AVE at CDME 2025
Educational Systems as Racialized Structures:
Narratives of Exclusion and Resistance Among Immigrant-Background Youth in Germany
February 15, 2024 - August 19 2025
Hyunjung, Hansun, and Noor
Why This Matters
Our project shows that despite decades of reforms — from Ausländerpädagogik (foreigner pedagogy) to intercultural and diversity-sensitive education in Germany — a core pattern remains: schools place the burden of adjustment on racialized students rather than questioning the structures of exclusion.
Diversity policies are important, but if they avoid naming racism, they risk reinforcing it.
Teachers’ racialized discipline, even subtle comments, can create an existential threat to belonging.
When distress is interpreted as a student’s personal weakness rather than a response to racism, structural critique is silenced.
Ultimately, this damages trust in schools and forces students to navigate education with strategies of self-silencing, assimilation, or internalized self-blame.
Our Takeaway
Education must move beyond diversity talk to structural anti-racism. This means:
Naming racism explicitly.
Training teachers not only in “cultural sensitivity,” but in anti-racist reflexivity.
Co-developing pedagogy with racialized students and communities.
Recognizing podcasts, digital storytelling, and community media as valuable educational spaces.
In short, anti-racist education means shifting from managing “difference” to dismantling inequality — and centering those who have long been pushed to the margins.