Refugee children saying and doing citizenship: Global-local tensions and common civic spaces in an international school in the United States

Abstract

Abstract International Baccalaureate (IB) schools have traditionally been associated with displaced expatriates and globally mobile privileged elites. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of state funded Title I IB schools across the United States, many of them serving immigrant and refugee children and youth. However, this unprecedented access of immigrant and refugee students to an international education is an underrepresented field in the education literature. How do immigrant and refugee children construct and perform citizenship in such contexts? How does the school utilize their cultural and global capital? In this article, I present the findings of a qualitative case study conducted in a fourth grade classroom in a public charter international school, River Song Elementary (pseudonym), serving immigrant, refugee and local children in one of the largest refugee resettlement areas in the United States. Through document analysis, focus groups, individual interviews, and ethnographic observations over a period of twelve weeks, I explored the children’s constructions and performances of citizenship. I found that there were tensions between global and local narratives that trickled down to the school and classroom climate dichotomizing various aspects of children’s identities and cultures as well as the ways in which they understood and enacted citizenship. Yet, guided by their teachers, the children were actively engaged in the construction of common civic spaces where different forms of expression played a singular agentic, participatory and unifying role.