'They call you Chinese when you're not.' Discourse, agency and the experiences of minority ethnic secondary school students in Ireland
Author(s):
Emer Nowlan (presenting / submitting) Dympna Devine
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

07 SES 11 B, Divisions and Transformation

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-10
17:15-18:45
Room:
3001. [Main]
Chair:
Eunice Macedo

Contribution

With increasing international migration, interest in the experiences of immigrant and minority ethnic students in education has also increased in recent decades. The manner in which schools facilitate or impede ethnic integration and citizenship and challenge or perpetuate inequalities is of growing interest to educators and policy-makers in Europe's increasingly multi-ethnic societies. While much of the focus of research in relation to minoritised students focuses on underachievement, global discourses have been identified which position students from East Asian backgrounds as ‘good students’ (Ng et al., 2007, Ngo and Lee, 2007, Teranishi, 2010). These draw on broader orientalist discourses of Asians as profoundly Other, asexual and threatening (Said, 1978, Youdell, 2012). They also draw on model minority stereotypes of 'Asians' as hardworking and un-troublesome (Osajima, 2005, Nguyen, 2008), which are prevalent in most European societies. Discourses of Asian families as stable and authoritarian (Nakano Glenn, 2005, Juang et al., 2013) are also influential in these students’ positioning. 

With its unique history as both a post-colonial nation with a long history of emigration, and a ‘developed’ member state of the European Union, Ireland’s immigration and integration patterns and racisms take particular forms (Garner, 2004, Fanning, 2010). Since the formation of the state in the 1920s, narrow constructions of Irishness as the preserve of white, settled Roman Catholics have dominated, and the education system has been an important site for the development and circulation of these exclusive and nationalistic discourses (Inglis, 1998, Bryan, 2008, Kitching, 2010). Policy on immigration and system-wide provision have been slow to develop (Fanning, 2009, Boucher, 2010), and while teachers and school leaders struggle to develop supports at school level, immigrants and minority ethnic students experience racism and exclusion in schools in different ways (Devine, 2005, 2011, 2013, Nowlan, 2008, Smyth et al., 2009, Kitching, 2012). 

The school experiences and subjectivities of students with Asian backgrounds remain largely unexplored in the Irish context, despite increasing immigration from different Asian countries, especially in the last 50 years. This study aims to address a gap in research in this area, by exploring the specific experiences and positioning of a sample of students with East Asian backgrounds attending secondary schools in the greater Dublin area.  

The theoretical framework for this research understands subjects as performatively produced by power, through processes of subectification and classification which link global, national and local discourses and employ disciplinary technologies, including normalisation and surveillance (Foucault, 1977, Foucault, 1982, Butler, 1990). Identities are carefully considered in relation to the processes of identification, categorisation, self-understanding, social location, connectedness and groupness (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Race and ethnicity are understood as regulatory regimes which are articulated in relation to gender, class and other regimes (Butler, 1993). These regimes constrain the production of the subject and the construction of identities, but their norms are open to re-signification by subjects through their discursive agency (Butler, 1997). 

As institutions of the state, and sites of social interaction and development, schools have a complex role in the production of subjects, identities and groups, and in positioning them hierarchically (Foucault, 1977, Devine, 2003, Youdell, 2011). Subjects can occupy different and contradictory positions in different settings, and a translocational frame allows us to consider how power and agency relate to the performative production of subjects and identities and their social positions and positionings across different national, European, home and school contexts (Anthias, 2013).

Method

The overarching aims of this research are to explore the experiences and positioning of students from different East Asian backgrounds in secondary schools in Ireland, and in doing so to develop understanding of the relationship between students’ raced, gendered and classed subjectivities, schooling and inequality. In keeping with its feminist and post-structural theoretical underpinnings, the research takes a qualitative approach. In the course of the research, 33 students with Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino backgrounds were interviewed, as well as 16 teachers and six parents. These students were drawn from from five case study schools, and a Chinese Saturday school, and informal observations from school field site visits also informed the research. The data generated were analysed in the context of international literature relating to students from East Asian backgrounds and literature relating to immigrant and minority ethnic students in Irish schools. The approach taken to analysing the content of interviews, formal and informal, and field notes and observations, was broadly in line with the principles of critical discourse analysis. Analysis was therefore interdiscursive, considering discourse as part of social activity, as representational and as constitutive of ways of being (Fairclough, 2005). It involved paying close attention to language, not just in terms of the particular words and linguistic forms exchanged, but also to its role in processes of meaning-making. This research foregrounds the perspectives of the student participants. It aims to go beyond the elicitation of student talk, and to listen to the “sub-voices” (Arnot & Reay 2007) of students from Asian backgrounds, who have remained largely invisible in Irish schools until now. In doing so it is cognisant of how the communicative procedures embedded in teaching create particular pedagogic identities. The author is situated in the research as a white Irish adult - an education professional from a middle class background. While measures were taken to unsettle power hierarchies, the extent to which it was possible to move beyond perceptions of her as as an insider, a teacher and an authority figure, through “translation” (Cook-Sather, 2007), and to really hear students’ “sub-voices” was limited. Vigilance and hyper-reflexivity (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995) were therefore required throughout, and especially in analysing data and drawing conclusions.

Expected Outcomes

Student participants came from a range of social class, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, had diverse migration histories, and showed varying levels of academic attainment and ambition. Although few participants self-identified as 'Asian,' there was evidence that some students’ minority ethnic identifications impacted positively on perceptions of their academic ability, and suggestions that there were beneficial elements to identification, conscious or otherwise, as ‘Asian’. However, many also experienced racism, isolation and pressure in school, sometimes exacerbated by language difficulties and racial tensions. Typologies of student subjectivities were identified, with students exercising discursive agency to develop these. The complexity of students’ responses and positionings was not reflected in teacher perceptions, which were found to be narrowly focused on stereotypical representations of ‘Asian students’ as hardworking and (too) well-behaved. Students who diverged from this stereotype faced particular difficulties. Some experienced invisibility. Some seemed ‘abject’, without a viable studenthood available to them. For teachers, ‘Irishification’ involved learning ‘healthy disrespect.’ However, the ideal Irish-Asian student was rarely achieved. Behaviour considered untypical of ‘Asian students’ (laziness, messing) was explained in terms of ‘contamination’ so that the ‘good Asian student’ identity was preserved intact, and ‘Asian students’ rendered firmly Other. This research contributes to our understanding of the ways the education system regulates the development of student subjectivities, and the inclusion/exclusion of certain students. It also identifies scope for the subversion of regulatory norms (race/ethnicity, gender, social class), through the deployment of discursive agency. Recommendations are made for policy and pedagogies. Secondary schools need to become more critical and more caring. Instead of soft multicultural approaches to diversity, which serve to essentialise ‘Asianness’ and other categories, approaches based on human rights and social justice should be employed. Teachers must be supported to engage in critical reflection on their praxis, and on stereotypical and racialised discourses.

References

ANTHIAS, F. 2008. Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: an intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4, 5-20. ANTHIAS, F. 2013. Hierarchies of social location, class and intersectionality: Towards a translocational frame. International Sociology, 28, 121-138. ARCHER, L. & FRANCIS, B. 2006. Challenging Classes? Exploring the Role of Social Class within the Identities and Achievement of British Chinese Pupils. Sociology, 40, 29-49. ARCHER, L. & FRANCIS, B. 2007. Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement, Abingdon, Routledge. BRUBAKER, R. & COOPER, F. 2000. Beyond "identity". Theory and Society, 29, 1-47. BUTLER, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, New York & London, Routledge. BUTLER, J. 1993. Bodies that matter: on the discourse limits of “sex”. New York and London: Routledge. BRYAN, A. & BRACKEN, M. 2011. They think the book is right and I am wrong’: Intercultural education and the positioning of ethnic minority students in the formal and informal curriculum. In: DARMODY, M., TYRELL, N. & SONG, S. (eds.) The Changing Faces of Ireland: Exploring Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Children's Experiences. Rotterdam: Sense. DEVINE, D. 2003. Children, Power and Schooling: how childhood is structured in the primary school, Stoke on Trent, Sterling, Trentham Books. DEVINE, D. 2011. Immigration and Schooling in the Republic of Ireland, Manchester, Manchester University Press. FOUCAULT, M. 1979. The History of Sexuality - Volume 1, An Introduction, London, Allen Lane. FOUCAULT, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish, London, Allen Lane. FOUCAULT, M. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8, 777-795. KITCHING, K. 2012. Understanding Class anxiety and 'race' certainty in Changing Times: moments of home, school, body and identity configuration in 'New Migrant' Dublin. In: BHOPAL, K. & PRESTON, J. (eds.) Intersectionality and 'Race' in Education. New York: Routledge. LYNCH, K., GRUMMELL, B. & DEVINE, D. 2012. New Managerialism in Education: Commercialization, Carelessness and Gender, Palgrave Macmillan. NGO, B. 2010. Doing ''Diversity'' at Dynamic High: Problems and Possibilities of Multicultural Education in Practice. Education and Urban Society, 42, 473-495. SAID, E. 1978. Orientalism, London, Penguin. TERANISHI, R. 2010. Asian Pacific Americans and Critical Race Theory: An Examination of School Racial Climate. Equity and Excellence in Education, 35, 144-154. YOUDELL, D. 2011. School Trouble: Identity, Power and Politics in Education, London, New York, Routledge.

Author Information

Emer Nowlan (presenting / submitting)
University College Dublin
School of Education
Dublin
Dympna Devine
University College Dublin, Ireland

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