Changing landscapes, changing narratives: socio-cultural approach for teaching global migrants

Abstract

Given the proliferation of new media technologies today’s immigrant children and youth are experiencing the effects of time–space compression in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Increasingly, they are able to simultaneously engage in developmental activities across their native and host societies. If migration is no longer a one-way binary choice, but rather a culturally dialectical process involving fluid articulation of consciousness and identity across multiple cultural landscapes, how can we structure teaching and learning to support cognitive development of immigrant children and youth as they gradually assume the responsibilities of adulthood? This work builds on socio-cultural theory in order to describe sense-making, a psychological process situated in interaction with extant social, cultural and physical environments, which employs language actively woven into a narrative as a tool for organising consciousness and perception. Practical recommendations stemming from this theoretical framework are explored in order to enable the tools for curriculum design that support bicultural and transnational developmental orientations.

Keywords:

• Psychological development
• time-space compression
• immigration
• sense-making
• narrative development
• social media