Chapter 9 (Not) Meeting the Needs of Refugee Students Toward a Framework for the Humanization of Education

Anna Kirova

In 2019, Save the Children International published a report titled Stop the War on Children: Protecting Children in 21st Century Conflict. The report eloquently captures the current state of the world: “Right now, across the world, millions of children are caught up in conflicts they played no part in creating. Often their rights are violated with total impunity” (9). The report points to the disproportional suffering children endure in contemporary wars that tend to last longer and are fought in urban areas with a high density of civilian population, leading to a higher number of deaths and injuries.

Since the publication of the report, two major wars have erupted, continuing these brutal trends—the ongoing war in Ukraine that began with the invasion of Russia on February 24, 2020, and the Israeli-Hamas war that followed the attack of Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, that is affecting predominantly the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Thousands of children have been killed, severely injured, abducted, displaced, or left orphans as a result of the armed conflicts in the Middle East in the last several decades and, most recently, in the two on-going wars that have led to multiple humanitarian crisis. The reports on children being killed as a result of the indiscriminate bombing or who have died because of the lack of health care or medications or because of the infectious diseases that spread out quickly in the affected territories that lack basic sanitation show an alarming rising trend.

Although absolutely staggering, the unprecedented numbers of people, including children, being killed, injured, or displaced in recent wars cannot capture the scale of human suffering. The images of the complete obliteration of homes, roads, hospitals, schools, and human activities that are shared on a daily basis convey better what life is like for millions of civilians. Yet neither numbers nor images can make those of us who are not in these war/conflict zones feel what it is like to be haunted by the unmistakable stench of decaying human flesh under the rubble, to go for days without food or with very little water, to have no place to sleep, or, for a child, to hold their parent’s guiding hand as they make their way through the rubble. Finding an improvised temporary shelter where a hospital or school once stood is a rare, usually very short-lived respite from the immanent dangers of the surrounding world that only a few can find. With more than half of Gaza in ruins, schools are one of the few places where the displaced can take temporary refuge, but the long-term consequences of the total devastation of children’s lives—including the loss of family, community, and a place to call home or a place to learn—are yet to be seen.

Iman Farajallah (2023), a psychologist who was born and raised in Gaza and now lives in California and who traveled to Gaza to interview children about their experiences during the previous round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in 2016, offers a glimpse of what some of the consequences of these children’s experiences of trauma could be on their emotional and cognitive behavior as well as their ability to function at school and home. She states that the results of two months of the latest Israeli attacks could damage an entire generation of children in Gaza.

As the world celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN General Assembly 1948), almost sixty-five years since the adoption of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the UN General Assembly (1959), and almost thirty-five years since the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly 1989), it is hard not to agree with the main argument made in the 2019 Save the Children report: “Children suffering in conflict today are not primarily suffering from a deficit of identified rights. Rather, they are suffering from a crisis of compliance with those rights” (10).

It seems that as a whole, the world leaders not only failed miserably to secure children’s “inherent right to life” (UNCRC Article 6.1) or protect them from “all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse” (UNCRC Article 19.1), but that the intensified global and local geo-political tensions have created conditions that cause harm in a scale not seen since the second world war.

While the children’s right to protection is violated on a daily basis in war and conflict zones, children’s rights to education (UNCRC Articles 12, 13, 14, 29, and 30), and more specifically their right to participate in their education is violated even after their resettlement in their host countries often after a long period of living in refugee camps or on the road as their parents or surviving relatives make a long journey to a “safe haven” such as Canada. This begs the question, How do refugee children experience school in Canada?

Niga Jalal shared, “By the time I was five years old, I had survived two wars and a year and a half in a refugee camp, but the hardest thing I had to do was to adjust to school in Canada” (personal communication). This recollection of the first year in elementary school is that of a young woman who came to Canada as a refugee in 1999 because of the ongoing war in Kurdistan. It is the harshest and perhaps the most honest judgment I have come across that reveals the (in)ability of Canada’s education system to meet the complex needs of refugee children. It is also one of the most compelling “calls to action” to make changes in the education system so that those who come to Canada as refugees not only find refuge but also fulfill their dreams and aspirations for brighter futures.

One may ask how—in a country of immigrants like Canada, which prides itself on being welcoming and accommodating diversity, a country that, by the time Niga arrived as a child, had more than twenty-five years of multiculturalism as its federal policy—a refugee child could have a more difficult school experience than surviving two wars and living in a refugee camp. Unfortunately, Niga’s experience in school is not unique. Refugee students are often dealing with feelings of grief and loss that make it difficult to thrive in school (Celik at al. 2019; Coelho 2004; Elsayed et al. 2019). As a result, the school experience can be a difficult transition for refugee children. Traumatic experiences that children have gone through or witnessed can manifest as troubled behaviour (Eruyar, Maltby, and Vostanis 2018; Strekalova and Hoot 2008). These behaviours may include explosive anger that is inappropriate to a situation, rule testing, problems with authority, age-inappropriate behaviour, an inability to concentrate, withdrawal, and lower academic achievement (Ayoub 2014; Blackwell and Melzak 2000; Strekalova and Hoot 2008). Providing refugee students with a safe and welcoming environment is critical not only for school success but also for healing. However, providing such an environment largely depends on teachers’ training, values, and attitudes (Cummins 2001; Frater-Mathieson 2004; Kaplan et al. 2016). As noted by teachers and school leaders who participated in a recent study conducted in Canada, the lack of appropriate training prevents them from responding to refugee students’ needs, or they may respond to behaviours “that could be potentially misunderstood, such as unknown cultural differences or a child becoming aggressive out of fear for personal safety” (Stewart at al. 2019, 65). In some cases, teachers can even contribute to the problem of creating an unsafe environment for refugee students. In my own experience as a political refugee who came to Canada in 1990 with my family, including my five-year-old son, the lack of understanding on the part of some teachers and administrators of my child’s experiences had a detrimental impact on his behaviour, learning, and overall attitude toward school.

My son’s experiences in elementary school in Canada motivated me to explore childhood loneliness and isolation in school, which became the topic of my second PhD, completed at the University of Alberta in 1996. The methodology I used in that dissertation was hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen 1994), which concerns itself with subjective lived human experience. The notion of the lifeworld—the world of everyday experience (Husserl [1936] 1970)—is taken as the beginning of the phenomenological understanding of what it means to be human. Jennifer Skuza (2007) argues that phenomenology allows for humanizing the understanding of acculturation experiences. This argument prompts me to ask in this chapter, What does humanizing the educational experiences of refugee students mean? And has the education system concerned itself with the humanization of refugee/immigrant students?

In unpacking these questions, I first provide a brief critical overview of the promises and failures of multicultural and anti-racist education, particularly in regard to their essentialism and assumptions of normalcy. I then define dehumanization and trace its roots in educational theory and practice back to the seventeenth century, when the universal benchmarks for a “civilized” modern human were created and since then have positioned those who are different as less than human. I also provide examples of the impact of dehumanizing practices such as homogenization, “schooling the body,” objectification, stereotyping, and racism on multiply minoritized and racialized students, many of whom are also refugees/immigrants and English-language learners. Finally, I explore the concept of alterity as a key concept in intercultural philosophy and its potential to develop a framework for the humanization of education.

Being Concerned with Humanization

To humanize, according to the Cambridge Dictionary (2020), is to “make something less unpleasant and more suitable for people.” This everyday understanding of the verb to humanize is exemplified in numerous academic and practitioner-oriented publications devoted to making the educational experiences of refugee and immigrant children—most of whom are from ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic minority groups—more suitable for their needs. However, Reza Hasmath (2012) found that most teachers’ awareness of ethnic differences appears to be at a superficial level. Joanne MacNevin (2012) found that teaching refugee students requires educators to (1) become proficient with different teaching skills, (2) overcome challenges that exist in supporting children emotionally, (3) include refugee students socially and academically in all aspects of the classroom, and (4) build on students’ prior experiences.

Although recognizing the experiences refugee students have had when they arrive at school seems to be the logical first step that teachers can take to effectively meet their needs, Jan Stewart (2012) suggests that complications often arise in schools because educators are not fully aware of the complexity of students’ migration experiences. Teachers’ approaches to inclusion are based on an assumption that all immigrants have had similar pre-migration experiences and therefore would benefit from a similar exercise that fosters diversity and inclusion. For example, in a twenty-five-page booklet, Dream Big Together, developed by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation in response to a large number of Syrian refugees who arrived in Canada, educators and school administrators in Canadian secondary schools are encouraged to “ignite a dialogue on cultural diversity within the school setting.” While the activities proposed in the booklet “encourage students to understand and respect cultural differences and to appreciate similarities with other young Canadians” (Canadian Teachers’ Federation 2015), the difference between “immigrant,” “refugee,” and “ethnic minority” is blurred. Many educators see these measures as pathways to achieving equal accessibility and eliminating discrimination. The uncritical multicultural values fostered in many schools not only do not distinguish between immigrant and refugee experiences, but they also emphasize celebrating differences on special occasions or dates, typically accomplished as an add-on to the regular curriculum, as well as an increased effort to reduce prejudice and promote cultural awareness and knowledge. While these measures leave the status quo intact (see, e.g., Barton and Tan 2020; Giroux 1993; McLaren 1995), it can be argued that they result in pockets of transformative teaching and learning experiences that are “humanizing,” in the dictionary definition of the term, for those involved. But has the education system truly concerned itself with humanizing refugee/immigrant students’ experiences?

In the most general sense, to “be concerned with humanization is to uphold a particular view or value of what it means to be human, and furthermore to find ways to act on this concern” (Todres, Galvin, and Holloway 2009, 69). In the case of Canada’s education system, it seems that being concerned with humanization means that educational institutions act on the values inherent in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Department of Justice Canada 1982), the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (Department of Justice Canada 1988), and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and form standards. However, scholars such as Maria Kronfeldner (2018) have noted that theories of human rights could be conceptualized as resting on a normative conception of human nature that is based on an incomplete set of essentialist assumptions regarding the causal importance of nature in development and evolution. In analyzing the current discourse of inclusion as a framework for providing high-quality learning opportunities for all students, for example, Angela Barton and Edna Tan (2020, 434) argue that such a framework is grounded in the extension of a set of static rights as well as responsibilities “regarding who one is and must become.”

In regard to Canada’s federal multiculturalism policy, multiple scholars have pointed out that a major problem with its implementation in education is the “lack of federal control over education, and provincial legislation in general, [which] has limited federal ability to influence education in this direction to any meaningful degree” (Ghosh and Abdi 2004, 45). Almost forty years ago, Margaret Gibson cautioned that the general field of multicultural education theory “abounds with untested and sometimes unsupportable assumptions regarding goals, strategies, and outcomes” (1984, 109). Indeed, she suggested that “unless these assumptions are made more explicit and educational practices embody these assumptions, multicultural education as a whole risks being dismissed not only as ineffective but as potentially encouraging of even greater educational inequalities” (as cited in Hoffman 1996, 546). In their review of critical perspectives on multicultural education, Boyle-Baise and Gillette remark on multicultural education’s disconnect from its transformative, emancipatory roots in the civil rights movement, noting that it “has been co-opted and redefined within schools, textbooks and teacher education programs as attitudinal, tolerance-oriented, sensitivity training” (1998, 20; see also Sleeter and Delgado Bernal 2004). Its power to promote transformative change has been dulled.

In the past couple of decades, concerns have become stronger among the general public, ethno-cultural communities, and practitioners that schools are poorly equipped to cope with increased diversity and that, instead of facilitating equity and belonging, they foster isolation and replicate racialized forms of injustice (Wideen and Barnard 1999). Such inequalities and injustices are experienced as acts of dehumanization: a process through which some groups are ejected from the category of the human (Abdi 2012; Caraballo and Souto-Manning 2017).

Defining Dehumanization

In her recent book What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept, Maria Kronfeldner defines dehumanization as “an evaluative stance (merely cognitive or also behavioural) toward other humans that consists in drawing the line between individuals or groups (as in-group/out-group) according to an assumed concept of what it means to be human” (2018, 18). Steffen Herrmann identifies three different ways in which social exclusion as a form of dehumanization can be explained: “as a form of special separation, a lack of participation, or as emanating from practices of misrecognition” (2011, 133; italics in original). Charles Taylor connects identity to recognition or its absence; he states that because our identities are also often shaped “by the misrecognition of others” (1992, 25), a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining, demeaning, or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm and be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being (25).

Dehumanization is demonstrated in practices such as racism, sexism, classism, and ableism, among others. Nick Haslam (2006) cites Jahoda’s historical catalogue of ways in which ethnic and racial others have been represented not only in popular culture but also in scholarship: “as barbarians, who lack culture, self-restraint, moral sensibility, and cognitive capacity” (252). These representations, he argues, have become normalized. Mariana Souto-Manning and Ayesha Rabadi-Raol (2018), in their review of quality in early childhood education over the past thirty years, identify three assumptions about multiply minoritized and racialized children on which the discourse on early childhood education quality was constructed: inferiority, deficit, and cultural difference. They explain these assumptions as follows:

• Inferiority: Children from multiply minoritized backgrounds have been seen as biologically inferior—as having smaller brains and lower IQs than White children, who have been seen as racially superior.
• Deficit: Children from multiply minoritized backgrounds have been seen as experiencing poor upbringings in their homes and communities and developing a deficit—whether linguistic or cultural—for example, having a word gap, being at risk, or needing a head start to succeed in schools and schooling. (These assumptions are grounded in the desirability of colonial monocultural, monolingual norms that have been imposed ethnocentrically and violently onto them.)
• Cultural difference: Children from multiply minoritized backgrounds have been seen as different from the colonial monocultural, White, monolingual norm. (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol 2018, 205–6)

Beyond early childhood, Angela Barton and Edna Tan (2020, 433) provide examples of multiple oppressions “minoritized youth experience through the regularities of classroom practice, including otherization, conditional participation/belonging, and dehumanization.” Educational practices informed by these discourses that are based on outdated essentialist ideologies should be understood as dehumanizing, since they position multiply minoritized and racialized children, including refugee/immigrant children, as less than human.

Othering as a Persistent Problem in Educational Theory and Practice

The systemic injustices that manifest themselves through the practice of othering those who are different and therefore presented as less than human have been a persistent problem in educational theory and practice (Kirova 2013; Kirova and Prochner 2015). As Carmen Mills and Julie Ballantyne (2016) argue, inequalities are (re)produced through the social structures of schooling, including assumptions embedded in models of teaching and learning, assessment, and management. In order to understand the historical roots of these inequality-producing social structures, we need to trace them back to the publication of Johan Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures) in 1666.

The Creation of Universal Benchmarks for a “Civilized” Modern Human

Orbis Sensualium Pictus, translated shortly afterward into all official European languages, promoted a particular vision of order, an order presented as “normal” to humankind. This order “privilege[d] some things in particular, and at the same time, through processes of exclusion, segregate[d] that which [was] considered different, foreign, of less value or simply incapable of integration” (Lippitz 2007, 5). As a result, the everyday life of the underclass, unable to fit into the perfectly ordered (divine) structure of the world that was desired, was made invisible.

The underclass’s way of living and being was thus excluded; it was seen as a kind of foreignness—that is, a “type of ‘sickness’ or ‘sinfulness’ that can always be healed in the great beyond” (Lippitz 2007, 4). The book used the concepts of being human and of human nature for social demarcation. The “civilizing” process of the modern individual/human through the creation of order in schooling has since had an impact on pedagogical theory and practice in many ways, including generalizing the manners and customs of the higher class (in terms of such things as cleanliness and order) as a universal benchmark for a civilized modern individual/human (Lippitz 2007).

The practices of labelling and “fixing” children from certain groups who were deemed different and therefore deficient/other/abnormal (Kirova and Prochner 2015) have persisted. In Canada in 1879, for example, the journalist and newspaper publisher Nicolas Flood Davin (later the member of Parliament for Assiniboia West) proposed a residential school system for Indigenous children modelled on the Indian industrial schools in the United States and aimed at assimilating “Indians” and “half-breeds” into Canadian society (Prochner 2020). The premise of the residential school system was that “young children could be saved from their lifestyle and become productive citizens of the state and fully assimilate into the dominant society” (Nishnawbe Aski Nation, n.d., quoted in Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario 2017, 49). Currently, millions of Roma children in Europe are subjected to similar kinds of dehumanization through the system of segregated schools, despite the European Union’s attempts to end such practices (Lambrev, Kirova, and Prochner 2019).

Homogenization: Becoming “One of a Type”

In addition to civilizing or fixing children of lower socio-economic classes or those of non-European descent, the school’s role has been (and still is) to socialize all children into the world outside the home, a world that Clinton Collins calls “the third-person world of political life” (1974, 149), a world where people—children, teachers, administrators, and parents—relate to one another on the basis of shared expectations about their respective roles. The role of a child in school is different from their role at home, and the goal of schooling is “to make students out of children” (Lippitz and Levering 2002). Martin Packer and Jessie Goicoechea (2000) suggest that becoming a student requires an ontological change; in contrast to the home, a child in school is asked to become one of a type: a student who is expected to have the same kind of relationship with each teacher based on designated school rules. Or, as Alfred Schütz put it in 1964, students are expected to conduct themselves “in the manner of the anonymous type” (102). This practice of homogenization deemphasizes each person’s uniqueness in favour of how they fit the characteristics of a student.

If the experience of schooling can be described as a “foreign imposition” (Lippitz 2007, 7) on all children that results in their becoming cultural hybrids, how is this otherwise for children who are (im)migrants, refugees, or newcomers to the school? In other words, what makes the experience of schooling different for immigrant/refugee children?

Schütz’s description of a stranger as a “marginal man, a cultural hybrid on the verge of two different patterns of group life, not knowing to which of them he belongs” (1964, 104) is helpful in understanding immigrant children’s experiences of schooling. Although all children are in some sense strangers to schooling, immigrant and refugee children are also strangers in that their history or past experiences are not shared by others in the school. In this sense, the description of a stranger as “a person without a history” (97)—that is, with no shared experiences with others in the school—makes the experience of schooling even more alienating for immigrant children. The accelerated rate of change brought about by the migration experience presents a challenge to refugee/immigrant children as they struggle to recreate a personal history in which past, present, and future make it possible for them to experience continuity and consistency in their sense of being in the world. Refugee and immigrant children’s embodied sense of belonging to the homeworld (both the family home and the cultural homeworld) is shaken because they can no longer rely on their tacit knowledge or their language to navigate their journey in the world. As the world remains foreign both inside and outside the school, the sense of dislocation can be overwhelming.

Limiting Human Agency: Schooling the Body

While school rules in most countries in the world concern students’ bodily activities (e.g., ways of walking, talking, playing, using equipment), discipline at school differs from school to school and culture to culture. In addition to being unfamiliar with the school spaces in the new country, “learning the ropes” of the school culture can overwhelm the newcomer child. For Iris Marion Young, the requirement to assimilate is unjust because it “always implies coming to the game after it is already begun, after the rules and standards have been set, and having to prove oneself accordingly” (1990, 165). School rules are abstractions sustained by the school/classroom community and by the requirement that students relate to the world in a way that is sanctioned by these rules. However, those who are historically marginalized in schooling, as Barton and Tan (2020, 435) state, “are expected to reconfigure themselves towards the dominant White, patriarchal, English-speaking culture, regardless of the real or symbolic violence such acts require.” Particularly insightful here is Michel Foucault’s (1977) concept of the necessity of “docility-utility,” which was an essential quality of the urban citizenry in capitalist democracy in general and to the smooth and efficient management of institutions such as schools in particular. Brenda Simpson states that “the underlying intent of the school curriculum is to ensure that schools are inhabited by ‘docile bodies’” (2000, 63). She argues that the overarching goal of the curriculum is to order children’s spatial and temporal lives. Thus, school rules such as the timetable and differentiation of school spaces aim not only to determine the location of all students, individually or in cohorts, at all times (i.e., the “time-space path”; Gordon et al. 1999) but also to determine the correct kind of embodiment acceptable in that place and at that time. While these school rules seem to be in contradiction with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC Article 15; freedom of association), learning the “curriculum of the body” (Lesko 1988, 123) is indeed a difficult task for newcomer students whose daily lives might have been governed by the need to survive or, at best, to get by unnoticed by the authorities.

Lunchtime Routine

A specific example of immigrant and refugee children’s struggle with learning foreign rules and acquiring the correct kind of embodiment is the lunchtime routine (Kirova, Mohamed, and Emme 2006). Historically, the purpose of mealtime rules was to socialize children into “proper” behaviour. According to Luis Cantarero, this may be because commensality is seen as the “symbolic manifestation of humanization” (2001, 4). Pierre Bourdieu (1986) points to the competitive dimension of taste and how eating practices are used to establish and reproduce distinctions between social classes.

Meal planning in schools usually favours foods from the dominant culture (Morrison 1996). In relation to Foucault’s notion of docility-utility, a dietary regime is a form of schooling bodies (Kirk 2004). Thus, the selection of foods in general and of foods on school menus is based on the ideology of caring for students’ health. Outlining a “political anatomy” of the body, Felicity Armstrong (1999) argues that children’s bodies are increasingly subjected to pedagogical and medical surveillance. Cultural tensions between private (home) and public (school) views regarding appropriate and nutritious foods can clash in the case of refugee/immigrant families when the food choices are subjected to control and educational guidance on the part of the school.

A clash can also be experienced in the lunchroom, where being rejected by peers based on how food looks or smells or how it is eaten can be a dehumanizing experience for some refugee/immigrant students. A geography of the lunchroom can emerge where particular groups sit in certain locations (Thorne 1993). The lunchroom geography exemplifies how food choices and practices can serve to regulate social inclusion and exclusion based on divisions between ethnic groups. Barrie Thorne writes that “eating together is a prime emblem of solidarity, and each day there is a fresh scramble as kids deliberately choose where, and with whom, to eat” (1993, 42). The prestige that comes with being part of a social grouping at lunchtime may lead some children to bring “desirable” foods such as candy and chips to use in negotiating a higher position for themselves in the social lunchtime hierarchy. Moreover, navigating through lunch alone without friends can be a painful experience.

Objectification

While school rules and food regulations can negatively affect refugee/immigrant children’s self-confidence and self-esteem as a necessary condition of self-realization (Honneth 1996), learning the new language, as the main symbolic system refugee/immigrant children need to master in order to succeed in school, has a much more forceful impact on their identity and overall well-being. If we take Martin Heidegger’s (1982) notion that language is the house of being, refugee and immigrant children’s initial inability to speak the language of the new world of school is more than an inconvenience. Students whose first language is not the dominant language in school report feeling stupid, laughed at, and embarrassed (Kirova 2007). These experiences also bring feelings of being excluded or rejected. Remedial (English/French) language classes are often held in segregated environments in or outside the school building, which creates and reinforces boundaries between the students in the classes and the rest of the people in the school. The creation of the category “second-language learner” that is also associated with a “code” for funding purposes is an example of a dehumanizing process of objectification. Students labelled as belonging to this category are made into objects by the diagnostic system, which emphasizes the distance between them and “native speakers” of English/French and both solidifies the boundaries between these groups and positions the non-native speakers as inferior and as outsiders.

Language-based discrimination is exacerbated by adding the designation “at risk” to the label “second/additional-language learner.” Built on the normativity attached to the concept of human nature, the “at risk” category of students and their families subjects students to a number of intervention programs that they often experience as humiliating as well as useless in terms of meeting their social and academic needs. The proliferation of such programs today indicates that the discourses of cultural and linguistic inferiority according to white monolingual and monocultural norms still perpetuate the colonial values and beliefs firmly grounded in cultural and linguistic normativity. These values inform practices that violate linguistic minority children’s right “to use his or her own language” (UNCRC Article 30) and thus to participate meaningfully in their education.

Loss of Meaning

While the different explanations of the relationship between language and meaning offered by different philosophical traditions are beyond the scope of this chapter, under the influence of Wittgenstein, Winch, and Kuhn, among others, the linguistic turn in social science is associated with the view that social life and language are interwoven (Hughes and Sharrock 1997). From this perspective, practices, things/objects, and events in the world are inseparable from language, and the primary means of understanding among members of a society is their everyday language. What children know and can do as they begin formal school is related to their families’ and communities’ everyday lives and practices. Children’s development of everyday concepts is based on the “families’ cultural practices associated with their experiences with objects outside of an integrated system of knowledge” (Hedegaard 2007, 248). Cultural diversity in symbols leads to differences across cultures in the way that members of a culture think and express themselves. However, school rules require students to relate to the world by mastering symbolic forms—such as the (Latin) alphabet, numbers, musical notes, and so forth—to represent their knowledge and relationship to the self, others, and the world around them. In contrast to learning at home, scientific concepts are connected to children’s activities in settings with conventional symbolic systems the children learn at school. Scientific concepts are organized in an integrated system of knowledge in relation to other concepts about academic disciplines (Kirova, Prochner, and Massing 2019). Thus, school not only necessitates an ontological change in children but also imposes a particular (scientific) epistemological construction of their knowledge of and about the world, which may or may not be similar to the everyday epistemology of their homes (Lippitz 2007). In some cases, it can even contradict their families’ worldviews. This may lead to children’s inability to exercise their right to form and express their own views (UNCRC Article 12.1). It also violates that child’s right to freedom of expression, including “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice” (UNCRC Article 13.1). Such violations of children’s rights can lead not only to internal tension but to the loss of meaning in life. The dehumanization of non-Europeans by the school system worldwide based on the Western worldview has positioned those who speak minority languages and/or have non-Western worldviews as lesser humans, as “barbarians”—a word that literally means, in ancient Greek, those without language or civilization (Kronfeldner 2018, 29).

Stereotyping: Who Is a “Good” Person?

As already discussed, the concept of human / being human can be used for inclusion in or exclusion from groups as well as for respective normative judgments about being a good person / good human. Judgments, according to Young, “are made unconsciously [. . .] and these judgements often mark stereotype, devalue, or degrade some groups” (1990, 133). Venus Nicolino defines stereotypes as “faulty generalizations [that] frequently serve as mental shortcuts” (2006, 17). Stereotyping is a form of dehumanization founded on the belief that certain groups (e.g., Jews or Muslims) are evil people. Assumptions about Muslims, for example, are mostly developed before non-Muslims and Muslims encounter each other and are often based on the negative media projection of Muslims as terrorists, which creates and reinforces stereotypes about them (McCoy, Knight, and Kirova 2011; Zine 2004). These stereotypes support the difference of the other and therefore increase the social distance between the host/dominant society and Muslims. Because of their unfamiliarity with or stereotypical beliefs regarding certain groups, mainstream classroom teachers often underestimate Muslim students’ learning abilities and interact differently with them (Barrera 1995; Berhanu 2008; Zine 2006). Goli Rezai-Rashti (1994) criticizes the Eurocentric focus of Canadian education because it often clashes with Muslim students’ cultural and religious beliefs. She writes, “In dealing with teachers, students and administrators I find their interaction with Muslim students to be based largely on stereotypes of Muslims that are reminiscent of a long-gone colonial era” (37). Thus, teachers can contribute to escalating anti-Muslim sentiments and behaviours in school. A student in Afshan Amjad’s 2016 study, for example, reported that her teacher “showed [the class] a movie about the Holocaust and afterwards said that if a holocaust ever happened again, it would happen to Muslims” (125). As a result, the student had difficulty sleeping for many days, waking up several times during the night because she was having bad dreams about a holocaust for Muslims. In this case, the teacher, in the authority vested in her by the school as a government-funded institution, failed to respect the right of the child to preserve her identity, including nationality and religion (UNCRC Article 8.1).

Racism

Researchers (e.g., Nicolino 2006; Ridley 1995) have found that stereotypes affect the attitudes and behaviours of one group toward another and usually become a major reason to promote the dehumanizing practices of racism. Peers’ racist views can result in jokes students make about racialized minority students or even physical attacks (Zine 2008). Kanu (2008), MacNevin (2012), and Stewart (2012) have all identified teachers’ attitudes and knowledge levels as factors contributing to racism and discrimination against refugee students. Racism can also become the reason children from certain groups or classes are excluded and can marginalize the competencies of children who have different norms of competence than the dominant society (Ghosh and Abdi 2004). However, Pérez and Saavedra (2017, 5) argue that the so-called achievement gap for students of colour and Indigenous students exists only when education is enacted from three perspectives, as summarized below:

• One rooted in colonization—the epistemological global north belief in the inherent (genetic) deficiency and inferiority of people of colour from the global south or those who have global south positionings within the global north
• The superiority and standardization of global north knowledge
• The corporatization of education through sweeping reforms, neoliberal public policy, and accountability systems

Education enacted from these perspectives positions minoritized children as “less than” from birth (Delpit 2012).

What Can Be Done?

So far, this chapter has explored the dimensions of dehumanization found in educational theory and practice and has demonstrated how the image of a normalized child has been legitimized and widespread through Western onto-epistemological dominance that has had devastating consequences for multiply minoritized and marginalized children, including refugees. These dimensions violate many of the articles of the UNCR and serve as barriers to the humanizing potential of education, especially in the case of students from refugee backgrounds who have already been subjected to the most severe forms of dehumanization—war, genocide, and other forms of violence—because of who they are. So what can be done? What would the educational experiences of refugee students look like if the education system concerned itself with humanization? Kronfeldner writes, “From the social point of view, dehumanization itself is the challenge: it needs to be overcome because it conflicts with basic ideas about equality, human rights and justice. Given that normalcy assumptions and essentialism make dehumanization stronger, the challenge becomes one of minimizing dehumanization as much as possible by getting rid of the normalcy assumptions and essentialism” (2018, 5).

Going back to the potential of multicultural education to serve as a source of values that should increase the humanizing potential of education, one would expect that because multicultural education rejects the assimilationist agenda, promotes respect for human dignity, and advocates for social justice and greater equity within society (Bennett 2001), it should reduce discrimination, promote enhanced self-understanding through expanding one’s cultural lens, and liberate individuals from the restraints of cultural boundaries (Banks 2008; Eckermann 1994). However, multiple authors (e.g., Gosine 2002; Kirova 2015) point out that by emphasizing exoticized, knowable (other) cultures, multicultural education has instead solidified the boundaries between majority and minority cultures.

In sum, the current multicultural education practices based on ethno-racial distinctions (e.g., curricula that essentialize knowledge about other cultures and celebrate them) have not contributed to eliminating racism or the unequal treatment of minority, non-white students. Nor have they led to a critical examination of the dominant white, middle-class, Eurocentric culture. Therefore, although multicultural efforts that take the form of curricular add-ons about the “Cultural Other” (Montecinos 1995) take steps toward challenging and altering the mainstream curriculum, they have their own hidden curriculum, a major outcome of which is reinscribing essentialized notions of culture and essentialized representations of the members of cultural groups. Furthermore, as Kevin Gosine (2002) argues, not only multicultural but also anti-racism education oversimplifies the dynamics of cultural diversity and racism because both emphasize the defensively situated collective identities, or essentialisms, that racialized communities construct in relation to a dominant culture that represents them in homogeneous and stigmatized terms and fails to adequately consider the multifaceted subjectivities such seemingly homogeneous identities often mask. Thus, although anti-racism represents a leap forward in the fight against racism and racial inequality, in the past decade, scholars (e.g., Yon 2000) have critiqued the anti-racism movement for what they see as an uncritical reliance on essentialized or homogeneous conceptions of racialized communities.

Toward a Framework for the Humanization of Education: Alterity

In contemplating the possibility of developing a values framework for humanizing health care, Todres, Galvin, and Holloway (2009) identified eight dimensions that are essential constituents of humanization in relation to caring. In their view, “each dimension is heuristically expressed as a continuum stretching from the term that characterizes humanization in a positive sense; through to the term that characterizes the barrier to such possibility” (69). The conceptual framework they developed is presented in table 9.1.

I do not suggest here that health care and education systems are identical; however, I find it alarming how many of the dehumanizing practices or barriers to humanization identified in the literature briefly discussed so far are similar in both contexts. It might be valuable for education theorists to explore existing humanizing practices that, based on Todres, Galvin, and Holloway’s (2009) suggestion, can be seen as being on the “opposite” ends of a continuum (e.g., from passivity to agency, from dislocation to a sense of place, or from isolation and rejection to belonging and togetherness).

In terms of education’s humanizing potential, alterity as a key concept in interculturalism should be examined (Abdallah-Pretceille 2004). Although there are various conceptualizations of interculturalism with subtle differences, the intercultural perspective derives its foundations from the principles of liberalism and hermeneutics. At its core, intercultural philosophy highlights the importance of understanding through intercultural dialogue; however, understanding and agreement are not synonymous. Intercultural education involves open, respectful dialogue among cultures, which is believed to promote cross-cultural sensitivity and increased understanding not only about diverse cultures encountered but about one’s own and the general influence of culture on how we perceive and interact in the world (Kirova and Prochner 2015).

Table 9.1. Todres, Galvin, and Holloway’s (2009, 70) conceptual framework
Forms of Humanization	Forms of Dehumanization
Insiderness Agency Uniqueness Togetherness Sense-making Personal journey Sense of place Embodiment	Objectification Passivity Homogenization Isolation Loss of meaning Loss of personal journey Dislocation Reductionist body

The term alterity derives from the Latin word alter, which means “other.” Although Other was used most often in the late 1990s, alterity seems to be the preferred term today. The central question governing philosophical discussions of alterity is not that of who the Other is but that of our access to alterity. Martine Abdallah-Pretceille (2004) argues that the question of who the Other is leads to the reification of culture and should be avoided. She points out the interdependence of the concepts of self and the Other as represented by the paradox “l’identité de l’un exige la reconnaissance de l’Autre comme Je” (the identity of one requires the recognition of the Other as I; 42).

From this perspective, knowledge of the Other as other is experienced as a process in which one needs to remain open to the Other’s perspectives as a possibility for questioning one’s own. The goal, therefore, is “disturbing the totalizing system of knowledge which assimilates the Other into being the same” (Kemp 1992, as cited in Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007, 39). Claire Kramsch (1993) maintains that when engaging in a “third space” at the interstices between cultures, individuals must name and interpret the world in alternative ways, leading to novel understandings about their own culture and the culture(s) of their partner(s) in dialogue. Thus, intercultural interaction is a unique process for every individual because the third space will be variously located depending on the context and the interpretive frame of the interactors.

When the intercultural interaction is seen as a dialogic process rather than a product, culture is understood as a cultural frame that influences how people perceive and interact in the world while they develop the ability to operate in multiple cultural settings. It seems that because schools are sites of active cultural reconstitution, not just exchange, where children engage in both the ongoing reproduction of the classroom community and its transformation, they can also change the adults in the community. Our pedagogical understanding of children as strangers in school shows us that the simple fact that we are never really able to understand who the children are opens the possibility of pedagogy as an ethical means to renew our world. In other words, seeing children as strangers whom we can never fully understand can allow us to get “rid of the normalcy assumptions and essentialism,” as Kronfeldner (2018, 5) asserts, and make a shift from “grasping the other to respecting the other” (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007, 39). Only then can educators attempt to transgress the deeply entrenched norms, rules, and codes meant to assimilate the Other into a homogeneous same and instead enact alterity as a movement toward the richness and brilliance of the heterogeneous Other and bear responsibility for who they are. Only then can schools become sites where the educational experiences offered to all children, including those who come from refugee backgrounds, truly respect the alterity of the Other. The education system has a long way to go before making this shift. Although pockets of practice attend to the humanization of refugee students, without a concerted and systematic approach, such isolated practices may remain piecemeal and will likely not result in systemic changes that are overdue.

References

Abdallah-Pretceille, Martine. 2004. L’éducation interculturelle. 2e édition mise à jour. Paris: PUF.
Abdi, Ali A., ed. 2012. Decolonizing Philosophies of Education. Rotterdam: Sense.
Amjad, Afshan. 2016. “Multicultural Education and Immigrant Children: The Case of Muslim Children in Canadian Schools.” PhD diss., University of Alberta. https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/a35034f9-48f9-4d03-a291-a515645e0acf.
Armstrong, Felicity. 1999. “Inclusion, Curriculum, and the Struggle for Space in School.” Inclusive Education 3 (1): 75–87.
Ayoub, Mohamad Najib. 2014. “An Investigation of the Challenges Experienced by Somali Refugee Students in Canadian Elementary Schools.” Master’s thesis, University of Windsor. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/5120.
Banks, James A. 2008. An Introduction to Multicultural Education. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson.
Barrera, Isaura. 1995. “To Refer or Not to Refer.” New York State Association for Bilingual Education Journal 10 (Summer): 54–66.
Barton, Angela, and Edna Tan. 2020. “Beyond Equity as Inclusion: A Framework of ‘Rightful Presence’ for Guiding Justice-Oriented Studies in Teaching and Learning.” Educational Researcher 49 (6): 433–40.
Bennett, Christine. 2001. “Genres of Research in Multicultural Education.” Review of Educational Research 71 (2): 171–217.
Berhanu, Girma. 2008. “Ethnic Minority Pupils in Swedish Schools: Some Trends in Over-Representation of Minority Pupils in Special Educational Programs.” International Journal of Special Education 23 (3): 17–29.
Blackwell, Dick, and Sheila Melzak. 2000. Far from the Battle but Still at War: Troubled Refugee Children in School. London: Child Psychotherapy Trust.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Boyle-Baise, Marilynne, and Maureen Gillette. 1998. “Multicultural Education from a Pedagogical Perspective: A Response to Radical Critiques.” Interchange 29 (1): 17–32.
Cambridge Dictionary. 2020. S.v. “Humanize.” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humanize.
Canadian Teachers’ Federation. 2015. “Dream Big Together: Engaging Dialogue on Cultural Diversity with Immigrant Families.” December 10, 2015. https://www.ctf-fce.ca/blog-perspectives/dream-big-together-a-practical-resource-to-welcome-refugee-students-to-our-canadian-high-schools/.
Cantarero, Luis. 2001. “Eating in a Home for Children. Food Resistance in the Residence.” Anthropology of Food, no. 0 (April). https://journals.openedition.org/aof/1024.
Caraballo, Limarys, and Mariana Souto-Manning. 2017. “Co-constructing Identities, Literacies, and Contexts: Sustaining Critical Meta-Awareness with/in Urban Communities.” Urban Education 52 (5): 555–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085915618726.
Celik, Rukiye, Naime Altay, Selverhan Yurttutan, and Ebru K. Toruner. 2019. “Emotional Indicators and Anxiety Levels of Immigrant Children Who Have Been Exposed to Warfare.” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, no. 32, 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcap.12233.
Coelho, Elizabeth. 2004. Adding English: A Guide to Teaching in Multilingual Classrooms. Toronto: Pippin.
Collins, Clinton. 1974. “The Multiple Realities of Schooling.” In Existentialism and Phenomenology in Education, edited by David E. Denton, 139–58. New York: Teachers’ College Press.
Cummins, Jim. 2001. Language, Power, and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Dahlberg, Gunilla, Peter Moss, and Alan Pence. 2007. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation. New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
Delpit, Lisa. 2012. “Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children. New York: New Press.
Department of Justice Canada. 1982. “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/.
Department of Justice Canada. 1988. “Canadian Multiculturalism Act.” https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-18.7/page-1.html.
Eckermann, Anne-Katrin. 1994. One Classroom, Many Cultures: Teaching Strategies for Culturally Different Children. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. 2017. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Education Resource: Engaging Learners Through Play. Toronto: Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario.
Elsayed, Danah, Ju-Hyun Song, Eleanor Myatt, Eleanor Colasante, and Tina Malti. 2019. “Anger and Sadness Regulation in Refugee Children: The Roles of Pre- and Post-Migratory Factors.” Child Psychiatry & Human Development 50 (5): 846–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-019-00887-4.
Eruyar, Seyda, John Maltby, and Panos Vostanis. 2018. “Mental Health Problems of Syrian Refugee Children: The Role of Parental Factors.” European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 27 (4): 401–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-017-1101-0.
Farajallah, Iman. 2023. “A Palestinian Psychologist Reckons with the Trauma Gaza Children Face After Two Months of Attacks.” CBC, December 9, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2290701891701.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Allen & Unwin.
Frater-Mathieson, Kaaren. 2004. “Refugee Trauma, Loss, and Grief: Implications for Interventions.” In Educational Interventions for Refugee Children: Theoretical Perspectives and Implementing Best Practice, edited by Richard Hamilton and Dennis Moore, 12–34. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Ghosh, Ratna, and Ali A. Abdi. 2004. Education and the Politics of Difference: Canadian Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Gibson, Margaret. 1984. “Approaches to Multicultural Education in the US: Some Conceptions and Assumptions.” Anthropology of Education Quarterly 15 (1): 94–119.
Giroux, Henry A. 1993. Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York: Peter Lang.
Gordon, Tuula, Elina Lahlma, Pirkko Hynninen, Tuija Metso, Tarja Palmu, and Tarja Tolonen. 1999. “Learning the Routines: ‘Professionalization’ of Newcomers in Secondary School.” Qualitative Studies in Education 12 (6): 689–705.
Gosine, Kevin. 2002. “Essentialism Versus Complexity: Conceptions of Racial Identity Construction in Educational Scholarship.” Canadian Journal of Education 27 (1): 81–100.
Haslam, Nick. 2006. “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (3): 252–64. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_4.
Hasmath, Reza. 2012. The Ethnic Penalty: Immigration, Education and the Labour Market. Burlington, VT, and Surrey, UK: Ashgate.
Hedegaard, Mariane. 2007. “The Development of Children’s Conceptual Relation to the World, with a Focus on Concept Formation in Preschool Children’s Activity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky, edited by Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch, 246–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1982. On the Way to Language. New York: Harper & Row.
Herrmann, Steffen K. 2011. “Social Exclusion: Practices of Misrecognition.” In Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated, edited by Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster, 133–50. New York: Springer.
Hoffman, Diane M. 1996. “Culture and Self in Multicultural Education: Reflections on Discourse, Text, and Practice.” American Educational Research Journal 33, no. 3 (Autumn): 545–69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i248888.
Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hughes, John, and Wes Sharrock. 1997. The Philosophy of Social Research, 3rd ed. London: Addison Wesley Longman.
Husserl, Edmund. (1936) 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Kanu, Yatta. 2008. “Educational Needs and Barriers for African Refugee Students in Manitoba.” Canadian Journal of Education 31 (4): 915–40.
Kaplan, Ida, Yvonne Stolk, Madeleine Valibhoy, Alan Tucker, and Judy Baker. 2016. “Cognitive Assessment of Refugee Children: Effects of Trauma and New Language Acquisition.” Transcultural Psychiatry 53 (1): 81–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461515612933.
Kemp, Peter. 1992. Emmanuel Levinas: En introduction [Emmanuel Levinas: An Introduction]. Göteborg, Sweden: Daidolos.
Kirk, David. 2004. “Beyond the ‘Academic’ Curriculum: The Production and Operation of Biopower in the Less-Studied Sites of Schooling.” In Dangerous Coalitions? The Uses of Foucault in the Study of Education, edited by Bernadette M. Baker and Katharina E. Heyning, 117–35. New York: Peter Lang.
Kirova, Anna. 2007. “Moving Childhoods: Children’s Lived Experiences with Immigration.” In Global Migration and Education: Schools, Children, and Families, edited by Leah Adams and Anna Kirova, 185–99. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kirova, Anna. 2013. “A Foreigner Among Strangers: The Lived World of a Newcomer Child in School.” Educational Research 4:127–37.
Kirova, Anna. 2015. “Critical and Emerging Discourses in Multicultural Education Literature: An (Updated) Review.” In Multiculturalism in Canada: Theories, Policies and Debates, edited by Shibao Guo and Lloyd Wong, 239–55. Rotterdam: Sense.
Kirova, Anna, Fauza Mohamed, and Michael Emme. 2006. “Learning the Ropes, Resisting the Rules: Immigrant Children’s Representation of the Lunchtime Routine Through Fotonovela.” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 4 (1). https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/16997.
Kirova, Anna, and Larry Prochner. 2015. “The Issue of Otherness in Pedagogical Theory and Practice: The Case of Roma.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 61, no. 4 (Winter): 381–98.
Kirova, Anna, Larry Prochner, and Christine Massing. 2019. Learning to Teach Young Children: Theoretical Perspectives and Implications for Practice. London: Bloomsbury.
Kramsch, Claire. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kronfeldner, Maria. 2018. What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lambrev, Veselina, Anna Kirova, and Larry Prochner. 2019. “Education Reforms for Inclusion? Interrogating Policy-Practice Disjunctions in Early Childhood Education in Bulgaria.” Education Inquiry 11 (2): 126–43.
Lesko, Nancy. 1988. “The Curriculum of the Body: Lessons from a Catholic High School.” In Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Leslie G. Roman, Linda K. Christian-Smith, and Elizabeth A. Ellsworth, 123–42. London: Falmer.
Lippitz, Wilfried. 2007. “Foreignness and Otherness in Pedagogical Contexts.” Phenomenology and Practice 1 (1): 76–96.
Lippitz, Wilfried, and Bas Levering. 2002. “And Now You Are Getting a Teacher with Such a Long Name . . .” Teaching and Teacher Education 18 (2): 205–13.
MacNevin, Joanne. 2012. “Learning the Way: Teaching and Learning with and for Youth from Refugee Backgrounds on Prince Edward Island.” Canadian Journal of Education 35 (3): 48–63.
McCoy, John S., W. Andy Knight, and Anna Kirova. 2011. “Xeno-Racism in Canada? Patterns of Exclusion and Integration.” Paper presented at Global Governance: Political Authority in Transition, annual conference of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montréal, Québec, March 16, 2011.
McLaren, Peter. 1995. Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge.
Mills, Carmen, and Julie Ballantyne. 2016. “Social Justice and Teacher Education: A Systematic Review of Empirical Work in the Field.” Journal of Teacher Education 67 (4): 263–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487116660152.
Montecinos, Carmen. 1995. “Culture as an Ongoing Dialog: Implications for Multicultural Teacher Education.” In Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, edited by Christine E. Sleeter and Peter L. McLaren, 291–307. Albany: SUNY Press.
Morrison, Marlene. 1996. “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Eating: A Hidden Curriculum for Food.” In Reshaping Education in the 1990s: Perspectives on Primary Schooling, edited by Rita Chawla-Duggan and Christopher J. Poole, 89–103. London: Falmer.
Nicolino, Venus M. 2006. “The Relationships Between Racism, Islamophobia, Religious Dogmatism, and Attitudes Toward War.” PhD diss., Alliant International University.
Packer, Martin, and Jessie Goicoechea. 2000. “Sociocultural and Constructivist Theories of Learning: Ontology, Not Just Epistemology.” Educational Psychologist 35 (4): 227–41.
Pérez, Michelle S., and Cinthya Saavedra. 2017. “A Call for Onto-Epistemological Diversity in Early Childhood Education and Care: Centering Global South Conceptualizations of Childhood/s.” Review of Research in Education 41 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X16688621.
Prochner, Larry. 2020. “‘Placing a School at the Tail of a Plough’: The European Roots of Indian Industrial Schools in Canada.” In From Disconnection to Reconciliation: Indigenous Education in Canada, edited by Sheila Carr-Stewart, 26–53. Vancouver: Purich Books.
Rezai-Rashti, Goli. 1994. “Islamic Identity and Racism.” Orbit 25:37–38.
Ridley, Charles R. 1995. Overcoming Unintentional Racism in Counseling and Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide to Intentional Intervention. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
Save the Children. 2019. Stop the War on Children: Protecting Children in 21st Century Conflict. London: Save the Children. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/pdf/report_stop_the_war_on_children.pdf/.
Schütz, Alfred. 1964. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” In Collected Papers II, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 91–105. The Hague: Martinus Nijihoff.
Simpson, Brenda. 2000. “Regulation and Resistance: Children’s Embodiment During the Primary-Secondary School Transition.” In The Body, Childhood, and Society, edited by Alan Prout, 60–77. London: Macmillan.
Skuza, Jennifer A. 2007. “Humanizing the Understanding of the Acculturation Experience with Phenomenology.” Human Studies 30 (4): 447–65.
Sleeter, Christine E., and Dolores Delgado Bernal. 2004. “Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, and Antiracist Education: Implications for Multicultural Education.” In Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, edited by James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee-Banks, 240–58. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Souto-Manning, Mariana, and Ayesha Rabadi-Raol. 2018. “(Re)centering Quality in Early Childhood Education: Toward Intersectional Justice for Minoritized Children.” Review of Research in Education 42:203–25.
Stewart, Jan. 2012. “Transforming Schools and Strengthening Leadership to Support the Educational and Psychosocial Needs of War-Affected Children Living in Canada.” Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 6 (3): 172–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2012.691136.
Stewart, Jan, Dania El Chaar, Kari McCluskey, and Kirby Borgardt. 2019. “Refugee Student Integration: A Focus on Settlement, Education, and Psychosocial Support.” Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education 14 (1): 55–70.
Strekalova, Ekaterina, and James L. Hoot. 2008. “What Is Special About Special Needs of Refugee Children? Guidelines for Teachers.” Multicultural Education 16, no. 1 (Fall): 21–24.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thorne, Barrie. 1993. Gender Play: Girls and Boys in Schools. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Todres, Les, Kathleen T. Galvin, and Immy Holloway. 2009. “The Humanization of Healthcare: A Value Framework for Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being 4:68–77.
UN General Assembly. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.
UN General Assembly. 1959. Declaration of the Rights of the Child. New York: United Nations. https://archive.crin.org/en/library/legal-database/un-declaration-rights-child-1959.html#:~:text=The%20child%20shall%20be%20entitled,a%20name%20and%20a%20nationality.&text=The%20child%20shall%20enjoy%20the,natal%20and%20post%2Dnatal%20care.
UN General Assembly. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York: United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child.
van Manen, Max. 1994. Researching Lived Experience. London, ON: Althouse Press.
Wideen, Marvin, and Kathleen A. Barnard. 1999. Impacts of Immigration on Education in British Columbia: An Analysis of Efforts to Implement Policies of Multiculturalism in Schools. No. RIIM WP 99-02. Vancouver: Vancouver Centre of Excellence, Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis.
Yon, Daniel A. 2000. Elusive Culture: Schooling, Race, and Identity in Global Times. Albany: SUNY Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zine, Jasmin. 2004. “Anti-Islamophobia Education as Transformative Pedagogy: Reflections from the Education Frontlines.” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21 (3): 110–18.
Zine, Jasmin. 2006. “Unveiled Sentiments: Gendered Islamophobia and Experiences of Veiling Among Muslim Girls in a Canadian Islamic School.” Equity and Excellence in Education 39 (3): 239–52.
Zine, Jasmin. 2008. Canadian Islamic Schools: Unravelling the Politics of Faith, Gender, Knowledge, and Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Part III. Countering Dehumanization: State Apologies and New Approaches