Session Information
07 SES 17 B, What Shall We Do with Next-gen Children? Educating with Newcomers in Mind
Symposium
Contribution
Gibran's poem On Children (1923) directs our attention to the intricacies in addressing the issue of children's belonging, a fundamental need of every human being and a matter of recognitional and associational justice. However, although children want and need to belong, Gibran cautions that children do not belong to and are not owned by anybody. This raises the issue of the responsibilities of adults for their educational upbringing as not being overly constrained by specific expectations to be and feel at home. The question of children's belonging becomes more pronounced where the education of migrant children is concerned. Immigrant children's bonding to the school is crucial to their educational development and economic independence (Bondy et al. 2019, Janta & Harle 2016). Parents of children with backgrounds of migration who experience themselves as "guests" within schools are often grateful for education despite its assimilative tendencies and are fundamentally concerned with making a good living. Nevertheless, the price they pay for assimilating into ways of life prevalent to their new home country cannot be underestimated, considering the fraught experiences of living in borderlands, in between differing cultures pertaining to their original home and new home (Ahmed 1999, Anzaldua 2017, Winer 2021). Educators, even those committed to integrating children socially, politically, and culturally are challenged by their obligations to nurture children's freedom of thought, expression, association, and action. Because of the increasingly interconnected being in the world (due to globalization, technological advances, war, disease, ecological destruction and climate change) this paper argues that rather than considering children as belonging to particular homes, their education should aim for their belonging to the world ( Biesta 2021). This entails the decentralization of the seemingly universal conceptions of what it means to be human in the world (Heidegger 2011) combined with a paradigm shift in education that accentuates the uncertainties of belonging to the world rather than the world belonging to human beings (Braidotti 2013, Snaza 2014) and the future responsibilities of being in the world with and next to human and non-human others. To borrow Gibran's metaphors what does it take for educators to be the 'stable bows' for children to belong to 'life's longing for itself' ( Gibran 1923)
References
Ahmed S. (1999) Home and Away. Narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2(3). 329–347. Anzaldua G. (198r) Borderlands/ La Frontera, United States Aunt Lute Books. Bondy, J. M. et al (2019). The Children of Immigrants' Bonding to School: Examining the Roles of Assimilation, Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Social Bonds. Urban Education, 54(4), 592–62. Biesta G. ( 2021) World-Centred Education. A View for the Present New York, Routledge. Delpit L. (2006) Other people's children. Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, New Press. Braidotti R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge, Polity Press Gibran K. (1923) The Prophet, New York, Knopf. Heidegger, M. (2011b). Letter on humanism. Basic Writings. Oxon: Routledge. Janta B. & Harle E. (2016) Education of Migrant Children. Cambridge, California. Rand Europe. Snaza N. (2014. "Toward a Posthuman Education." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30 (2): 39-55. Winer N. (2021) "A Home of My Own": The Experience of Children of International Migrants" Clinical Social Work Journal 49:325–335.
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