Educating the New Century Cuban Citizen

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Well-known for its high levels of inclusion and academic quality, education in Cuba is also openly ideological; it strives to produce citizens with strong socialist and patriotic values, capable of maintaining and strengthening the Revolution. Cuba’s tentative moves towards rapprochement with the United States have produced a new flurry of international interest in the future of the Revolution, a future that will be defined by today’s young Cubans and the success of that educational project.

Through variously analyzing formal and informal learning, family and school, work and play, and, vitally, the testimony of young Cubans gained through extensive research within the country, the papers in this panel combine to offer a wide-ranging and detailed assessment of who young Cubans are, how they have been formed by their education and how they will use that education to form the Cuba of tomorrow.

Sub Track

• Pedagogy and the Politics of Education

Chair

• Parvathi Kumaraswami, University of Reading

Individual Presentations

• Cuban Youth of the Special Period: Constructing Their Dreams - Denise F Blum, Oklahoma State University

• From Martí to MMORPGs: Constructing Childhood Identity in Granma Province - Miranda R Lickert

• The Lost Generation?: Education and the New Cuban Citizen Identity - Rosemary Smith, University of Nottingham

• Obstáculos y Contradicciones: Cuban Parents' Views on Preparing Young People for Schooling, Work and Citizenship - Jenny R Dawley-Carr, Minnesota State University - Mankato