The ongoing civil war in Syria has displaced many citizens who have fled the violence in order to seek sanctuary and asylum in Europe. As they seek refugee status, they are living in liminal spaces in transit countries, in the hope that they will be relocated on a permanent basis to a new country. In many instances, family members have gone before them and are already ‘settled’ in new countries. The remaining family make the perilous journey out of Syria, in the hope that they will be reunited with their family members and accorded refugee status. In this article, we share the stories of five Syrian children (aged from 11 to 15 years of age) temporarily housed in the LM refugee centre near the town of Lehaina (Myrsini Ileias, Peloponnese, Greece). We asked them about their concept of ‘home’ and, using a narrative methodology, we present their personal stories of their reconstructions of ‘home’ while they are located in this liminal space. How do they share stories of their original homes? What are their lives like in this and the other unfamiliar places that they have found themselves in? What do the young refugees make of their ‘new homes’? What challenges do they face? These are just some of the issues that we explore here in these narratives of a search for a ‘new’ home.
Changing initial teacher education and lifelong learning experiences has become a real challenge for education as we strive to cultivate 21st-century skills in our students to ready them to become new cosmopolitan learners and knowledge professionals. The concepts inherent to transformative education and reflexive pedagogies, even though they are evolving concepts, have posed some serious concerns for the structure and experiences of preservice teacher education. This article presents a reflexive account of 207 preservice teachers attending a regional city university in Greece. In this study, the prospective teachers adopted the Learning by Design pedagogical framework during their Practicum experience. Their focus was to engage in learning design in a meaningful and collaborative way. A participatory action research methodology was adopted. Major findings revealed 'reflexive deliberations' on planning learning repertoires and making pedagogical choices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.