Learning in Culturally Heterogeneous Worlds: How Immigrant Parents Reinvent "Education"

• In Event: Learning "In-Between" Cultural Worlds: An Immigrant Perspective on Education

Abstract

This paper focuses on how education in immigrant families is reshaped in response to the multiple and diverse educational practices they come in contact with after migration. How do parents orient and educate their children when they migrate to a country that is new to them and that they themselves need to learn to cope with? And how do migrant families do this in culturally heterogeneous settings in which their practices of child raising are confronted with those of others? Research on the cultural orientations of immigrants has predominantly been set up from a majority position in which minority populations are judged in terms of their adaptation process, their school results or their economic success. Here, in contrast, my attempt is to understand the learning of immigrants from their specific social and cultural situation. Instead of seeing immigrant education as a gradual movement towards the mainstream culture I consider it as the result of the particular nature of the confrontation between groups and practices of a different origin in which the ‘original’ meanings are transformed in the act of translating. The paper takes a socio-cultural perspectives on learning in that it connects individual learning processes to processes of collective transformations (Engeström, 1987; Lave & Wenger, 1991). However, while borrowing from the concept of cultural translation (Papastergiadis, 2000) these perspectives are reframed in an attempt to include the perspective of cultural diversity into socio-cultural theories of learning and development.

Author

• Mariette Haan De, Utrecht University