SYMP 216 - Re-inventing parenting in culturally diverse settings: revisiting a community of practice perspective

This symposium brings together different research projects in which the learning and development of parents are addressed in situations of intense social and cultural change, either through (transnational) migration or through the falling apart of local social structures in rural areas. Starting out from socio-cultural notions of learning, in particular, those that have conceptualized learning as related to the qualities, forms and extent of community participation of individual learners, the symposium has as its goal to review these notions to include understanding learning in communities that are under high pressure due to cultural and social change.
The papers bring together urban migration settings in Europe, the Netherlands and rural areas in West Africa, Kenya. The confrontation with conflicting belief systems, and diverging practices of meaning-making, as well as contexts of ethnic tensions, play an important role in the learning and development of these parents. From a practice-based perspective, the studies seek to contribute to the development and support of self-organized networking and communal learning, bottom-up training programs in the domain of parenting, as well as to an emancipatory agenda for non-mainstream groups of parents who face the challenge to re-invent their parenting against the backdrop of normative middle-class parenting practices which are often imposed on them by the mainstream services and training in this area.