A newborn child enters the world of pre-existing order established by the previous generations. However, some children accept, others reject the familial and/or societal rules. This prompts Lippitz to ask, "Does the interrelationship of successive generations follow a measure of continuity, or is the intergenerational process principally of discontinuity?" (2007, p. 90). This presentation explores the intergenerational processes from the generative phenomenological perspective that understands the constitutional significance of a "generation gap" as a kind of alienness in a generative home (Steinbock, 1995, p. 230). More specifically, it explores immigrant children's encounters with the alien world of school in their host country. Building on Lippitz's notion of education as "thoroughly interpenetrated by foreignness" (2007, p. 78) it asks, if the experience of schooling can be described as a "foreign imposition" on all children that results in their becoming cultural hybrids, how is this different for children who are (im)migrants or newcomers to the school? Particularly important here is Steinbock's (1995) description of this relationship as "liminal," that is, home and alien are formed by being mutually delimiting as home and as alien, as normal and abnormal. From the homeworld point of view, the mutual delimitation of home and alien implicates a "responsibility" (Steinbock, 1995, p. 185) for the alien in the sense of responsiveness to the indispensability of difference born of the recognition that to obliterate the alien is simultaneous to undermine the potential of the home for renewal. In the context of schooling, this means that as pedagogues, we recognize that intergenerational foreignness is present in the relationship between educator and child and that the child is not entirely accessible to us as we are not entirely accessible to the child. This difference is indispensable not only because pedagogy is "the human charge of protecting and teaching the young to live in this world and to take responsibility for themselves, for others and for the continuance and welfare of the world" (Van Manen, 1991, p. 7), but also because the difference between myself and my own child or the child I am teaching opens the possibility for me to become engaged in a critical renewal of my homeworld though the transgressive act of encounter with the child as a foreigner. This renewal is not a mere repetition, but an "absolute ethical demand" consisting in the struggle toward a "better humanity" and "genuine human culture" (Steinbock, 1995, p. 200).

Lippitz, W. (2007). Foreignness and otherness in pedagogical contexts. Phenomenology and Practice, 1 (1), 76-96. Steinbock, A.J. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Hüsserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Van Manen, M. (1991). The tact of teaching: The meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness. London, ON: Althouse Press.