempting to explain the gap in the primary curriculum with regard to

controversial issues refers to the “primary ideology”, the persistent notion of young

children’s moral purity and the consequent responsibility of teachers and other adults to


13

“protect the young from a corrupt reality” (Alexander, 1984 in Short, 1988: 11). Within the

language of educationalists, ideas of readiness and distinct developmental stages associated

with age are theoretically rooted in the influential works of Piaget. However, according to

Short (ibid: 18), Piaget is now much maligned for underestimating children’s cognitive

abilities and “the reigning orthodoxy now recognises young children as less naive politically

than has traditionally been assumed”.

In addition to awareness and exposure, Claire and Holden (2007: 4) cite other studies that

demonstrate children’s desire “to learn about these issues at school so that they could...be

proactive in working for change. Exploratory research from my organisation surveying 400

upper primary pupils confirmed trends in the literature, suggesting that children are

empathetic, in some cases wanting “to make people welcome to our country” and

demonstrate a strong sense of justice and desire for equal rights for everyone (Taneja, 2009:

5).

Although the opening anecdotes to this paper suggest that children’s baseline concern about

issues of migration varies greatly and comes in many forms, the assumptions within the

counter-discourse to the asylum question, lean towards conceptions of both children’s moral

purity expressed in emotional empathy as well as their cognitive capacity to process

convoluted information. It is unsurprising, then, that children and young people become a

target audience. Some critics state that governments have “a tendency to treat education

as...a repository for dealing with social problems where solutions are uncertain or where

there is a disinclination to wrestle with them seriously. Such problems are prone to be

dubbed ‘education’ and turned over to the schools to solve” (Halsey, 1972: 8 in Troyna,

1988:173). This tendency, it seems, is replicated by proponents of the “pedagogical

solution”, as expressed in the production of curricular resources.

However, the landscape of curricular content appears to mirror the legislative and discursive

disarticulation that Kushner (2003: 257) and Kundnani (2001: 50) describe between popular


14

and institutional racism anathema and anti-asylum seeker racism. For all the emphasis on

anti-racism in its diffuse forms within educational debates, on both a state-endorsed as well

as explicitly subversive level, teaching about migration and asylum does not appear to

feature prominently in these debates. It is often the producers of curricular resources

directly addressing issues of migration and asylum that make the overt link between this

content and the existing citizenship, anti-racism, and community cohesion agendas for

schools.


15

An emerging genre

“I don’t see much of how this works in the curriculum but I’m not overly

impressed by what I see.” – Susie Symes

Hope (2007; 2008: 295) discusses an “emerging genre” of early childhood literature

recounting “various aspects of the refugee experience”. As media productions in their own

right, it can be similarly said that there is an “emerging genre” of curricular resources—

variously termed teacher’s toolkits, study packs, learning resources or lesson plans—that

address issues of migration and asylum. Two major authorial sources stand out with

overlapping but ideologically distinct intentions: humanitarian organisations and citizenship

education organisations.

The major output of teaching resources around migration and asylum in England comes,

unsurprisingly, from the Refugee Council UK. Jill Rutter, its former Education Advisor, has

written prolifically about the particular educational needs of refugee and asylum seeking

children of all age groups. Within this remit of equal educational opportunities, she has also

produced resource books teaching about the causes, consequences and experiences of

refugeehood, namely several editions of both a primary and secondary version of a

citizenship teaching resource in book form that are marketed as “sensitively addressing the

difficult issues surrounding asylum seekers and refugees” (Rutter, 2004; 1998).

The British Red Cross recently published a teacher’s toolkit in 2009 with the explicit aim of

promoting “positive attitudes among young people (aged 12 to 25) towards vulnerable

migrants” through a Europe-wide initiative tasked with a usage goal of reaching 3 million


16

young people in the next three years (Positive Images, 2009). The supranational bodies of

the UNHCR2 and the IOM3 similarly produced their teacher’s toolkit also in 2009 targeted at

the same age group and geographic audience with nearly an identical mission, though more

focused on the “need to raise awareness of the many reasons for which people choose or are

forced to leave their own countries” (Not Just Numbers, 2009).

Refugee Week, a coalition of many of the largest national humanitarian and refugee

organisations, has similarly published a primary and secondary resource promoting an

expansive idea of citizenship as global interconnectedness “through the exploration of an

issue that touches [young people’s] day-to-day lives” and “to support teachers in tackling

these issues in their classes” (Refugee Week Info Centre, 2010). Although undated in both

its print and online versions, the author’s biography suggests that it was produced within the

last five years. It is noteworthy that this educational project is funded by a government

department, the Department for International Development (DFID), suggesting that the

public sector and third sector intersect in more ways than just the production of external

resources to be distributed in national education systems. This also hints at the intrinsic

paradoxes within an incoherent state, what Yuval-Davis (1997: 13) discusses as the

contradictions of various state apparatuses with “different ideological orientations”. The

DFID’s support of refugee/asylum related educational initiatives can thus coexist with what

Kundnani (2001: 43) terms the “the apparatus of state racism against asylum seekers that is

generating a complementary popular racism on the ground”. This paradox is perhaps a

microcosmic example of how the production of curricular resources by external

organisations renders mass education a force that both replicates and resists dominant

discourses.

2 The UN refugee agency, Office for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

3 International Organisation for Migration


17

The resistance type of rhetoric is consistent across humanitarian NGO’s, particularly those

with refugee/migrant protection in their remit. Although the above only represents a

sampling and not a comprehensive inventory, it is clear there is a growing impetus by

organisations purporting a rights-based discourse, particularly those tasked with the

particular humanitarian protection of vulnerable migrants globally, to supplement their

humanitarian work with the goal of raising awareness and disseminating information in

order to influence young people. These educational interventions are ideologically

positioned, and explicitly so, with a promotional agenda that reflects their rights-based

missions. What is implicit is the premise that lack of awareness and understanding and

information is one of the major barriers to the materialisation of these rights. Hence issue-

based education, in short, the “pedagogical solution”, gets enveloped within the

humanitarian missions of these organisations.

***

The other realm in which a counter-discourse and a state-endorsed education system

intersect is the ideological space of the citizenship curriculum. From my vantage point as a

practitioner in this field, citizenship education, were it a contracted term, could be the new

multiculturalism in the sense that Bhabha (1996: 55) describes it: “a portmanteau term...a

‘floating signifier’ whose enigma lies less in itself than in the discursive uses of it to mark

social processes where differentiation and condensation seem to happen almost

synchronically”. The synchronic tensions of fragmentation and unification, then, seem to be

that citizenship education has been critiqued on the one hand for “an attempt to impose a set

of British values where no such consensus exists” (Jasper in Meer & Modood, 2009: 66)

while simultaneously “a lot of us in the citizenship community have stayed away from ...the

so called Britishness debate, is that we have feared that in talking about citizenship of

identity we slip from process towards status.” (Breslin in Meer & Modood, 2009: 67)


18

From an educator’s point of view, however, the abstraction of citizenship education debates

translates into a more sociological one: the desire to teach children about the world they live

in. Marguerite Heath, who has produced two explicitly migration focused lessons within a

menu of hundreds of citizenship lessons, states “my motivation is really...for children to

understand the society in which they’re living in and immigration and the fact that people

move around a lot...it’s a really important aspect of learning about our society”. In short,

migration is an empirical reality, hence it must be taught.

In contrast to the human rights thrust behind resources produced by humanitarian and

refugee organisation, the production of teaching resources around issues of migration and

asylum emerges, then, within a more generalised task of socialising children into their

contextual realities. The two lessons developed by Marguerite, for instance, are grouped

under the umbrella topic of ‘diversity and cohesion’ with the lower primary lesson telling “a

story to illustrate how an outsider might feel” and how they might be welcomed into the

school (Heath, 2006a), while upper primary receives a “potted history of immigration to

Britain” from the Celts and Romans to modern day (Heath, 2006b). The issue, in the case of

citizenship education, then, becomes subsumed within education for greater social

understanding, rather than with an explicitly human rights agenda.

With the rationale of teaching to empirical realities, there also appears to be a growing

impetus within other citizenship education organisations and projects. For example, a

website that interfaces directly with young people, Britkid, “a website about race, racism and

life” contains scenarios and conversations at a refugee drop-in centre (Gaine, 2006).

Another initiative entitled the ‘Migration Conundrum’ in development by the Citizen

Organising Foundation UK was, at its inception, attempting to “bring compelling,

discursive and active teaching and learning around the issue of migration to classrooms”

because “every young person should be entitled to experience a high-quality, evidence-based


19

exploration of this controversial issue” (Hammond, 2010). At the time I met with the project

leader (Crawford-Rolt, 2010), however, it did not appear that the project leader was aware of

pre-existing resources with similar aims, suggesting that it was conceived out of either a

perceived demand from teachers or the common extension of their social justice work to the

“pedagogical solution”. Although its outdated online presence suggests the project may be

shelved, this initiative speaks to the alternate reality that there may not be a dearth of

resources, as one might expect, but rather a duplication and perhaps a saturation of learning

resources.

***

“There’s a lot of funding available for study packs...things that people that

don’t operate in the sector tell you [that] you must have...[But head

teachers will] take me to the staff room and say, ‘See those things

gathering dust there. That’s what those are.’” - Susie Symes

I began my search with the hypothesis that teaching of issues of migration and asylum would

be limited, hence the learning resources would be scarce, whatever the causal relationship

between the two. My gap analysis of learning resources was limited to the resource library at

the Citizenship Foundation, the Institute of Education curriculum resources library, the

websites of refugee organisations, my own programme’s website, the cross-references within

all these resource, bibliographies of evaluative case studies and conversations with former

and current educators. This is obviously not indicative of what is actually going on in schools,

but my search, I feel is representative of what would be readily available to a teacher in

search of curricular materials for teaching about refugees and asylum.

But the availability of resources may be more reflective of the perceived demand by teachers

or, in my view, the particular agendas of the organisations that produce them. In fact, as a


20

teacher, Harry deliberately avoids external resources because of their “built-in bias”,

choosing to do devise activities appropriate to his classroom. But the issue of circulation of

learning resources is seldom about the specific ideological position of the teacher, but more

often becomes about the rigidity of the National Curriculum at large.

Both interviewees who are current and former teachers allude to the increased

standardisation of the curriculum in recent years, a policy shift they are ambivalent towards.

Stating a citizenship education-oriented view, Marguerite’s proposition is that “the

curriculum should be planned but there should be flexibility built in...so in the very least,

when issues crop up, as immigration has particularly over the time of the election, that

teachers would have discussed it...but my fear is that in most classrooms not much space is

given to topical issues at all.”

Harry’s aspiration is also for greater flexibility, but to give teachers the ideological space to

provide what is relevant to their students: “And so you have total control and teachers don’t

feel they have any freedom. And a lot of our success is despite the system, not because of it”.


21

The target audience: to validate or educate?

“They’re fascinated...because it turns them into the objects of study in a

way that most lessons are about someone else”.

– Harry Fletcher-Wood

Although an inquiry into the production and circulation of curricular resources is revelatory,

the more insightful question would be their consumption by their target audience. In short,

does the “pedagogical solution” work? Assessment methodologies built into the education

system to measure achieved learning objectives, while problematic, might go some way to

providing insight. Although an ethnographic audience analysis was beyond the scope of my

project, I can draw upon case studies offered in educational literature that evaluate

effectiveness of migration and asylum themed interventions. Built into the question of

evaluation, however, is a question of who is the target audience?

The evaluative accounts, as case studies, are contained in their scope, though they

demonstrate consistencies. Habib (2008: 43) assesses her first-hand experience introducing

the novel “Refugee Boy” to her Year 8 English class that gave “students a new perspective on

the terms ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’”. Hope (2007; 2008) explores the novel form too,

but those aimed at the primary key stages, conducting a textual analysis of an “emerging

genre” of refugee stories for children (Hope, 2008: 295). Watts (2004: 317), an academic

commissioned to conduct “an evaluation of multicultural interventions in East Anglian

schools” profiles a group of sixth form students that attended a human rights workshop

facilitated by a former refugee, investigates their “repositioning” of attitudes. Day (2002)

examines a workshop as well, in the form of Forum theatre, in which the secondary school


22

students engaged interactively with the moral dilemmas presented about refugeedom and

homelessness.

Evaluative research has to account for the varied ‘starting points’ among subjects, although

many of the researchers either demonstrated or assumed that students’ views largely

replicate those of the populist tabloid discourse that criminalises asylum seeker. Though the

studies take place in varied geographical contexts, overall, they appear to be concerned

largely with a homogenised audience of the “host society” students, suggesting that this is the

perceived target group whose views need to be altered. The distinction between pupils who

are refugees/asylum seeker and the “majority” who are reacting to them are, within the

counter- discourse under discussion in this paper, is often subsumed under the label “white

working-class”. This is, of course, as false a conflation as many of the ones that educational

interventions may try to unravel.

As the opening anecdotes suggest, children and young people may or may not passively

absorb dominant discourses from mass media or other socialising influences. Back (1993:

223) in his pioneering ethnography of “youth culture” in a South London neighbourhood

suggests that the identities of young white people are a product of the dissonance between

“racialised nationalism circulating in the parent culture and national media discourse” and

their own lived experience. Rutter (2005: 146) acknowledges this complexity with her

research confirming that “children’s views about asylum seeker and refugees were rather

fluid and often localised”. Hope (2008: 301), however, in her mini ethnographic study is

deliberate about including both refugees and “non-refugees” to determine how far refugee

stories go towards “validating lived experience” or as “educative tools” suggesting that her

envisioned audience is more inclusive, but still neatly divided into two possibilities.

In keeping with this perceived cleavage in the audience, of refugees and non-refugees,

learning resource producers tend to have disclaimer sections in which they advise teachers to

be mindful about pupils that may have had direct experience of the subject matter.


23

Marguerite uses cartoon character animals in her lessons “to discuss these things sort of one

step removed”. On the other hand, she has received feedback on The Stranger lesson to the

effect of, “we don’t have children like that coming to our school so it’s irrelevant” and in her

mind, “that’s the very school that needs the lesson”.

But despite simplified notions of target audience, across the board in both learning resources

and the case studies, there is a an effort to disentangle the terminology of migrants, refugees,

asylum seeker, irregular migrants and other technical categories of displaced peoples and

distil them to their legal origins in an age-appropriate way (Not Just Numbers, 2009: 9;

Positive Images, 2009: 6; Halahmy, primary: 8-9). Many resources are careful to

disarticulate concepts of legitimacy from the legal definition of asylum-seeker: “the term

contains no presumption either way – it simply describes the fact that someone has lodged

the claim” (Not Just Numbers, 2009: 9). Halahmy (primary: 9) similarly specifies that

“illegal asylum-seeker” is a contradiction in terms as seeking asylum is a universal right.

These efforts might go some way to parse out umbrella categories of migrants, but in all of

the texts, representing in this discussion the counter-discourse to asylum issues, there

remains an undercurrent of essentialising the primary target audience of students that are

not from “displaced backgrounds” as Habib (2008: 51) carefully described them. For this

target audience, exposure to the other half, so to speak, is identified as a major variable in

their baseline attitudes. Rutter cites research reporting that social contact with asylum

seeker and refugees “lessens misconceptions and concerns” (ICAR, 2004 in Rutter, 2005:

145) because refugees are not highly visible in daily life for most. This “contact hypothesis” is

adopted by Watts (2004: 319) who frames it in terms of an urban/rural divide suggesting

that “those from more rural schools may never find diversity intruding into their own

environments...as such...they may be particularly susceptible to the populist discourse on

asylum seekers”.


24

The “contact hypothesis”, however, is less than straightforward. Many authors cite the

importance of personalising the issue, through narrative or testimony. But as secondary

school history teacher, Harry Fletcher-Wood, contends, it is difficult for students to

generalise from their friendship groups, groups that may well be a mix of recent migrants

and so-called white British and everything in between: “They find it very hard to link the

general impression they get – that, you know, migrants to Britain are scroungers-- they can’t

link that with the personal. Even if they know lots of personal stories, that doesn’t override.”

Yet the weight placed on personal narrative as the main pedagogical strategy to change

attitudes runs through all the case studies and is similarly reflected in learning resources

produced by external organisations. The prevalent premise in both curricular productions

and cultural productions that tell migration stories is that empirical realities presented in

narrative formula reveal the complexities behind essentialist labels and dehumanised data,

following the logic of ethnographic methodologies to deconstruct commonsensical notions of

difference. “In locations that range from community organisations to public schools, the

telling and hearing of stories of ‘authentic experience’ is a central pedagogical tool, with the

implicit goals of reducing individual prejudice through greater knowledge of the “other”

(Srivastava & Francis, 2005: 3).

In this vein, all of the analysts prescribe mindful representation of people on the move that

avoid essentialism and victimisation. “It is of paramount importance that refugees are

depicted positively, that there is empathy but not pity, and that, where possible, the

situations described are located geographically and politically to make most impact in

mirroring real-life situations” claims Hope (2007: 296). The leap from personal stories to

socio-political context is further emphasised in Watts’ (2004) study of sixth form students,

with his central argument that educational interventions must counter the decontextualising

of asylum seekers’ stories in populist discourse.


25

But perhaps Harry’s inkling of an inadequacy in the mere presentation of individual stories

has to do with the alternate educational goal: to validate the lived experience of “students

from displaced backgrounds”. What this might call for, then, is a linking up of individual

narratives of displacement within an inclusive national narrative. It follows that for those

pupils with a salient memory of their own or their family’s migration, according to Harry,

“they’re fascinated...because it turns them into the objects of study in a way that most lessons

are about someone else”.


26

Migration and asylum: a bounded form of knowledge

“I guess why it works for history is I can be making them better at history

and still give them a better understanding of the world... because they do

overlap. Critical pedagogy is about questioning the structures that are as

they are and looking at the evidence and seeing who we can trust. And,

well, that’s just what good history is.” – Harry Fletcher-Wood

Freire’s (1996: 52) classic manifesto critiquing traditional power structures between teacher

and pupil presents a rather more radical view about narrative as a pedagogical strategy:

“Education is suffering from a narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were

motionless, static, compartmentalised, and predictable”. His critique is analogous to

Maalki’s (1995) ‘archaeology’ of the construction of the refugee and the “national order of

things” that produces it. She unpacks the sedentary analytical bias (Clifford, 1988 in Maalki,

1995: 508) that essentialises displacement as an anomaly of life despite the diverse

conditions that produce it, stating that both displacement and emplacement are “historical

products, ever-unfinished projects.” (ibid: 516).

The refugee, in its institutional and discursive formation as a separate sociological category,

however, has becomes itself a compartmentalised area of knowledge, ironically static and

motionless in the way Freire describes. In migration literature, Castles (2003) discusses the

relatively new sociology of migration that is conducted in the context of voluntary migration,

while refugee/forced migration studies emerged as an autonomous discipline in the mid-

1990s (Indra, 1999). In national education systems, fittingly, the breakdown of curricular

content into subject areas is reflective of a tendency to compartmentalise areas of knowledge


27

and as students age, teachers become specialists in a subject area. Where, then, do issues of

asylum and migration, as their own knowable area of study, fit in?

The evaluative case studies, in some cases carried out by subject teachers themselves,

suggest that drama (Day, 2002), English (Habib, 2008; Hope, 2008; Hope, 2007), and

citizenship (Rutter, 2005) have the ideological space, so to speak, to explore these issues.

The potential is echoed by Harry but his vote lies with his own subject: “I think you can do it

with English because...if you’re studying an interesting text you can play amazing games with

it. Geography I think you could do. Citizenship I think you can do although most citizenship

teachers are non-specialists and don’t really care about what they’re doing. I mean, there’s

space for anyone...But I think there’s more space in history than most”.

Marguerite, alternately, feels that citizenship is the natural fit, echoed in many of the case

studies, but its position particularly in the primary curriculum is so tenuous that other

subjects will have to fill the vacuum: “So if they’re not going to teach citizenship as such, the

only time it’s going to appear is in PSHE [personal, social, health education] in which

[teachers] are meant to tackle sort of issues to do with how we make friends and how we get

on with each other...rather than why people have come here. Or it’s going to come up in

history. And it doesn’t naturally come up in the primary history curriculum. Or the other one

might be sustainability [in the geography curriculum] but I would guess that not many

primary teachers will actually see it fitting in there.” Thus the curricular subject through

which the issues are mediated will inform how debates, if any, are framed.

External organisations, however, are adept at tailoring their content to national assessment

standards in an attempt to align themselves with teachers’ agendas. The British Red Cross

resource, for example, lists all the Key Stage 2, 3, 4 citizenship learning standards with which

they link, such as “2e – to reflect on spiritual, moral, social, and cultural issues, using

imagination to understand other people’s experiences” (Positive Images, 2009). On the

other hand, resources cannot be overly prescriptive in order to have the widest reach. A


28

rhetoric of flexibility is also commonplace: the UNHCR/IOM resource, for example, provides

a suggested timeline, but stresses that activities “can also be taught as self-contained lessons

or as part of specific curriculum subjects such as history, geography, art” (Not Just Numbers,

2009: 12).

Marguerite reminds us that exploration of the issues might happen outside the classroom in

other educational spaces, such as assemblies or Refugee Week, reiterating that an inventory

of curricular resources is not representative of how and if schools address the issues. But,

even the Refugee Week website (2010) stipulates, “migration and asylum are such key

issues..they are not something that can be ignored for the rest of the year..there is a real need

for the issues to be tackled more widely throughout the year, and integrated into the existing

curriculum”.

Similary, Rutter’s (2005: 144) prescription resists any sort of compartmentalisation: “anti-

racist initiatives in schools need to run side by side with practices that address other

oppressions, such as poverty and sexism”. This is the curricular expression of much

feminist theorising, suggesting that there is no analytic relevance to “compartmentalising

oppressions” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1996 in Yuval-Davis, 1997: 7). It is reminiscent of

anti-racist critiques of multiculturalism. Rutter cites research “that stresses the need to

portray cultures in true-to-life complex forms” (Hewitt, 1996 in Rutter, 2005: 144) rather

than representing “minority cultures as unitary in events such as ‘Africa Week’”, a familiar

critique in critical race theory (Gillborn, 2006). Derman-Sparks (1989: 7), writing in the

American context, terms it the “tourist approach”, in which the curricular approach to

multiculturalism mainly focuses on celebrations, clothing or foods of “other” cultures, what

modernist theorists might call the “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). Rutter

(2005: 144) warns that “simplified portrayals may exclude majority students” or, in other

words, whiteness is reinforced as normative because it is has no discernible “culture” to be

“visited”.


29

This discussion could be analogous to teaching about migration and asylum as a topic to be

infrequently “visited”. One of the major debates in citizenship education is whether it should

be a discrete subject or whether it should be cross-curricular, a lens for all subject matter.

The same debate could be applied to teaching of a controversial issue, in this discussion that

of migration and asylum. Is it possible to critically explore a social phenomenon that is at

once a human rights issue, a legal question, a localised and national political debate, an

historical fact, as well as the lived and inherited experience for an under perceived

population by relegating it to one discipline? What is the potential, then, for migration, a

world in motion, to be the lens through which all other curricular content is viewed?


30

Discourse analysis as critical consciousness

“Thinking seriously about media representations of asylum seekers and

refugees is central to our teaching about asylum, geography, and the

challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees.” (White, 2004: 286)

One of the means by which teaching about migration and asylum becomes an entry point for

a critical pedagogy, rather than a bounded form of knowledge itself, is when the content of

teaching becomes the methodology of discourse analysis. Mass media is widely

acknowledged to be a “key political actor” (Kaye, 1998: 164) in immigration debates, with

tabloid newspapers acting as “an interface between state and popular racisms, providing a

forum where the bureaucratic language of the first is translated into the populist language of

the second” (Kundani, 2001: 48). Malkki (1995: 292) echoes this with a Foucauldian view,

that the “meanings and metaphors” surrounding asylum and immigration “percolate through

society and can quickly attain the status of ‘truth’ being (re)produced in everyday

conversations and endlessly recycled through national and local media.”

But critical assessment of media representation is even encoded within the citizenship

curriculum and other subjects. Although a mainstreamed state-sanctioned learning

objective, it offers up a version of Freire’s concept of conscientização, or critical

consciousness, “the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence”,

that is, emergence from a previously unquestioned status quo (Freire, 1996: 90).

White (2004: 285-286) writing about using news media for geography in the university level

classroom, starts with the premise that for most of the UK public, “the everyday presence of


31

asylum seekers is entirely mediated through television and print media reports...” and hence

“thinking seriously about media representations of asylum seekers and refugees is central to

our teaching about asylum [and] geography”. Thus media analysis, according to White

(2004), requires a combination of methodologies, because the weakness of a pure content

analysis is its underlying assumption that content “contain[s] a single determinate meaning”,

and is thus “unable to investigate multiple readings or interpretations of the same text”

(288). For this, he prescribes discourse analysis which concentrates on the assumptions and

agendas underlying the text and the “relationship to powerful institutions and specific social,

political and cultural context through which pupils can understand that “meaning is more

diffuse, multiple and often contradictory” (288).

The latter is a methodology familiar to an anthropology of media. But it is also found as a

pedagogical technique at both the primary and secondary level (Halahmy, secondary: 84-91;

Halahmy, primary 40-43; Positive Images, 2009: 13; Not Just Numbers, 2009: 31-32).

Harry ends his migration lesson with an activity analysing the “facts” about immigration on

the BNP website as a way of considering mythologies about migration but also promote

history skills “because what the BNP [site] does is that it takes a load of true facts and uses

them out of context”. And “they’re very good at picking holes in that and being like, ‘well

here are all the reasons why it’s wrong or I don’t trust that statistic’”.

Two of the curricular texts I examined go even further with critical thinking about mass

media by comparing the sociological category of youth to that of refugees/asylum-seekers.

The Red Cross activity (Positive Images, 2009: 13) begins with a scenario of a sign on a shop

window, “only two pupils at this shop at any time”. Pupils are asked to consider the

assumptions about young people underlying the policy. Similarly, DFID primary resource

(Halahmy, primary) provides an activity with genuine newspaper headlines, mainly from the

Daily Mail, about children and young people such as, “200 pupils kicked out every day” and

“Age of the young crook” and asks participants to gauge whether they present a fair view of

youth. These activities, albeit contained, could facilitate an exploration of the oversimplified


32

criminalisation of certain groups by analogising the figure of the young person and the figure

of the migrant, two sociological categories upon which moral anxieties are inscribed. The

pedagogical strategy relies less on the more prevalent attempt to elicit empathy by “how

would you feel if...?” testimony (Rutter, 2005: 144) and more on a sense of personal affront.

Thus perhaps it could be argued that issues of migration and asylum, rather than being a

delimited unit of study, are a particularly useful prism for a skill building of analysing public

discourse, a step towards unravelling common sense notions on which all power differentials

are based. Harry comes at the teaching of migration and asylum from the approach of a

critical pedagogue: “It’s not that migration for itself is my issue...my overall interest is social

criticism, getting people to understand their own context, critique it and then seek to change

it. And migration is one angle, although one of the most important angles in a multicultural

school and just in London and in Britain today”.


33

Children as narrators, children as pedagogues

“Perhaps the reason children are so good at narrating this country’s

migration history is their ability to empathise. And perhaps it is also

because childhood can be a metaphor for the experience of migration–

a period of both wonderment and strangeness in which to sort out those

complex issues of citizenship, identity and belonging”

-from my blog entry, Citizenship Foundation Voices (2010)

If teaching and learning about migration in the broadest sense, as one of many

“controversial” issues competing for curricular space, arguably lends itself particularly to a

critical pedagogy, how far can this actually go within the constraints of the both the hidden

and textual curriculum? Rutter’s (2005) and other authors’ set of best practices on the

teaching of refugee and asylum issues, although drawn from evaluating interventions that

actually took place, presuppose optimal circumstances to some extent. For the teaching of

issues of migration and asylum to take place, and certainly for the subject matter to inspire

any sort of critical consciousness, as my investigation suggests, the conditions need to be

ripe. An impassioned and informed teacher and adequate flexibility within a specialist

subject are just two of the necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, conditions.

But, there might be an alternative site for a curricular intervention outside of the classroom.

The Museum of Immigration and Diversity (2010) in both its production and consumption,

presents a possible response to the best practices espoused by the various theorists and

practitioners that have comprised this inquiry.


34

The museum is housed in 19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, a listed heritage site for its many

past iterations: a Huguenot silk weaver’s home, a Victorian synagogue, a meeting place for a

mid-20th century anti-Fascist movement, among others. It is an architectural documentation

of the layers of immigration to the area and the rest of the country (Symes, 2010). The

building is a testament to the “production of locality”, the place-making activities of

diasporic communities that manifests in built spaces as theorised by Appadurai (1995),

among others. But it isn’t just the walls of the building that tell the stories of the waves of

newcomers that have cumulatively made place of space in the last 300 years; it is also the

creative capacities of primary school children.

Both my informants that are or have been educators in the traditional sense, express that

there are developmental limitations to children’s imagination of postmodern sense of

identities, of “displacement” and “emplacement” as ongoing processes (Malkki, 1995: 516) of

a world undifferentiated by national borders. According to Harry, “the argument that

borders and national identity are abstract and fluid and so on, is far too abstract because as

kids, they haven’t articulated or thought through their own sense of national identity, so

they’re not really ready start critiquing the whole concept.” The implicit belief here is that a

“national order of things” (Malkki, 1995) needs to be constructed, even naturalised, before it

can be deconstructed. In the Freirean sense, that pupils must develop a critical

consciousness before they can “emerge” from it. Marguerite, despite producing a lesson

narrating the country’s prolonged migration history, attributes children’s incapacity for

abstraction to this nation-state’s island geography: “I think that’s a really difficult one for

children...because we’re an island...you sort of feel that it is the country that it is because it’s

physically the country that it is”.

The exhibit at the museum created by Year 5 pupils suggests otherwise. The exhibit, spilling

out of suitcases, contains children’s inventive letters, collages, dioramas and recorded

theatre telling their imagined experiences of Protestant Huguenots, Irish Catholics, Eastern

European Jews and Bengali Muslims, among others, and the various othering devices that


35

were imposed upon them. Through the metaphor of the suitcase, a trope common to many

curricular resources and cultural productions, pupils were tasked to “develop an imaginative

understanding of” questions of why people move, why they always have, and how they have

been received by pre-existing settlers (Suitcases and Sanctuary, 2001).

In recounting the creative process that took place a decade ago, Susie Symes, Chair of the

charity that preserves the museum, explains, “we were very deliberately trying to get them to

come and not to tell their family story...but it was the act of imagination we wanted children

to get from a number of different angles”. Within a cross-curricular intervention that lasted

a whole term, rather than the more feasible “tourist” approach, primary pupils from six

Tower Hamlets schools explored and recreated the experiences six major waves of migration

to the East End of London in partnership with artists, historians and politicians, many with

their own salient migration stories. This element follows Watts’ (2008: 322) invocation of

McLuhan’s concept that the “medium is the message”, the idea that a first-hand account is

most impactful and yet, prevents refugee plights as well as the contexts that produce them

from being considered ‘other wordly’ in Rutter’s (2005: 145) terms.

There is an experiential learning element, perhaps the “active citizenship” component

prescribed by Rutter (2005: 149) that young people shouldn’t just “passively absorb

information”. This strategy potentially addresses the deficit Harry pinpoints of students

connecting theirs and others’ personal stories to a cohesive national story. Susie posits that

the specificity of the site itself facilitates a sense of historical (and current) entitlement for

everyone, a sort of universal and yet personal geography can be found by the resurrection of

untold stories, the stories contained within the built space.

As the storytellers, then, children become the cultural producers, rather than the target

audience with ideological conceptions of social change inscribed upon them in the discourse

of the “pedagogical solution”. The “narration sickness” (Freire, 1996: 52), where static

bodies of knowledge are transferred from authoritative teacher subjects to students, is


36

avoided by students narrating this knowledge themselves. They mediate, rather than receive

information, and thus participate in a pedagogical solution for a broader audience, not only

limited to the sociological category of youth. According to Susie, “the big impact is not the

impact that it had on those 180 children who were involved. It’s the impact that it has on

some of the visitors that come to it. It’s that way of getting people to look at things

differently. And of course, that’s what art does.”

In so doing, the museum, at least for the limited participant-audience, offers the opportunity

for a critical consciousness that resists a static view of the world across time and space. It

rearticulates a history of discrimination – and its counter-discourse – to remind us that “the

allegations and language used against today’s asylum-seekers are indeed painfully, one

might add tediously, familiar to those who have studied past reactions and responses”

(Kushner, 2003: 257-8). And it uses the multiplicity of children’s reactions to symbolise the

multiplicity of causes and responses to cross-border movements and thus parse out

conceptions of migration from their contemporary iteration as the delimited politics of

asylum determination.


37

The pedagogical solution?

“So-called multicultural societies –are much more fragile than most of us

think...if we want to create or believe you live in [one] already...then

that’s something you have to be vigilant about, you have to protect, and

you have to educate people continuously in what that’s about : in where

it came from and in the values of maintaining it.” -Susie Symes

Perhaps, then, a possibility lies outside of the ideological space of the curriculum and the

geographic space of the school in innovations such as the Museum of Immigration and

Diversity. While schools remain the major access point to a mass audience of youth, their

particular role as a “repository” for the perpetuation of dominant discourses as well as for

ideological inscriptions of social change, mass education, and its recipients, serves more of a

symbolic than actual role in the counter-discourse to contemporary understandings of

migration and asylum. In a sense, in this counter-discourse, children and young people as a

category become the alternate to scapegoats. Rather than absorbing moral anxieties

attached to contemporary social problems, they absorb the idealised solutions to them.

Thus, to return to the original question of the “pedagogical solution” – whether it works and

why it exists – the potential for curricular interventions to widely change attitudes, though

they may be rising in production, remains questionable. The nature of innovations that take

to heart the carefully articulated best practices and prescriptions of those embedded in a

counter-discourse, is that they are small-scale. Thus their potential to rival the “massness”

of the “unrestrained campaign against asylum-seekers” (Kushner, 2003: 257) is limited.


38

Thus, to close with my own prescription, I adopt the view put forth by Susie. “So-called

multicultural societies –are much more fragile than most of us think...if you want to create or

believe you live in [one] already...then that’s something you have to be vigilant about, you

have to protect, and you have to educate people...continuously in what that’s about : in

where it came from and in the values of maintaining it.” The work is constant, and must

come from a variety of actors, not just a select few teachers or innovators. But more

importantly, as Susie reminds us, the target audience must be expansive. “We shouldn’t

expect more of children than we expect of ourselves”.


39

References

Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology and the ideological state apparatus. (In Althusser, L. Lenin and

Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated from French by Ben Brewster. New York:

Monthly Review Press, pp. 85-126.)

Appadurai, A. 1995. The production of locality. (In Fardon, R. (ed). Counterworks:

managing the diversity of knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 204-225.)

Back, L. 1993. Race, identity and nation within and adolescent community in South London.

New Community, 19.

Bhabha, H.K. 1996. Culture’s In-Between. (In Hall, S. & Du Gay, P. (eds). Questions of

Cultural Identity. London: Sage, pp. 53-60.)

Boy With A Suitcase: A play for children, schools, and families. 2010. [Play]. First produced

16th June. Arcola Theatre, London. Screenplay writer: Mike Kenny. Director: Owen

Calvert-Lyons.

Castles, S. 2003. Towards a sociology of forced migration and social transformation.

Sociology, 37(1): 13-33.

Citizenship Foundation Voices. 2010. Listen to the building, listen to the children. [Online]

10 June, 2010. Available from citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/blogs

http://citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/blogs/main/2010/06/ [Accessed 3 Sept, 2010].

Claire, H. & Holden, C. Introduction. 2007. (In Claire, H. & Holden, C. (eds). The Challenge

of Teaching Controversial Issues. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books Limited, pp.1-14.)

Crawford, K. 1995. A History of the Right: the battle for the control of national curriculum

history 1989-1994. British Journal of Educational Studies, 43(4): 433-456.

Crawford-Rolt, C. 2010. Migration Conundrum.[Personal communication] 23 March, 2010.

Day. L. 2002. ‘Putting yourself in other people’s shoes’: the use of Forum theatre to explore

refugee and homeless issues in schools. Journal of Moral Education, 31(1).

Derman-Sparks, L. 1989. Anti-bias curriculum: tools for empowering young children.

Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Fletcher-Wood, H. 2010. Personal Interview (teaching of migration-themed lesson in

secondary school history), 13th July. London.

Freire, F. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from Portuguese by M.B. Ramos.

London: Penguin Books.

Gaine, C. 2006. Britkid. [Website for young people]. Available: http://www.britkid.org/

[Accessed 22 August, 2010].


40

Gillborn, D. 2006. Critical race theory and education: racism and anti-racism in educational

theory and praxis. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 27(1): 11-32.

Gokulsing, K.M. 2006. Without Prejudice: an exploration of religious diversity, secularism

and citizenship in England (with particular reference to the state funding of Muslim

faith schools and multiculturalism). Journal of Education Policy, 21(4): 469-470.

Habib, S. 2008. Refugee Boy: the social and emotional impact of the shared experience of a

contemporary class novel. Changing English, 15(1): 41-52.

Halahmy, M. Undated. Global communities: learning about refugee issues. [Primary school

teaching resource]. London: Refugee Week & DFID

Halahmy, M. Undated. Global communities: learning about refugee issues. [Secondary

school teaching resource]. London: Refugee Week & DFID

Hall, S. 1980. Encoding/decoding (In Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. & Willis, P. (eds).

Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, pp. 117-127.)

Hammond, B. 2010. Migration Conundrum. [E-mail]. Message to A. Taneja. 3 March, 2010

Heath, M. 2010. Personal Interview (authorship of curricular resources on issues of

migration and asylum), 8th July. London.

Heath, M. 2006a. The Stranger. [Key Stage 1 lesson online]. Available

http://www.gogivers.org/ppts/The_Alien.ppt [Accessed 30 May, 2010].

Heath, M. 2006b. Coming to Britain. [Key Stage 2 lesson online]. Available

http://www.gogivers.org/ppts/Coming_to_Britain.ppt [Accessed 30 May, 2010].

Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hope, J. 2008. “One day we had to run”: the development of the refugee identity in

children’s literature and its function in education. Children’s Literature in Education,

39: 295-304.

Hope, J. 2007. Flightlines: exploring early readers for children about the refugee experience.

Forum, 49(3): 289-297.

Huddleston, T. 2003. Teaching about controversial issues: guidance for schools. [Online].

Available http://www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/lib_res_pdf/0118.pdf [Accessed

15 June, 2010].

Indra, D. 1999. Not a “room of one’s own”: engendering forced migration knowledge and practice. (In Indra, D., (ed). Engendering Forced Migration: theory & practice. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp.1-22.) Jackson, P. 1995. Life in classrooms. (In Mayes, A.S. & Moon, B. (eds). Teaching and learning in the secondary school. New York: Routledge, pp. 155-160.)


41

Kaye, R. 1998. Redefining the Refugee: the UK media portrayal of asylum seekers. (In Koser,

K. & Lutz, H. (eds). The New Migration in Europe: social constructions and social

realities. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 163-182.)

Kundnani, A. 2001. In a foreign land: the new popular racism. Race and Class, 43(2): 41-60. Kushner, T. 2003. Meaning nothing but good: ethics, history and asylum-seeker phobia in

Britain. Patterns of Prejudice, 37(3): 257-276. Malkki, L.H. 1995. Refugees and exile: from ‘refugee studies’ to the national order of things.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 295-523. McLuhan, M. 2002. Medium is the Message. (In Askew, K.M. & Wilk, R.R. (eds). The

Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, p. 18-26.) Meer, N. & Modood, T. 2009. Chapter 3: Education and migration related diversity. (In

Meer, N. & Modood, T. Migration, identity and citizenship: Approaches for addressing cultural diversity in 21st century Britain. European Commission report. [Online]. Available: http://emilie.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/final_d6_uk.pdf [Accessed 15 June, 2010].

‘Not Just Numbers’: Educational Toolkit on Migration and Asylum in Europe. 2009.

[Teacher’s manual online]. Available: http://www.unhcr.org/numbers-toolkit/NJN-MANUAL-EN.pdf [Accessed 22 August, 2010]. External pedagogical expertise: Mounir Zarour. Brussels: IOM/UNHCR.

On A Clear Day You Can See Dover. 2010. [Theatre performance]. First produced July 28th.

Wilton Music Hall, London. Screenplay writer: Sonja Linden. Produced by Ice and Fire: Exploring human rights through performance.

Osler, A. & Starkey, H. 2005. Changing Citizenship: Democracy and inclusion in education.

Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Positive Images: European Toolkit. 2009. [Learning resource online]. Available:

http://www.redcross.org.uk/What-we-do/Teaching-resources/Teaching-

packages/Positive-

Images/~/media/BritishRedCross/Documents/What%20we%20do/Teaching%20reso

urces/Teaching%20packages/Positive%20images/PIETpositiveimageseuropeantoolkit

fullversion.ashx [Accessed 22 August, 2010]. London: British Red Cross.

Refugee Week Info Centre. 2010. [Online]. Available:

http://www.refugeeweek.org.uk/InfoCentre/resources-on-refugees/educational-

resources/global [Accessed 22 August, 2010].

Rutter, J. 2005. Understanding the alien in our midst: using citizenship education to challenge popular discourses about refugees. (In Osler, A. (ed). Teachers, Human Rights and Diversity: educating citizens in multicultural societies. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books Limited, pp. 133-53.)

Rutter, J. 2004, third edition. Refugees: we left because we had to. [Citizenship teaching

resource]. London: Refugee Council. Rutter, J. 1998. Refugees: A resource book for primary schools. London: Refugee Council.


42

Shaull, R. 1996. Foreword. (In Freire, F. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated from

Portuguese by M.B. Ramos. London: Penguin Books, pp. 11-22). Short, G. 1988. Chapter 2: Children’s grasp of controversial issues. (In Carrington, B. and

Troyna, B. (eds). Children and Controversial Issues. Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis (Printers) Ltd, pp. 11-28.)

Srivastava, S. & Francis, M. 2006. The problem of ‘authentic experience’: storytelling in anti-

racist and homophobic education. Critical Sociology, 32(2-3): 275 – 307. Smith, A.D. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Suitcases and Sanctuary. 2010. First created in 2001. London: Museum of Immigration and

Diversity, 19 Princelet Street. Suitcases and Sanctuary. 2001. Citizenship Pieces [Website about exhibition]. Available:

http://www.citizenship-pieces.org.uk/initiatives/Suitcases/details.html [Accessed 13 June, 2010].

Symes, S. 2010. Personal Interview (educational objectives of Museum of Immigration and

Diversity), 2nd September. London. Taneja, A. 2009. Care to make a difference?: survey of key stage 2 pupils’ attitudes and

behaviours. [Online]. Available: http://www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/main/resource.php?s405] [Accessed 30th June, 2010].

Tomlinson, S. 2005. Race, ethnicity and education under New Labour. Oxford Review of

Education, 31(1): 153-171.

Troyna, B. 1988. British schooling and the reproduction of racial inequality. (In Cross, M. &

Entzinger, H. (eds.) Lost Illusions: Caribbean minorities in Britain and the

Netherlands. London: Routledge, pp. 166-184.)

Watts, M. F. 2004. Telling tale of torture: repositioning young adults’ views of asylum seekers. Cambridge Journal of Education, 34(3): 315-329.

White, A. 2004. Teaching students to read the news via representations of asylum seekers in

British newspapers. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(2): 285-299.

Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage.


43

Appendix A: Profiles of informants

A former teacher and headteacher for most of her career, Marguerite Heath, is the brain

behind Go-Givers (www.gogivers.org), the primary arm of the Citizenship Foundation

(www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk), where I work. She created the hundreds of lesson plans

and learning tools for English primary schools for teaching citizenship and PSHE (personal,

social, health education), an initiative that followed the statutory status of citizenship in

secondary schools. She has been commissioned by educational publisher A&C Black to write

the book ‘Prejudice’, a guidance for teachers that contains a chapter on teaching about

immigration, which will be published later this year.

Over a decade ago, Susie Symes abandoned her career as an economist and civil servant to

resurrect the Spitalfields Centre Charity that was set up to preserve the crumbling 19

Princelet Street (www.19princeletstreet.org.uk) which houses the Museum of Immigration

and Diversity. The building is an architectural documentation of layers of migration to

London’s East End and the rest of the country. These migration stories are mediated

through the artwork of local primary school children. My own “arrival” to the building

began when I started volunteering to host museum group visits and to support its rare public

opening days.

On one of the museum’s open days during Refugee Week, I overheard visitor Harry

Fletcher-Wood talking about a migration-themed lesson he conducts with his Year 9

students. Harry is in his third consecutive year teaching history at Kingsmead secondary

school in Enfield, North London. He recently completed his traineeship with Teach First, an

organisation that places graduates in “challenged secondary schools” to address achievement

gaps.


44

Appendix B: Sample interview questions

Marguerite Heath:

How do teachers, in your experience, address issues of migration and asylum, if at all? If

not, why does this seem to be a gap in the curriculum?

What was your motivation developing the lessons, The Stranger and Coming to Britain, that

aren’t expressed in the stated learning objectives?

Why did the name of the lesson change from The Alien to The Stranger?

Have you heard impressions from anyone that has used this lesson?

Do you think this lesson works as effectively when the scenario is hypothetical (for pupils

that haven’t been a newcomer or experienced a newcomer joining their classroom)?

Is teaching about topical issues particular to an age group/developmental stage?

Do you think teaching about these issues has a place in citizenship or in other subjects?

Do you think it’s relevant enough to teach at the primary level about the causes of migration?

Do you think primary pupils replicate language used by politicians?

Given that there’s such an emphasis on anti-racist initiatives through education since about

the 1970’s, how come teaching about migration and asylum isn’t more mainstreamed in the

curriculum?

Do you think inflexibility in the curriculum is the main barrier?

In your experience as an educator, and having written about teaching topical issues, how do

you take away your personal politics from it?

Is your forthcoming book targeted at teachers? Is it a set of best practices?

When the book was commissioned, was there a perceived need for this kind of guidance?

Do teachers tend to purchase these kinds of books one off? Or do heads purchase them for

the whole school?

As for the Coming to Britain lesson, is the migration history of Britain part of the National

Currculum?

Do you think that the idea that countries aren’t natural, they are made, is a concept that can

be grasped at primary age?


45

Harry Fletcher-Wood:

Tell me about the migration lesson you teach. Did you develop it?

Does this lesson in particular excite everyone equally? Is that universal?

What do you view as the learning objectives?

Do you think there’s a version transferable to primary classrooms?

Is this the issue you are most impassioned about? Where did that come from? Why is this

your issue?

How did you get into teaching?

A lot of what I hear from teachers is that day to day constraints overwhelms the ideological

reasons they got into teaching, but that hasn’t come up in this conversation. Do you think

there’s some level of exceptionalism to make that happen, to be a critical pedagogue?

How representative are you of your school? Department? Headteacher?

Is it history as a subject, in your view, that has the most potential to radicalise things?

Is there anything in the history requirements, in British history, that has anything to do with

migration history? The Empire? Settlers? Invaders, etc?

I’ve heard other teachers say that they have a feeling of cultural disconnect with their student

population? Is this a concern for you?

Susie Symes:

Tell me about the germination and the process of creating the exhibit by the young artists at

19 Princelet Street.

How would you articulate the educational objectives of the museum? What is the ‘theory of

change?’