This paper calls attention to Cross-Culture Kids’ (CCKs) need for cultural transition care in Lithuania by suggesting a cultural narrative intervention approach.

As student mobility becomes ever more common globally, schools are faced with reconsidering their role in identity curation as part of adolescent well-being, directly affecting student performance and learning outcomes (Mahoney and Barron, 2020). Alongside repeated relocation comes significant personal and social difficulties often overlooked by its benefits to the international mobile youth. Ven Reken (2002) termed Cross-Culture Kids (CCKs) as “(those) who are living/ have lived in – or meaningfully interacted with – two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during the first eighteen years of life". They experience being transience, or, on the move, and are in the constant status of 'transition', which is the change from one place, state, or condition to another (Pollock & Van Reken, 2017). Many see CCKs as victims of globalisation who is left to deal with the consequences of where culture and identity collide (Carter & McNulty, 2012). As the educational needs of CCKs differing from their non-expatriate counterparts is much acknowledged, scholarship has largely investigated four pedagogical consequences due to social and emotional issues as implications of living an internationally mobile lifestyle: 1) identity, 2) sense of belonging, 3) grief & transition, and, 4) coping strategies. Killguss (2008) found that many CCKs suffer from "authenticity anxiety"- and not having solid definitions of one's identity can cause problems later in life, developmental trauma such as high-risk Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) was evident (Crossman & Wells, 2022).

This is especially true as they are considered alien and abnormal in mono-cultural societies like Lithuania (Garšvė and Mažeikiene, 2019). As a historically emigration heavy country (Eurostat, 2015), the Lithuanian context is specific to CCKs care as only in 2018 did Lithuanian schools first experience receiving a continuation of steep increase of CCKs. This included repatriated Lithuanian pupils post-Brexit or due to the COVID pandemic, and refugee children due to the recent European political climate. As the key agent of socialisation, schools are responsible for providing spaces in mainstream classrooms for multi-contextual narratives of identity to be expressed and differentiated cultural representation to be recognised. Changes have been called for with sensitivity, reflexivity and interdisciplinary collaboration (Bagdonaitė, 2020). Yet, a clear framework to aid the integration of these youth whose lives have been utterly disrupted by mobility has yet to be provided to Lithuanian schools (Chu & Ziaunienė, 2021). This paper proposes a cultural and identity narrative intervention as a pedagogical strategy for school agents to foster identity narrative spaces and to provide language for cultural transition care to be explored.

The research question that this paper looks to answer are:

1. How do narrative interventions aid CCKs in Lithuania in developing their identity, belonging and place?
2. How may narrative interventions facilitate the development of cultural transition awareness in Lithuanian educational settings?
3. What are the implications of narrative interventions for Lithuanian educators to better assist CCKs in the process of cultural transitions?

This piece is the result of a serial narrative workshop intervention that borrows from the TARMAC ‘multicultural story’ framework (Ward and Keck, 2021). It is a guided framework that aid focus group discussions with individuals who have experienced multiple cultures growing up. The collaborative process of making sense of the multicultural participants’ identity formation prompts deep reflection and understanding that hinders growth in self-recognition, relationships, belonging, and loss (Chu, 2022). The ten-sessions framework covers topics such as: Defining home and creating the experience of home, CCK strengths and resources, building relationships across cultures, experiences of cultural identity, cross-culture transition paradoxes, responding to transition, narrating cross-culture stories, and celebrating change. The framework has been applied on two bases: a pedagogical strategy and a pedagogical intervention. The framework has been applied as a pedagogical strategy where rigorous reflexivity was prompted by encouraging calling on memory in the communication about selves (Goodall, 2001). It is also applied as a pedagogical intervention as it gives voice to the much-hidden CCK stories in Lithuania. The provision of such a safe reflective space for CCKs is an attempt to combine pedagogical action with research and proposes a tool that calls for a transformative rather than informative intervention (Baldwin, 2012). The intervention lasted ten weeks and was conducted with a group of eight CCKs aged between 16-18. The participants were recruited based on snowball sampling targeting CCKs from different schools in a major city in Lithuania through local schools that offer bilingual study programs. After the voluntary signing up have been received, the project was communicated to both the schools that the youth belongs to at the time of the study, and the CCKs’ parents’ permission was gained. Ethical protocols were informed and the school psychologists and social and emotional support teams were informed about their participation. Post the intervention, six CCK participants were interviewed about their experience of the workshops with both feedback and recommendations for future improvements. The interviews were semi-structured and conducted with individual participants online. Open-ended questions were discussed, including topics relating to self-identification culturally and socially (three questions), recap and report of change on home, identity, and belonging (nine questions), and feedback on the intervention process (7 questions). Each interview lasted around sixty minutes. The interviews were recorded with consent and stored in the official university cloud space. All interviews were transcribed for thematic analysis.

Findings showed that narrative-based, cultural dialogues allow for CCKs to explore and express the non-dominant identities which do not otherwise have a space to be acknowledged, especially in mainstream classrooms. The analysis leads to the implications of philosophical and practical education approaches exploring identity and intercultural communication in alternative and non-traditional forms. Overall, this paper contributes to the formation of cross-culture transitional care awareness and strategies which may be implemented by Lithuanian school agents or included as part of teacher training. Proposals from some of the CCK participants who expressed willingness to run the workshops within their schools for younger peers also prompt future possibilities for children-led participatory action research, as the next phase of this project.

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