This book by Fiona Smythe is an experiment and not a contract. In the design and delivery of education there are no guarantees, only experiments for those concerned—these enshrined in policy and accumulated practices at the classroom and school level. The teacher and the student hope for a shared beneficial outcome. If education is viewed solely as a contract between the teacher to teach and the students to learn, it risks impoverishment, failing to embrace flexibility and acknowledge the unexpected.
Fiona Smythe in her particular experiment is a researcher with long previous experience as a teacher. She asks what happens if two different educational (eco-) systems, on the surface vastly different historically and geographically—France and Aotearoa New Zealand—are brought into proximity through a single topic and investigated using a set of interwoven questions. She invites the reader to join with her in this intriguing experiment as each of the countries offer a mirror to view the other, and in so doing, a richer understanding of both is obtained. Her hypothesis (read experiment) is that educational environments that permit a plurilingual learning environment in the classroom will improve the learning of immigrant students. She formulates three questions:
How do immigration policies shape the educational environments that newly-arrived migrant, asylum-seeking and refugee-background students are learning within?
How are students integrating/being integrated into mainstream learning during the newly-arrived phase?
Where do educational conditions and individual learning behaviours intersect to enhance language acquisition and integration, leading towards successful outcomes at school?
A key term used throughout this book is ‘the language of schooling’ and this refers to respectively French (in France) and English (in New Zealand) as the dominant language of instruction in schools. As a backdrop to understanding this and its relationship to the learning and teaching environment, it is worth recalling the famous Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969). He saw language along with markers of culture, styles of clothing, tattoos, food and other mores, as one of an infinite number of signifiers we use to recognise and manage the boundaries of our social relationships.
Young Migrants and Integration into Mainstream Learning in Schools is a practical example of how language in a school setting is a boundary marker,
Plurilingualism is additionally the romantic desire that follows migrants, refugees and asylum seekers wherever they reside at any point in time. What Novalis once called a couple of hundred years ago, ‘the wish to be everywhere at home’ (Carlyle, 2010). Fiona Smythe’s book demonstrates that delivering on this sense of being at home via plurilingualism, while desirable, confronts the harsh realities of growing up in countries with hard borders policed by passports and rights (or lack of rights) and the softer borders of at times strained and demanding human, cultural and linguistic interactions. Simply put, how do immigrants belong through lived experience and identity-related endeavours? The answer to this is very much a work in progress, where the learning and teaching of the eco-system remain of central importance.
Young Migrants and Integration into Mainstream Learning in Schools illuminates the topic through a multi-pronged methodological approach. A small number of immigrant students are studied during the first year after arriving in respectively France and Aotearoa New Zealand. They were observed in their classes d’inclusion/mainstream classes and the book presents two case studies from the French school and two from the New Zealand school. There are also surveys and a number of interviews with FSL/EL teachers and mainstream class teachers. In the opening chapters there is a discussion of relevant national and international policies on integration in schools. In my view, these represent not only context-setting chapters, but also a good example of research on policy as a methodology in its own right.
In the wake of an unprecedented rise in the number of refugees wishing to enter Europe in the mid 2010s, France implemented a more restrictive refugee policy. By contrast, New Zealand increased the number of refugees resettled in response to the changing migratory flows evident a long way from their countries of origin in Europe and the Middle East. The conclusion the reader can draw from this is that both countries share an interest in the shifting events that impact on the flow of immigrants to their respective countries.
The author’s work evidences a deep understanding of policy mobility, as one country, such as France, borrows a policy found and emerging across other
The researcher contemplates the validity of different policy models, let’s call them additionally theories, in France and Aotearoa New Zealand. The first model is that of inclusion, where special needs and adaptation to suit the needs of all learners from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds is paramount. The second is a renewed interest in the well-known ecological model pioneered by writers such as Bronfenbrenner (1979) considering different life spheres and spaces (e.g. schools) and how they inculcate and support different living and learning activities. The last is the indigenous model inspired by Aotearoa New Zealand in particular. This references a policy framework that supports indigenous language and cultures and how these grow alongside multiculturalism. The last model mentioned is seen to include the cultures of immigrants and those who have settled over time, from first generation migrants to permanent residents. She does not reach a conclusion that one of these models is better or primary in the policy world. More that they have been drawn up to justify policies over time in education and school settings, and as such they offer different explanatory frameworks for the language learning and integration of immigrants.
In broad terms, the French educational system is more assimilationist, where the secular dominance (laïcité) of 1789 reaches into every aspect of society. In Aotearoa New Zealand there is an awareness and tolerance of social integration and respect for other cultures. The Treaty of Waitangi (the country’s founding document from 1840) builds upon biculturalism between Māori groups and the British Crown; nowadays between the Māori people and all settler cultures. As Fiona Smythe notes, it is constantly referenced in policy and practice in all sectors of society. It can be evidence of a relatively young country still seeking to come to terms with what a unified yet multi-faceted national identity might mean. However, both countries still share a fear of otherness; in France it is of “Muslim” and in New Zealand that of the “Asian invasion.”
Both countries each in their own way are coming to terms with an assimilationist past. In New Zealand, Māori became an official language in 1987, while in France a 2021 Law recognises the importance of regional languages. The move is therefore decidedly towards integration in both countries while at the same time retaining national ideologies that are underpinned by multicultural inclusiveness.
For readers of this book from either France or Aotearoa New Zealand, they will be familiar with one of the countries and as a consequence learn
With this question in mind, Fiona Smythe in her observations across both countries notes how immigrant children in schools alongside other immigrants of the same language sought to use their home languages to better inform working through a task taught in the dominant language, either French or English. In technical terms this reduces the cognitive demands and leaves more attention to work on the learning task. This is a great illustration of exactly what plurilingualism is, and why it is so important. This reminds me of the story of a small municipality in the north of Norway in the 1970s, where Sami speakers had not spoken their mother tongue language in the public sphere of the school of community. It had disappeared over a generation. The only language heard was Norwegian. Yet when acknowledged in schools and thus valued, it was found there were actually many speakers of Sami. Thus the community was transformed and a language space for diversity was created where there had been none.
In addition to plurilingualism, a key take-away message for the reader is the importance of offering migrant children in schools the opportunity to build good social relationships, as social capital, with other students and their teachers, some of whom may be bilingual teacher aides. So, we learn that it is not enough to simply allow immigrants to make use of plurilingualism, but building social relationships also plays a central role in inclusion. In terms of wider societal integration, Fiona Smythe documents well the manner in which families applying for asylum face an uncertain limbo process in French centres of residence called centre d’accueil pour demandeurs d’asiles. Those children who have had plurilingual experience prior to arrival in France, appear well-disposed and prepared for learning French in schools. She also devotes a chapter to describing and accounting for the role played by CASNAV (Le Centre Académique pour la Scolarisation des Nouveaux Arrivants et des Voyageurs) in France and the Faculty of Teacher Education in a New Zealand university. Each in their own way support the teaching profession by underlining the importance of teachers supporting immigrant children through accompanying plurilingual learning strategies and acknowledging the family situation.
The second part of the book will be of interest to those interested in the findings and empirical research underpinning all I have commented on up until now. Through the presentation of case studies of newly arrived immigrant students and their integration into mainstream learning in two schools
What remains important in this book is the empirical work that has been undertaken to show how the plurilingual capacities of new immigrants in both French and New Zealand schools are not always supported. Teachers being educated on the importance of this kind of pedagogy, founded upon creating learning sequences and spaces where plurilingualism is evidenced and supported, is the other half of the equation. When both students and teachers are united in supporting plurilingual learning, with the active support of bilingual teacher aides and immigrant parents and communities, learning as an experiment is more likely to be successful. Instead of the in-between or paradoxical “inclusive exclusion” (Dobson, 2004), it is more clearly inclusion that benefits all parties involved, and the wider society at large.
As we become ever more international and a handful of languages become what we might call global languages (Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Bengali, Russian and so on), it becomes even more important to understand how the number of speakers of more than one language, defined as plurilingual, also becomes more relevant. Why? Because it is these skills that can broker and mediate global languages and their presumed dominance.
References
Baek, C., Hörmann, B., Karseth, B., Pizmony-Levy, O., Sivesind, K., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2018). Policy learning in Norwegian school reform: A social network analysis of the 2020 incremental reform. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 4(1), 24–37.
Barth, F. (1969). Introduction. In Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Carlyle, T. (2010). Novalis. In H. D. Traill (Ed.), The works of Thomas Carlyle (pp. 1–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dobson, S. (2004) Cultures of exile and the experience of refugeeness. Bern: Peter Lang.
Dobson, S., Svoen, B., Agrusti, G., & Hardy, P. (Eds.). (2024). Learning inclusion in a digital age. Belonging and finding a voice. Singapore: Springer Publishers.
Gulson, K., Lewis, S., Lingard, B., Lubienski, C., Takayama, K., & Webb, P. (2017). Policy mobilities and methodology: A proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies. Critical Studies in Education, 58(2), 224–241.