Educating the Next Generation Reflections on Crises, Migration, and Education

This book offers perspectives on how "education as we know it" is being challenged by the complexity of "nextness" that no longer allows for taking deeply grounded assumptions on the meaning of education as granted. This book interrogates ontological, ethical, and political challenges that immigrant children face.

With the global situation in which more and more children are displaced, direct intergenerational transmission is broken, suspended, or complicated and made incoherent, and “things of concern” may be radically different for policymakers, for teachers, students, or their parents. Even the concept of the child as one who needs to be educated before they start participating in adult life cannot be taken for granted in this context. What needs and what can be passed on — and what is worth passing in this context? How do we conceptualize education to encounter newcomers in their realities of being both native and strange, inmate and neighbour or alien, temporal and spatial — and how do we address them all as worth of address? These questions will shine through the authors' reflections on crisis, education, and migration in the complex context of war, climatic catastrophe, displacement, hospitality and institutionalised hostility.  

This book suggests significant ideas for educational theory and practice responsive to the multi-dimensional crisis of which massive migrations is the most pressing feature in school nowadays.

Chapters 2,9,10, and 12 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Springerlink.

Chapter 1. Introduction: What Shall We Do with the Next-Gen Children? Introduction, or afterword before the text.- Chapter 2. Nextness: A Spatial corrective to temporalizing migration and the education of Newcomer Children, Wills Kalisha & Tomasz Szkudlarek.- Chapter 3. Arriving Thrown: The Facticity and Challenges of Dwelling as a Migrant Child- Lana Parker.- Chapter 4. Indispensability of Difference: Pedagogical Responsiveness to (Im)migrant Students’ Foreignness- Anna Kirova.- Chapter 5. “Look, this is your world (too)” Educational generosity beyond integration and hospitality. Piotr & Joris.- Chapter 6. Belonging to the World. On Children, Education and Migration- Simone Galea.- Chapter 7. Welcome to a planet in crisis: educational hospitality in the Anthropocene. Claudia Rutenberg.- Chapter 8. Educating in the Anthropocene by doing Community with Trees- Claire Meunier Kjetland & Frédérique Brossard Børhaug.- Chapter 9. Facing Uncertainty and Conflict: Stories of ethical decision-making and teacher leadership when educating newly arrived students for democratic participation. Eivind Larsen.- Chapter 10. Embracing the Language Barrier: Ignoring Misunderstandings in Teaching Language to newly arrived Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in Norway. Wills Kalisha.- Chapter 11. Multicultural Tact. Representing the World in a Culturally Diverse Society. Tommaso & Line Hilt.- Chapter 12. Stateless, futureless, purposeless? A critical reflection on educating the next generation of refugees. Inga C. Storen.

Wills Kalisha is Associate Professor of Education at NLA University College in Norway. He holds a PhD in Education from The University of Oslo and wrote his thesis on the phenomenological experience of waiting for asylum by unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Norway. His work focuses on continental education, phenomenology of practice, and the intersection between education (continental) and migration. He has researched on the intersection between different existential phenomena and education and as it relates to children living in protracted refugee situations and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Kenya and Norway respectively. His work has primarily focused on the lived experiences of young people first in protracted refugee situations and secondly in host nations. This research has been anchored on existential questions of what education might mean for those in protracted situations and whether its meaning matters to them in their realities in the refugee camp? He questions whether it only matters that children are educated, or it equally matters what they are educated about. He has also interrogated what it might mean to educate children who seek asylum alone and what education- in “temporality” means for unaccompanied children. In these explorations, he amalgamates hermeneutics phenomenology as a research methodology and educational theory to describe lived experiences of the young people on the margins and their teachers.