Diversities & Inequalities: Global, (Trans)national & Particular Citizen Identifications

Diversities & Inequalities: 

Global, (Trans)national & Particular Citizen Identifications

Purposes and Standpoints

            MacPhearson uses the case study of the Tibetan diaspora in Canada, the U.S., and India to examine three different approaches to integrating ethno-diversity into national educational policy: integration; achievement; and sustainability. Canada focuses on integration to create social cohesion, defined as a sense of trust and civic participation that creates a common identity across cultural or linguistic differences. The U.S. focuses on achievement, with MacPhearson noting that Americans are more likely to tolerate inequality if some marginalized people can join the ranks of the elite. One concern with both the U.S. and Canada is that racialized people who find success often do so at the cost of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. India, however, focuses on sustainable ethno-diversity through participatory pluralism. Many Indians are trilingual and the country has a tradition of giving minority groups free reign over their own cultural traditions and education. The downside to participatory pluralism is that the success or failure of these systems lies within the cultural groups themselves, not the state.

            Engel and Siczek examine national education policy frameworks from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Ireland, and Australia to determine their respective stances on global citizenship education. They found that all five countries focused on education as a commodity to increase national wealth, produce more competitive citizens, expand the influence of their countries globally and, in the case of the U.S., enhance national security. There was little to no mention of “global community” or “shared humanity” in their findings. This is at odds with the UNESCO goals of global education, leading Engel and Siczek to posit that any strategies for internationalization established by individual states are bound by their national aims, limiting their ability to form true global citizens.

            Dryden-Peterson and Mulimbi examine the history of Botswana to determine how civic education played a role in its becoming one of the most peaceful countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The three main factors they identify are: high levels of wealth redistribution after independence from Britain, so all people feel like they have a role in society; high rates of education across all ethnic groups, not only the majority Tswana; and increased funding in primary education giving all citizens a link to government services and concepts of state citizenship. Through these methods, Botswana has transformed their conflicts from horizontal to vertical and avoided the civil unrest of their neighboring countries.

Theory and Evidence

            Both MacPhearson and Engel and Siczek use available literature from the countries they examine. They analyze national education policy documents from each country, with Engel and Siczek using a data analysis tool that lets them analyze how many instances of specific words or phrases there are in a given policy. Dryden-Peterson and Mulimbi use policy documents, interviews, and public polling data from the Afrobarometer survey.

Comparisons and Synthesis

            MacPhearson’s argument that, within education policy, multicultural integration and achievement are fruitless in the long-term without sustainability, seems to be a direct response to the findings of Engel and Siczek. The latter show that the national governments of the top five “Anglo-Saxon” countries that are destinations for international students – Canada, Australia, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S. – have little in the way of explicit policy goals that match UNESCO’s intent to promote globalized democratic citizenship education. Engel and Siczek often use the term “commodity” when referring to how these countries view the concept of globalized education; the neoliberal model at work here reduces the complexity of global education to supply and demand, casting students as widgets.

Conversely, Dryden-Peterson and Mulimbi show, in their analysis of Botswana, how a country’s education policy can change course to meet the needs of its citizens without bending to corporate interests. However it could be argued that Botswana does not function as an equal comparison to the five aforementioned countries; Botswana built its education system for the expressed purpose of not descending into civil war as its neighbours had done, while the countries that Engel and Siczek examine did not face that existential risk – not accounting for the tensions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

                     

It would be interesting to explore the future of Botswana’s education system if the country moves towards increased global integration and interdependency. Would they also market their system to other Sub-Saharan states as a premier destination for international education, for the express purpose of generating capital?  Once the existential crises of war have been removed and concepts of citizenship are enforced through hegemony, would the education system naturally creep towards neoliberalism?

Applications and “So What” ?

Canada prides, and markets, itself as being a multicultural country. However, after reading this week’s articles, I wonder if the Canadian concept of “multiculturalism” needs to be rethought, particularly as it applies to how we inculcate our current and future citizens. A student learning to be a citizen in Scarborough will have a very different cultural experience than one learning the same lessons in rural Alberta. As hard as Canada has worked to establish a unique culture for itself, and to entrench those values in students, it could be argued that it has always been a patchwork country of regions held together more so by geography than shared cultural identity.

 I currently teach at a high school in Scarborough, with many difference races and ethnicities present in the school and staff. I have also taught overseas with Blyth Academy, catering to the children of some of Canada’s wealthiest families. Although there will always be some similarities between high school students, the concepts they have of what it means to be a Canadian citizen vary wildly – some of my students in Scarborough are landed immigrants whose parents clean homes for a living; one Blyth student I taught came to Pearson Airport in her own private helicopter. How do I teach both those students that as Canadian citizens, both their cultures have equal weight? Can both cultures be sustainable and successful, or is the immigrant forced to acquiesce to normative structures in order to survive?

REFERENCES

Dryden-Peterson, Sarah, & Mulimbi, Bethany (2017). Pathways toward Peace: Negotiating National Unity and Ethnic Diversity through Education in Botswana. Comparative Education Review, 61(1), 58-82. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689614

Engel, Laura, & Siczek, Megan. (2018). A cross-national comparison of international strategies: global citizenship and the advancement of national competitiveness [Canada, Australia, Ireland, UK, USA). Compare, 48(5), 749-767. doi:10.1080/03057925.2017.1353408

MacPherson, Seonaigh. (2018). Ethno-cultural diversity education in Canada, the USA and India: the experience of the Tibetan diaspora. Compare, 48(6), 844-860. doi:10.1080/03057925.2017.1362547