It is my great pleasure to introduce this edited book, Migrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement, which is the first volume of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies Series being published under the Brill | Sense imprint, with a new series editor. The aim of the series is to produce scholarly books on topics of global significance addressed from the perspective of comparative education and written in any of the six languages of the United Nations, namely Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. I wish to express our appreciation to Dr. Michael W. Klein, Interim Executive Director of the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University for his assistance in the negotiation of the contract.
The decision to produce this book emerged from the 2nd WCCES Symposium that was held in January 2019 at the headquarters of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) on the theme of “Immigrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement” which is slightly modified to be the title of this book.1 The idea of the WCCES symposium was initiated to promote and sustain vibrant intellectual interactions among members of the WCCES constituent societies and the comparative education community at large, during the periods between the WCCES World Congresses that are held every three years.
Based on the topic of the 1st WCCES symposium2 “Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Harmony through Ubuntu” there is a call for submissions for another book in the Brill | Sense WCCES series. Another book in preparation for the series and which is entitled Contextualizing Education for ‘Development’: Relationality and Learning in Oceania, does not include chapters from papers presented at a WCCES symposium or congress. Thus, it is important to explain that, while papers from the symposia and congresses, which are peer-reviewed and selected, may be included in or constitute the basis for specific books in this series, many books in the series by single or multiple authors or are edited/co-edited, in any of the six languages, will be submitted and published without originating from the symposia/congresses/conferences.
The 2nd WCCES Symposium titled “Immigrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement” and on which this volume is based began with a powerful keynote from Honorable Dr. António Manuel Seixas Sampaio da Nóvoa, Ambassador, Permanent Delegation of Portugal to UNESCO & Professor, University of Lisbon. His presentation was entitled, “Migration, Displacement, and Education – Looking beyond the 2019 GEM Report.” Eight full panels, most of which were organized as plenary sessions to allow maximum benefits for all participants, followed on related sub-themes: Experiential paradigm in the push-pull dynamics; Inhibiting and enabling factors in settling down process; Tragedy in migration; Primary and Secondary Education; Migrants in the education space; Dimension of higher education in migration; Proximity, distance and regional dimensions; Success stories in migration. Emerging from these various papers was the decision to issue a call for papers inviting symposium participants to revise and submit their papers for the required peer review and other key scholars to contribute to this book, even though they had not participated in this symposium. In all, a total of ten new manuscripts were submitted whilst the six manuscripts that were submitted based on papers presented at the symposium underwent major revisions. Thus, under the inspiration of this symposium, this book seeks to convey knowledge of this key topic from many different perspectives.
Several discussions during this 2nd WCCES symposium highlighted the unfortunate increasing rhetoric in the world today that migrants contribute to increasing violence, disharmony, and disconnect among people. While there have been positive and welcoming actions towards migrants in specific localities, aspects of exclusionary nationalistic rhetoric and policies by some politicians in various parts of the world have further exacerbated trends of demonization of immigrants.
Yet, the human history of the world since ancient time has been intertwined with, and defined by, perpetual migratory movements towards and from different parts. Historical facts have established processes and itinerary of populating the planet earth. However, recent periods have been characterized by specific patterns defying the classical push and pull factors and internal displacement and crossing of borders from/into neighboring countries. Thus, the past decades have been significant in terms of movement of human population in different parts of the world ranging from the impact of raging wars in countries in the Middle East, Central, Western, and Southeast Asia, parts of North, West, central and east Africa, central and North America, forcing millions of people to migrate to other countries, generally to industrialized countries and/or those offering some sorts of actual or perceived stability, particularly Europe. Unlike the legal distinction between refugees and internally displaced people, the framing of migrants allows the inclusion of all people, within and across borders of nation-states, who are uprooted and move to others places.
Increased negative consequences of poverty, unemployment, socio-political instability sometimes with religious elements, fueling hopelessness among large population segments of young people in many African countries have led to people’s desperate and treacherous attempts through the Saharan desert and the Mediterranean Sea in small dinghies in search of economic stability and educational opportunities and positive futures for their children.
As alluded to above, scientific research shows authoritatively that humankind emanated in Africa and gradually migrated to other parts of the world, thus populating planet earth over a very long period of tens of thousands of years, at times with cyclical experiences whereby long-time descendants return to the original sites. In recent centuries, Europeans, for instance, migrated as settlers in the Americas, Southern Africa, and other parts of the world, causing major displacements, involuntary migrations, relocations of indigenous populations and abruptly interrupting trends in population growth. Of particular significance are Africans in the Transatlantic Enslavement in the Americas and the Caribbean over several centuries. The 19th Century European colonial rule in Africa and parts of Asia was associated with massive European re-settlement and local population displacements and further reconfiguration with migration associated with the labor force needs of those settlers.
While some migrations have been gendered whereby either men or women or concerned specific population segments based on age, there have been many migration movements that have affected the whole spectrum of the population in contexts while presenting immense challenges in international migration, especially when families migrating include women, small children, elderly persons and people requiring urgent and complicated medical care. Thus, in addition to the general hopelessness, there are layers of vulnerability affecting specific sub-groups.
Scholars and practitioners, nation-states, governments, NGOs and international organizations have organized and are planning at the moment discussions with resolutions and policies on migration. The WCCES symposium on migration was designed to provide a platform for collective deliberations on engagement with global comparative education perspectives as a way to contribute to the search for more refined assessments and subsequent solutions. The term “Re/Engagement” in the subtitle is deliberately used to acknowledge the various forms of action that many members of the comparative education community have been involved in and to urge them to initiate or renew their involvement in the search for solutions.
The topics of the presentations during the symposium reflect the numbers of submissions that were accepted upon the review process, potential participants’ ability to cover the cost of the participation. Furthermore, compared to the WCCES Congress or even the conferences of the constituent societies, this WCCES symposium was only the second of the innovation of a between-Congress gathering. Therefore, the sub-topics and the related issues covered by the papers presented were neither representative of the topics or the regions nor exhaustive. As the book includes a small number of papers presented at the symposium that were peer-reviewed and accepted and more contributions that were not presented at the symposium, we are aware of gaps to be filled. However, this is a major initial contribution from a comparative education perspective. Thus, words of appreciation towards supporters of the symposium and contributors to this book are in order.
On behalf of WCCES I would like to express our profound gratitude to the Open Society Foundations (OSF), especially Mr. Hugh McLean and his colleagues for the financial support through the grants that they provided for both the first and second symposia.
I wish to express the deepest appreciation to the WCCES community for enthusiastically endorsing the idea of the between-congress events and for the strong support of both the first and this second symposium. I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to my immediate colleagues, primarily WCCES Treasurer and IOCES President, Professor Kanishka Bedi, for his immeasurable contributions on the intellectual and practical fronts. I wish to thank the WCCES Secretary General, Professor Lauren Misiaszek, for her very important contributions.
I would like to express our immense gratitude to Dr. Mmantsetsa Marope, IBE, Director, Dr. Simona Popa, IBE Project Officer and WCCES Assistant Secretary General, and their colleagues for their generous support, commitment, and collaboration in hosting the symposium.
I would like to make a statement of special recognition of Professor Zehavit Gross, the UNESCO Chair in Education for Human Values, Tolerance Democracy and Peace at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, immediate past president of the Israel Comparative Education Society, and serving currently as WCCES Chair of the Advisory Board of the Publications Standing Committee, member of the UNESCO Liaison Standing Committee, Chair of the Election Task Force, member of the Peace Education Task Force and member of the USA-UNESCO Relations Task Force. With her special diligence and commitment, she has managed to produce this volume based on, and bearing basically the same title as, the second symposium.
It is worth noting that the completion of the manuscript of this book coincided with the 2019 International Women’s Day during which, despite various types of accomplishments in different fields in the word, persistent gender-based inequalities call for continued actions to close these gaps. While in many regions of the world, gender parity has been achieved in terms of enrollment even at the higher education level, there are patterns of gendered clusters in academia in general, specific disciplines and areas, including knowledge production. It is hoped that the rigorous scholarly works undertaken by WCCES will continue to receive strong support from all of our colleagues. Precisely considering the rigorous criteria for the WCCES series, it is important to point out that the service to our organization by Professor Zehavit Gross emanates from her expertise in her impeccable professionalism, intellectual rigor, and reputation as an accomplished and dependable scholar. In addition to her stellar intellectual accomplishments, her previous works on migration and comparative education made of her an ideal editor for this volume. She has contributed to help us set a high standard for the intellectual leadership in producing more relevant and high-qualities books in the series.
We thank each of the contributors for their chapters included in this volume, irrespective of whether or not they were presented at the symposium. We hope that these broad and specific case studies will contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the issues and stir further commitment to seeking solutions to those circumstances leading to migration as a fundamental human quest for hope and dignifying and thriving life experiences, thus celebrating our common humanity. We invite more contributors to continue to collaborate on the topic.
Finally, while acknowledging and expressing our gratitude to all of our supporters and contributors to this volume, the arguments, facts and substantive arguments of the chapters do not necessarily represent those of the WCCES.
Notes
The title of the 2nd symposium has been slightly modified, replacing “Immigrants” with “Migrants.” As the expression “immigrants” refers mostly to the situation and experiences at the destination or new homes, the term “migrants” encompasses more easily sites of origin and experiences in the emigration process.
The 1st WCCES symposium “Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Harmony through Ubuntu” was held in June 2018 in conjunction with the 5th International Conference of the Indian Ocean Comparative Education Society (IOCES) on “Rethinking Epistemologies and Innovating Pedagogies to Foster Global Peace” at the Ali Mazrui Center for Higher Education at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.