The role of trust in the positioning of children with Migrant Backgrounds: Reflections on teachers’ narratives from London primary schools

Abstract

Based on qualitative interviews with primary school teachers in Greater London, this article explores teachers’ narratives to uncover how Children with Migrant Backgrounds (CMB) are positioned in the contexts of their learning experience. In particular, the article utilises the analytical category of trust to argue that the position of CMB in teachers’ narratives is related to the form of teachers’ trust. When trust is based on categorical inequalities, CMB are often considered untrustworthy partners construction of the learning and teaching experience. Trust based on categorical inequalities becomes a form of trust in distrust and CMB are positioned in the children’s needs paradigm where decision-making is reserved to teachers who act for them and on their behalf. When trust is based on personal relationships, CMB are positioned as agents who are capable to voice their interests, bringing about consequential changes in the contexts of their experiences. CMB are positioned in the children’s interests paradigm, where agency is expected and promoted as a right of children who are socially constructed as agents who can make a difference with their choices.

Voices from the rising of the curtain: Democracy and deliberation bringing the disadvantaged to the fore

“…On the other hand, those protagonists come to the front as ‘respectable’ agents capable of preserving and changing their surroundings against the background of the social stage. Specifically, in their research on primary school teachers’ narratives on children with migrant backgrounds (CMB), Farini and Scollan (2022) shed light on the power of teachers’ trust in positioning CMB within two distinct paradigms. Firstly, teachers’ trust rooted in ‘the children’s needs paradigm’ involves ‘categorical inequalities’ attending to ‘the stability of the organization’ and ‘pedagogical routines’ (55), which level out CMB into the same.…”

“…The mutual trust would guide ‘affective relationships’ among deliberation participants as well when speaking becomes a channel to encounter ‘personal expressions’ of others rather than others’ ‘role performances’ (Farini and Scollan, 2022: 58). This channel catering to the otherness is able to resist ‘a broadly impersonal, rationalized modern politics that corrodes trust’ (Luxon, 2013: 34).…”

“…This channel catering to the otherness is able to resist ‘a broadly impersonal, rationalized modern politics that corrodes trust’ (Luxon, 2013: 34). Whilst deliberation participants share their trust through equality, they can have ‘the competences and autonomy’ (Farini and Scollan, 2022: 56) to reflect on the public and personal habits blocking the ways to the socially disadvantaged. By trusting the bridge of equality, deliberation moves its universe from the status of confirmation into the formative process of recognition .…”

“…The systems in democracy can neutralize human creativity through canonical laws, regulations or stereotypes. Those apparatuses may act for people and on their behalf within the paradigm of ‘needs’ riddled with ‘categorical inequalities’ ‘replacing [people’s] agency with control’ (Farini and Scollan, 2022: 54). Moreover, democracy would be at risk of the collateral damage of the current expansion of neoliberal capitalism and other systems of autocratic control, so long as it recedes from a civil society where the rules need to be backed by varying channels of citizens’ speech manifesting their awareness of the multiplicity, exemplified by classical Athens’s collective self-governance by ‘an extensive and socially diverse body of citizens’ (Ober, 2017: 14).…”