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This chapter explores the role of language in constructing spaces of belonging in the relational lives of young migrant children in Ireland. In particular, it investigates how friendship is negotiated in linguistically normative school spaces.

The chapter draws on the findings and analysis of a larger study of Irish childhoods, race and belonging. The research involved qualitative work with 42 children, from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Research was undertaken with classroom groups in two primary schools in a large town in the west of Ireland, and with a small sample of migrant children and their parents in family homes. Arts-based and visual methods were incorporated throughout the data collection process.

Findings from the research indicate intersections between constructions of belonging in linguistic spaces such as the school and possibilities/constraints for children’s peer friendships. While ‘home’ languages and bilingual ability were valued in home contexts, even these spaces were inflected by the ‘English-only’ exigencies of school and broader societal spaces. Regarding peer friendship, the findings show that proficiency in speaking English was central, both in terms of accessing friendship rituals through ‘talk’, and, importantly, in terms of narrativizing self as viable school pupil and peer.

The significance of this work lies in its examination of the complexity of language as it functions in children’s relational lives. As well as being a pragmatic skill in negotiating and maintaining friendship, it identifies language as a marker of belonging that is shaped by and shapes school spaces, and which has implications for children’s peer friendships in this context. As such, the study points to a role for schools in engaging with and promoting recognition of children’s multilingual resources.

The structures, procedures and relationships within schools both constrain and enable the ways that children and teachers can engage with the everyday ‘business’ of literacy learning. In schools and classrooms, the resources available to children, the spaces in which they work and how adults interact with them are often decided upon by others, including their teachers. In this chapter, we focus specifically on access to mobile digital resources and important spaces in the school, arguing that opportunities for children to be critical consumers and producers of text can be provided when children are afforded some control of decisions about how, where and when people, materials, tools and texts are used. Drawing from data collected as part of a larger study of learning to write in the early years of schooling, at two different schools in different Australian states, we examine two cases of ‘disruption’ negotiated by children and their teachers. We explore the potential of mobile technologies in children’s hands as key elements in changing the socio-spatial power relations around text production that usually hold in schools. These instances are explicit opportunities to study what is possible when young children and teachers work to change children’s relationships to materials, spaces and people in productive and provocative ways. We analyse the digital texts produced and the work of teachers and children to foreground digital literacies as a way to influence what goes on in their schools.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Departing from the contribution of the Social Studies of Childhood, this research aimed to understand children’s relations with school based on their economic, social, and geographical belongings. In order to understand the way children from a big city in Southern Brazil build their relations with school, 36 children between 11 and 13 years old participated. The research was developed in two public schools in two neighbourhoods which are very different in terms of family income, violence taxes, access to cultural equipment, public green spaces, public and social freedoms, among other characteristics. Both contexts have big inequalities, and one of them is a context of high social vulnerability. Through participant observations, focus group discussions, and registers in notebooks, it was intended to comprehend not just what school represents to the children but also which elements structure their childhood experiences. The listening to children’s voices revealed that school is important for both groups. For the children who attend the school in the border of the city, school represents future, learning, the possibility to be together with their friends, and also a leisure space. For the children who attend the school in the city centre, the institution is their main social space where they can be together with their friends. Children from the city center school also acknowledge that the inequality between public and private schools is a social injustice. In a country constituted by strong social inequalities, children’s knowledge contributed to comprehend how territoriality, poverty, and social exclusion are related and how they shape the relations children establish with school. This chapter aims to discuss how social inequalities create different school representations, highlighting the specificities in each context.

This chapter focuses on a new school-level instrument for international benchmarking and policy learning – the OECD’s PISA-based Test for Schools (“PISA for Schools”) – and how it helps to constitute new global spaces and relations of education policymaking and governance. Unlike main PISA, PISA for Schools assesses school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Schools are thus positioned within a globally commensurate space of measurement and comparison, and are encouraged to engage with, and learn from, the policy expertise proffered by “high-performing” international schooling systems and the OECD itself. Drawing suggestively across literature and theorizing around new spatialities associated with globalization, the “becoming topological” of culture and “power-topologies,” and informed by document analysis and interviews with 33 policy actors from across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, the chapter examines how PISA for Schools helps the OECD to directly “reach into” local schooling spaces. This respatialized PISA for Schools, or “PISA to Schools”, provides the OECD with the means to influence how schooling is practised and conceived at the level of local policy implementation, while limiting mediation by national and/or subnational politics. Moreover, the school-to-system performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools arguably provide one of the first – if not the only – international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. This furthers the relevance and diffusion of “lessons” from main PISA and the OECD to schools themselves, and helps extend the epistemic communities through which the OECD practices its global epistemological governance of education.

The racial makeup of the United States' elementary school population is in flux. While much discussion addresses the shrinking White population and the growing Latinx population, less highlighted is the growing number of individuals who identify as belonging to two or more races. This group of individuals currently constitutes the youngest, fastest growing racial subgroup. According to the US Census' projections, the two or more races population will grow by 226% between 2014 and 2060, almost double the Asian population, the next fastest growing subgroup. Though individuals with multiplicity to their racial backgrounds have existed in the United States since its inception, only recently has the government provided the option for individuals to quantify their self-reported belonging to multiple races. The resulting statistics alert educators to the fact that individuals identifying as biracial and multiracial are going to be an increasingly sizable group of students requiring, as all children do, individualized care and support within school walls. In this chapter, I draw upon Black-White biracial women's elementary school recounts to help educational practitioners understand lived experiences that inform young girls' navigations of the intersections of their Blackness and Whiteness in schooling spaces.

In this comparative study, we explore the ways eight queer university students from Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick, Canada, use cellphilm production (cellphone + film production + intention) to share their experiences, make calls for change, and forge solidarities across racial, cultural, and national contexts. Engaging in cellphilm production as a research method for social change, we ask: What are queer, trans, and non-binary students’ experiences in campus spaces? What are the commonalities and tensions that exist between their experiences? How might cellphilm production work to disrupt unsafe campus spaces and create transnational queer solidarities? Through cellphilm production, participants crafted narratives highlighting significant systemic barriers, and speaking back to micro and macro aggressions. Both participating groups expressed feelings of exclusion and institutional neglect and highlighted their university’s disregard toward accommodating physical spaces, such as washrooms, downplaying of verbal hostilities, and other microaggressions. Participants also noted that students were at the forefront of creating purposefully queer spaces. Our comparative study disrupts the erasure of the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary university students in Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick and speaks back to hegemonic whiteness in the context of queer campus spaces in New Brunswick, Canada.

Authors’ experiences encourage teachers and learners to consider the impact of integrating an intersensory transformative curriculum that explores how the senses interact with each other in different combinations and hierarchies (see Howes, 2003). Such efforts may require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the senses in understanding self with a focus on increasing consciousness, meaning-making, and embodied experiences (Boske, 2011b; Burns, 1978; Eisner, 1994; Noddings, 1984). All human experiences are essential to interpretation of the senses. Attending to the sensorium, which embeds the senses throughout learning, may encourage connectedness among self and others; and ultimately, provide spaces to promote equity in schools. Teachers and learners, in developing this socioecological perspective by designing curricula to include readings and activities centered on deepening personal knowings, can work to collectively engage in making connections among self, social justice and equity, and addressing larger societal issues (Furman, 2012; Jean-Marie et al., 2009).