Practices of change in the education sector: professionals dealing with ethnic school segregation

Abstract

This article looks at second-generation professionals in the education sector in Sweden, France and the Netherlands, whose parents were born in Turkey. In their stories, ethnic school segregation appears as an important topic that coincides with other inequalities in society and signals educational injustice. This so-called wicked problem is used to understand how second-generation professionals assert influence in their quest for educational change. The analysis, based on semi-structured interviews, shows that influence and change are conditional. Second-generation professionals are constrained by the structural boundaries of the sector, which seem particularly fixed because of the way in which the education sector is entangled with state policies. Simultaneously, they are aware of these boundaries, and of the nation-specific change-opportunities existing within them. Using their "in-betweenness" as second-generation social climbers, with their knowledge of the education system, they apply varying practices of change focused on moderating the negative effects of ethnic school segregation.

Wicked problems: a mapping review of the literature

“…Sixth, some authors seem to use the concept to argue that a certain group of social actors should be acknowledged as having important skills or resources for addressing wicked problems. For example, Waldring (2017) argues that second-generation immigrants should be viewed as particularly competent in addressing ethnic school segregation since they 'are familiar with different social systems' and thus able to ' [build] bridges between the specific needs of ethnic-minority pupils and school organizations.' Seventh, some authors use the concept to call for action within a specific social community.…”

The Ability to Deal With Difference: Turkish-Dutch Professionals as Go-Betweens in the Education Sector

“…One way in which respondents negotiate the dual boundaries of in‐betweenness in the workplace, is by knowing and joining the rules of the game within their organizations and the education sector (Konyali, ; Ossenkop et al., ; Puwar, ; Waldring, ).

I know networks in the education sector are important.

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Profundizando en la segregación escolar por nivel socioeconómico en América Latina. Un estudio en cuatro países prototípicos

“…De esta forma, en su origen, la investigación sobre segregación escolar se centró en las características étnicas del alumnado (Orfield et al, 2016). En Europa, con un desarrollo más tardío, los trabajos se centraron originalmente en la segregación de estudiantes de origen extranjero (Bonal et al, 2019;Murillo et al, 2017;Söderström y Uusitalo, 2005;Waldring 2017). En la actualidad hay un gran interés en la segregación escolar por nivel socioeconómico de los estudiantes, tanto en Europa (Brandén et al, 2016;Gorard, 2014;Ivaniushina et al, 2019;Murillo y Martínez-Garrido, 2018b), como en Estados Unidos (Marcotte y Dalane, 2019).…”