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Intersecting Newcomer Families’ Narratives on Landscapes in Transition

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Cross-Cultural Schooling Experiences of Chinese Immigrant Families

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Abstract

To achieve a narrative grip on newcomer families’ stories, Connelly and Clandinin’s (Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1(1), 73–85.1995) notion of landscapes of experience was adopted and further developed to capture the experiential richness and the fluidity of the changing world in which newcomers live. Landscapes in transition is a term that imagines multidimensional, multifaceted, inclusive, and fluid interpretations of experience. The term captures the dimensions in which people move physically and conceptually, personally, and socially. The ideas of individualism and communitarianism and the philosophical notions of Confucian Continuity of Being and Deweyian Continuity of Knowing provide the philosophical/cultural structure for the metaphorical bridge between the East and the West. The educational lives of newcomer children and their families demonstrate the potential and power of reciprocal learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Part of the discussion in this section on the roles of grandparents on pp. 215–218 has been used and summarized in the following book chapter: Xu, S. J. (2011). Bridging the East and West dichotomy: Harmonizing Eastern learning with Western knowledge. In Janette. Ryan (Ed.). Understanding China’s education reform: Creating cross cultural knowledge, pedagogies and dialogue (Ch 11, pp. 224–242). London, UK: Routledge.

  2. 2.

    Citations from Lun Yun (The Analects) are translations modified from the following references:

    论语=Analects of Confucius 中文译注 蔡希勤; 英文翻译 赖波, 夏玉和。北京: 华语 教学出版社, 1994.

    中华文化信息网 http://www.ccnt.com/wisdom/rujia/lunyu/lunyu7.htm Confucius. (1998). The Analects of Confucius: A philosophical translation by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. New Work: Ballantine Books.

  3. 3.

    Part of the discussion on “To be human in Confucian values” in this section has been summarized in the following book chapter: Xu, S. J. (2011). Bridging the East and West dichotomy: Harmonizing Eastern learning with Western knowledge. In Janette. Ryan (Ed.). Understanding China’s education reform: Creating cross cultural knowledge, pedagogies and dialogue (Ch 11, pp. 224–242). London, UK: Routledge.

  4. 4.

    My discussion of the concepts of “Confucian notion of being” and “Deweian continuity of knowing” was summarized and further illustrated in the following book chapter: Xu, S. J. (2011). Bridging the East and West dichotomy: Harmonizing Eastern learning with Western knowledge. In Janette. Ryan (Ed.). Understanding China’s education reform: Creating cross cultural knowledge, pedagogies and dialogue (Ch 11, pp. 224–242). London, UK: Routledge.

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada

    Shijing Xu

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Xu, S. (2017). Intersecting Newcomer Families’ Narratives on Landscapes in Transition. In: Cross-Cultural Schooling Experiences of Chinese Immigrant Families. Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46103-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46103-8_8

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