Session Information
99 ERC SES 08 M, Research on Citizenship Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Processes of globalisation have drawn us into an increasingly interconnected world, yet stark divisions continue to exist in conflict and post-conflict societies, where minority and majority populations are involved in deep-seated ethnonational and religious conflicts. Among such divided communities engaged in violent conflict, schooling is often characterised by the existence of separate, parallel education systems divided along ethnoreligious lines. Although such segregated schooling often perpetuates conflict by maintaining separate ethnonational identities (e.g., Davies 2010; Fontana 2016), we must not overlook possibilities for religious education to promote peace and develop cosmopolitan identities and citizenships within societies facing protracted political conflict (Loukaidis & Zembylas 2017; Papastephanou 2005). This potential is particularly relevant when we consider multicultural and/or international curricula in faith-based schools serving religious minorities, such as Israel’s colonial-international Church schools (e.g., Levy & Monterescu 2022). This comparative ethnographic study of colonial-international Church schools in two of Israel’s contested cities (the Armenian School in Jerusalem and the Scottish School in Jaffa, both of which use the British-based International GCSE) unpacks how international education shapes the citizenship practices of local ethnoreligious minority youth against the background of protracted conflict and institutionalised discrimination against non-Jewish minorities.
In Israel, a sector-based education system keeps most students religiously and linguistically segregated, with the Jewish majority and non-Jewish minorities attending separate schools. Israeli government policies maintain large inequities between Jewish and Arab systems to control and subordinate the Palestinian minority. Schools within the Arab sector are underfunded, overcrowded, short-staffed, and subject to surveillance, with the curriculum controlled and censored to delegitimize and exclude minority narratives and youth identities. Consequently, large achievement gaps exist between Jewish and non-Jewish students (e.g., Nasser & Abu-Nimer 2022). To circumvent the inequitable Arab state school system, many ethnoreligious minorities have turned to private Christian schools, several of which utilise international curricula.
The greatest expansion of international education is now occurring in local markets, where families aim to provide their children with perceived economic advantage (e.g., Hayden 2013) through the accrual of international (Resnik 2018) and cosmopolitan capital (Igarashi & Saito 2014). Besides providing enhanced access to academic and economic opportunities within global markets, internationalisation in education strives towards education for global citizenship (Ortloff et al. 2012), which materialises in multiple forms, including cosmopolitan and advocacy models (Oxley & Morris 2013). Given the exclusion of Arab-Palestinian identity in the Israeli curriculum, as Arab-Palestinian youth seek alternative ways of collective belonging (Pinson 2008), global citizenship education has the potential to offer attachments to a global society which may compensate for the lack of recognition within the Israeli national narrative (Goren, Maxwell & Yemeni 2019). In recent decades, globalisation processes have encouraged youth to (re)imagine and (re)produce such post-national identities challenging traditional conceptions of nationhood and national identity (e.g., David, Dolby & Rizvi 2010).
Although the relationship between the internationalisation of education and global citizenship is the subject of much contemporary scholarship, how such global citizenship discourses unfold within international schools serving marginalised ethnoreligious groups remains an under-researched aspect of international education’s increasingly widespread reach. The present study addresses this lacuna, as it grapples with the multiple subjectivities circulating within the Armenian and Scottish schools. Examining how minority youth in these colonial-international Church schools negotiate citizenships on local, global, and transnational scales, I consider the novel forms of global citizenship which emerge within a contentious sociopolitical environment. The research draws on and contributes to the anthropology of education, postcolonial sociology, comparative education, and conflict studies, calling attention to contemporary questions surrounding identity and citizenship in an era when divisions within cities may be wider and more perilous than those across oceans.
Method
Based on seven years of fieldwork from the perspective of a teacher-ethnographer, this study relies on a variety of ethnographic methods, including participant observation, intensive interviewing, and content analysis of school Facebook pages. Although this comparative ethnography focuses on two individual colonial-international Church schools, I regard the Armenian School in Jerusalem and the Scottish School in Jaffa not as singular, bounded entities, but as embedded within multilayered social, historical, and political contexts at municipal, national, transnational, and global levels. Consequently, my fieldwork and the resulting ethnography extend beyond classroom walls and schoolyard fences, taking us into local communities and churches, to public protests and sporting events, to imagined homelands abroad, and into the digital worlds of cyberspace. In each school, I conducted participant observation during school assemblies, holiday celebrations, field trips, and other community events, and engaged faculty, parents, and students in informal conversations. Participant observation enabled holistic data collection concerning key actors’ practices, attitudes, perspectives, and motivations, drawing on emic discourses to understand how multiple subjectivities constructed within the school serve minority interests. I recorded fieldnotes and conversation logs during each visit, and later wrote full observation protocols. In several cases, audio recordings supplemented fieldnotes. A total of forty-three intensive interviews were conducted with faculty and alumni of the Armenian and Scottish schools. Beyond the collection of basic biographical information, faculty were asked questions about the mission of the school, the school population, and the use of the international curriculum in order to understand how the school shapes local and global youth identities. Alumni interviews aimed to understand the link between the graduates’ phenomenology of identity and citizenship and those discourses present within the school. A consideration of both faculty and alumni perspectives is essential to understand the degree to which institutional and community expectations regarding citizenship and identity formation are reflected in students’ lived experiences. Finally, posts (texts, images, videos) on the schools’ Facebook pages were sampled throughout the academic year. Adapting the methodology of Miller and Sinanan (2017), I analysed posts to identify genres and emergent patterns using principles of ethnographic content analysis (Altheide & Schneider 2013). Applying grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), data analysis entailed coding and categorising key concepts and themes within the data, uncovering recurring patterns and relationships between categories, and developing theory rooted in these patterns and relationships about the use of international education by marginalised communities and its impact on citizenship practices.
Expected Outcomes
Complex intersections of global curricula, religious tradition, colonial legacies, local ethnonational agendas, and multicultural discourses construct the Church schools under study as international education “bubbles” isolated from the surrounding conflict-ridden landscape. Both the Armenian and Scottish schools aim to maintain the distinctiveness of the minority communities they serve through the use of politically “neutral” international curricula. For minority youth, international education within a Christian school offers alternative avenues to attain educational equity, employment opportunities, and belonging by accumulating international capital and developing pragmatic forms of global citizenship. Considering the exclusion of non-Jewish minority identities within the bounds of the Jewish state, these schools create spaces encouraging students to forge new international attachments and allegiances, challenging traditional conceptions of belonging and citizenship. Beyond facilitating the accrual of international capital among their students, these schools shape students as citizens of imaginary worlds. In Jerusalem’s Armenian School, diaspora nationalism finds expression via key ethnosymbols and diasporic narratives which promulgate a powerful sense of belonging to an imagined Armenian transnation, captivating Armenian and non-Armenian students alike. Meanwhile, in the complete absence of Scottish students, the Church of Scotland School encourages transnational ties with a romanticised Scotland while simultaneously positioning Christianity as a uniting force for all peoples within an idealised narrative of coexistence. Within the imaginary worlds created by these schools, I argue that minority students find space for belonging that is otherwise inaccessible in Jaffa or Jerusalem. I contend that these sheltered oases promote a novel form of global citizenship, which I term “avatar citizenship.” Rather than fashioning students as citizens of the world, graduates of the Armenian and Scottish schools emerge as citizens of imaginary worlds, where experimentation with crossing boundaries of time, distance, and cultures forges multiple selves who simultaneously belong both everywhere and nowhere.
References
Altheide, D. L., & Schneider, C. J. (2013). Qualitative media analysis. Los Angeles: Sage. Charmaz, K. (2014).Constructing grounded theory. London: Sage. David, S., Dolby N., & Rizvi, F. (2010). Globalization and postnational possibilities in education for the future: Rethinking borders and boundaries. In J. Zajda (Ed.), Global Pedagogies: Schooling for the Future (pp. 35–46). Dordrecht: Springer. Davies, L. (2010). The different faces of education in conflict.Development53, 491–497. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2010.69 Fontana, G. (2016). Religious education after conflicts: promoting social cohesion or entrenching existing cleavages? Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 46(5), 811-831. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2015.1099422 Goren, H., Maxwell, C., & Yemeni, M. (2019). Israeli teachers make sense of global citizenship education in a divided society – religion, marginalisation and economic globalisation. Comparative Education, 55(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2018.1541660. Hayden, M. (2013). A review of curriculum in the UK: Internationalising in a changing context.Curriculum Journal,24(1), 8-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2012.744328 Igarashi, H., & Saito, H. (2014). Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital: Exploring the intersection of globalization, education, and stratification. Cultural Sociology, 8(3), 222–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975514523935. Levy, N. & Monterescu, D. (2022): Radical conservatism and circumstantial multiculturalism: Jews, Christians and Muslims in a French Catholic School in Israel, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2022.2049690 Loukaidis, L. & Zembylas, M. (2017) Greek-Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of religious education and its contribution to peace: perspectives of (in)compatibility in a divided society. Journal of Peace Education, 14(2), 176-194. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2016.1269732 Miller, D., and Sinanan, J. (2017).Visualising Facebook: A comparative perspective. UCL Press. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1543315/1/Visualising-Facebook.pdf Nasser, I. & Abu-Nimer, M. (2022). Marginalizing Palestinians in historic Palestine (Israel) through education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1805 Ortloff, D.H., Shah, P.P., Lou, J. & Hamilton, E. (2012). International education in secondary schools explored: A mixed-method examination of one Midwestern state in the USA. Intercultural Education, 23(2), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2012.686023 Oxley, L. & Morris, P. (2013). Global citizenship: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3), 301– 325. Papastephanou, M. (2005). Religious teaching and political context: The case of Cyprus. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 26 (2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13617670500164262. Pinson, H. (2008). The excluded citizenship identity: Palestinian/Arab Israeli young people negotiating their political identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(2), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425690701837554 Resnik, J. (2018). Shaping international capital through international education: The case of the French-Israeli school in Israel.Journal of Curriculum Studies,50(6), 772–788. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220272.2018.1499808.
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