‘I don’t want them to feel like we’re part of the establishment’: teachers’ learning to work with refugee families as entangled becomings

ABSTRACT

In this paper we ‘plug in’ ideas from post-qualitative thinking to read empirical material from Erasmus+ project, Open School Doors, and mobilise new ways of conceptualising teachers’ work with newly arrived families. Driven by commitments to inclusion and social justice teacher participants described tacit, in-the-moment, knowledge-making, that felt contingent and risky, as they sought to respond to encounters with families that demanded compassionate action but pushed them beyond the threshold of professional certainty and the would-be neutralities of ‘professional’ identities. We understand these affective responses to the work of teaching as ‘abductive’ moments of breakdown, rupture and estrangement, that draw attention to the always already becoming nature of professional practice. We put to work the concepts of entanglement, assemblage and rhizomes to make use of ‘abductive’ moments as productive opportunities for exploration of teachers’ messy, implicated, intra-relatedness to their practice worlds and to imagine models of professional learning that promote connection and knowledge-in-the-making as ethical, ‘response-able’ post/rhizo-professional alternative to linear forms of professional learning. Our discussion is embedded in a specific context but has important broader implications for the design of teacher education as preparation for complex anticipated working lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Newly arrived families
• Teacher becomings
• rhizomatics
• assemblages
• rhizo-pedagogy

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Open School Doors project contributors: Laura Collins; Barbara Forbes; Lucy Hudson; Emma Johnson; Francis Johnson; Denise Macdonald; Colleen Molloy; Jamie Morgan-Green; Kelly Steatham; Amelia Turnbull; Erika Walkington. In memory of Caroline Williams 

This work was supported by Erasmus Plus under Grant 2017-1-DE03-KA201-035602

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopaedia/swamp/.

2. Add Jackson and Mazzei 2012.

3. Does my social positioning (gender, ethnicity, linguistic, socio-economic) make it difficult for some families to foster sustained connections, dictating types of involvement?Do I, or colleagues, hold stereotypical and homogenous perceptions based on social markers (gender, ethnicity, linguistic, socio-economic factors)?How are minority ethnic/linguistic families accepted by established communities?How can the enrichment brought to educational settings as a result of cultural and linguistic diversity be understood, appreciated and shared across the wider school community? (2017:313).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Erasmus Plus [2017-1-DE03-KA201-035602].