Educational Inclusion of Migrant Children in the Discourse and Practices of Teachers in Private and Public Russian Schools

Abstract

Problems of inclusion of ethnic minorities from migrant communities in host societies are often associated less with explicit discrimination than with questions about the ways in which the majority population understands cultural and ethnic diversity. The institution of education is one of the key channels for the inclusion of ethnic and cultural groups. We attempt to explicate the key features of the everyday context of the educational process of children from migrant families. This work is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with teachers of secondary schools. It also includes a case study of a private educational initiative that examines the practice of inclusive education of non-Russian-speaking children in Russia. The specificity of modern migration processes, along with their transnational nature, corresponds to the variability and transformation of the discourse around the “adequacy” of adaptation measures, which tend to be revealed in the logic of assimilation. Our interest is how this process is evaluated by teachers and tutors working with migrant children. We explore how teachers’ interpretation of cultural differences and the goals of educational inclusion of migrant children affects the approach to the educational process, as well as the nature of socio-cultural inclusion in general.