190097 SE Professionalisation and Professionalism in Pedagogical Professions (2016S)

Transnational migration has created spaces of tension in eucational settings and spaces in formal and non-formal educational institutions. It takes place within fluid social spaces that are constantly reworked through migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society. These “arenas” are multi-layered and multi-sited, including not just the home and host countries but other sites around the globe that connect migrants to those with whom they share same national, ethnic, linguistic or religious memberships. A culturally heterogenous classroom, or any other educational setting, is one such social space constantly reworked through simultaneous cultural embeddedness of the immigrant students in interaction with their nonimmigrant teachers/instructors/trainers and peers. And as such, it is an intersection space of “collision of many layers, relations, perspectives and cosmologies” (Khagram/Levitt, 2008: 12).
The central question oft he course is: What is it like for teachers and/or professionals in the field of education to work in these spaces of collision, tension, disagreement and rupture? Drawing on the methodology of Researching Lived Experience (van Manen) we will engage in an empirical and conceptual inquiry of the experience of professionalism in transnational educational settings.