Migration and Education in a Multicultural World: Culture, Loss, and Identity

Arising from the legacies of the twentieth century - unprecedented worldwide migration, unrelenting global conflict and warring, unchecked materialist consumption, and unconscionable environmental degradation - are important questions about the toll of loss such changes exact, individually and collectively. As large-scale and ubiquitous as these changes are, their deep specificity re-inscribes the importance of place as a critical construct. Attending to such specificity emphasizes the interconnections between contexts and broader movements and remains a prudent route to articulating critical interconnections among places and peoples in complex times. This book of essays turns to such specificity as a means to examine the inflections of migration on identity- displacement, disorientation, loss, and difference- as sites of both regression and possibility. Fusing autobiography and cultural analysis, it provides a framework for a critical education attuned to such concerns.

Table of Contents:
Towards an Educational Discourse of Loss and Place Losing Place: Reluctant Leavings and Ambivalent Returns Writing 'The Distance Home': Migration, Mourning and Difference in Lawrence O'Toole's Heart's Longing The Word, For Loss:  Literacy, Longing and Belonging in Kevin Major's Ann and Seamus The Place of Reparation:  Loss, Ambivalence and Teaching Separation, (Re)connection and a Transformative Education of Place Loss, Place, and Education

About the Author :
URSULA A. KELLY is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Denver, USA.

Review :

"As one of the key thinkers within education in Canada today, Kelly offers a profoundly disturbing and yet surprisingly hopeful cultural reading on loss and migration in Newfoundland and Labrador - disturbing for what it says about loss and identity, and yet hopeful because there can be writers with Kelly's depth of analysis." - Claudia Mitchell, James McGill Professor, McGill University

"This is a highly original, timely book that explores issues of personal and collective loss and grief and reveals how they relate to identity and social-cultural knowledge. Building on interdisciplinary views of cultural loss, Kelly develops a unique educational theory of loss and grief aimed at encouraging a struggle against the structures that deter a critical transformative view of teaching and learning. The vital connections the author makes between thinking and feeling also invite readers to make renewed commitments to the work of transformative education." - Ann V. Dean, Associate Professor, Educational Foundations, SUNY New Paltz

"Kelly exemplifies the heart of pedagogy. With passionate imagination, heartful commitment, prophetic zeal, and boundless love, she embraces the possibilities of transformation in our personal and pedagogic lives. The book s eloquent and sophisticated prose breathes with lively and lovely wisdom, an enthusiastic call for living truthfully in words and in the world." - Carl Leggo, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, Universityof British Columbia; Author of Come-By-Chance