European Journal of Education & Language Review, Issue 1

International students:
Who gets to intern?

In the first article of this inaugural issue, Gjini and Hernandez-Gantes raise questions of how language, citizenship and discipline intersect in shaping international students’ access to opportunity. Using a quantitative analysis of survey data about internship programmes, the authors challenge perceptions of equity in participation, and share unsettling insights into how academic disciplines and visa regimes provide structural filtering across institutionalized pathways to employment.

Educational policies for immigrant children: Hidden barriers

In the article that follows, Dogutas compares the educational policies for children with a migration background in the United States of America and Türkiye. Her analysis shows how some ostensibly inclusive institutional practices actually normalise inequality. These include the expectation that immigrants comply with documentation requirements or deploy their own resources to compensate for missing educational provision, in order to have access to additional instruction. Such practices, which outwardly present as neutral or supportive, avoid signalling exclusion overtly, but they nevertheless reproduce social inequality. The study also questions the limitations of formally inclusive but structurally evasive technocratic solutions that serve to contain, rather than integrate, linguistic and cultural diversity.

International students: From welcome to surveillance

The experience of international students is also the topic of Acar’s article, which discusses the ‘precarious reality’ in which such students often find themselves. Acar notes that international students are often subject to a regime of hyper-visibility, which celebrates their status as diversity symbols. However, their lived experience (especially in the case of students from the Global South or people with racialized accents) is also typified by intense monitoring regimes, emotional labor and pressures to self-censor. The findings of this article are particularly timely and relevant, as they reposition visa status and language, not as adjustment problems with which international students have to contend, but as sites of injustice.

Transformative practice:
Critical awareness is just the first step

Next, Clarisse Halpern, Hasan Aydin and Bruno Halpern report on a longitudinal case study that examined how pre-service teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages engaged with the humanistic and social-justice-oriented content of their academic program of studies. They note that, while awareness is a requisite for transformative practice, it often leads only to positive dispositions towards marginalized others and surface inclusivity. The study raises the sobering concern that transformative practice cannot develop simply through exposure to concepts (cf. Kostoulas, 2024); rather, it requires structured discomfort, reflexivity and commitment to challenging established ways of thinking and acting as a language educator.

Japanese-background children
in Greek schools:
Hybrid identities in monolingual contexts

The contribution by Natsi and Vitsou raises questions about the inclusion of minorities, by bringing into focus an under-researched cultural group, children with Japanese heritage in Greek schools. This qualitative study synthesises established research traditions (interviews) and less traditional ones (language portraits) to show how these children negotiate belonging, identity, and linguistic positioning in a largely monolingual education system, and how they manage the tension between high linguistic competence and positioning as perpetual outsiders. In doing so, Natsi and Vitsou challenge assimilationist assumptions in educational discourse, and foreground belonging as an ethical, rather than a purely affective, issue.

The “Then” and “Now” Politics of Fear

The final article in the issue, by Deiri and Burkhard, shifts the focus from access and participation to the lived experiences of people whose daily lives unfold within language regimes shaped by renewed securitization, anti-immigrant policy, and linguistic nationalism. The article, a multilingual duo-ethnography of fear in the lives of two immigrant female women scholars in the United States and their research participants, reframes fear not as an individual emotion but as an emergent outgrowth of structural violence sedimented in official signage, executive orders, and even seemingly innocuous discourses (e.g., the affirmation that one speaks English “well enough”). The study also shows how multilingual intimate spaces provide scope for survival, healing, and resistance.

Footnotes

1. Kostoulas, A. (ed.). (2019). Challenging boundaries in language education. Springer. ↩︎
2. Deleuze, G. (1986). The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, trans.). University of Minnesota Press. [xes_{MικρότεροTουTρία}] ↩︎
3. Generally, Scopus only considers journals for indexing after they have been around for three years. We intend to have the journal indexed at that time, and we will not be charging any article processing fees, until the journal passes that threshhold. ↩︎