Transborder pedagogies of the home in contexts of forced repatriation

ABSTRACT

Drawing from an ethnographic study with families who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I explore what I call parents’ transborder pedagogies of the home, or the home-based educational practices that adults with experiences across transnational institutions draw upon to prepare their children for life and learning on both sides of the border. I argue it is important to understand parents of forced repatriation as transborder thinkers who draw upon a range of transnational knowledges that push against mononational expectations to educate their children and make challenging schooling decisions. Findings illustrate how caregivers and children may vary in their alignment regarding these decisions, especially when U.S.-born children’s return to the United States for schooling would entail new arrangements of family separation due to the lack of authorised pathways for their parents’ return.

KEYWORDS:

• transborder
• immigration and schooling
• pedagogies of the home
• family migration
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Fulbright, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation for their support of this research and Andrea Ortiz for her support with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All proper names are pseudonyms.

2 All quotations originally occurred in Spanish and have been translated by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fulbright Association (Research Fellowship); National Academy of Education (Post-Doctoral Fellowship); Spencer Foundation (Post-Doctoral Fellowship).