Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
About the Seminar
- Manka Varghese, Director
- Historically, Italy was one of the leading countries of emigrants – their citizens created homes in a number of other countries, especially the United States - now it is a major destination for immigrants from countries as varied as Romania, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Morocco. In this seminar, we will investigate immigration and identity at several levels through the lens of schooling, which is a central institution in the formation of identities and the lives of its citizens and residents. We will mainly explore how immigrant youth and their families are making sense of schooling and how this influences who they are. We will look at how immigrant youth and their families change the identity of the country while they navigate its diverse institutional contexts, especially the context of schooling. We will also look at how the institution of schooling is making programmatic and instructional decisions around their immigrant student population, thereby crafting identities for them.
2 comments:
This was the day we started focusing on the topic of our course after the 2 day orientation. After meeting in front of the Rome Center, many experienced their first adventure of the Rome subway. We took the subway to the Vatican station and walked to the office of the IDLO, the International Development Law Organization, an organization focused on working with jurists in developing countries and post-conflict nations. Jami Hubbard, a lawyer working for the organization, gave us an excellent and compelling summary of the “state of immigrant rights and the legal framework pertaining to immigrants in Italy.” What she painted was not a pretty sight. Basically she said that although there were certain legal rights for immigrants, in effect this didn’t carry through. She described that the way many things have worked in Italy is an ineffectual implementation of the law and this has made many Italians themselves not pin their hopes on legal rights and made them find ways to build a bureaucratic quagmire and circumvent the system or build a certain passivity. Therefore, for many immigrants and refugees, they may not either know about certain laws protecting them and they certainly were not going to advocate for themselves. She gave the example of Italy having the least number of asylum seekers as an example of this. The main hope she saw was in the European Union adopting a constitution and an enforceable legal framework that all countries that belonged to the union, including Italy, would have to abide by. She also talked at length about the current political shift to the right that has taken aim at immigrants, refugees and the Roma (gypsy) community. She gave examples of how any crimes that were committed by any of these groups have been highlighted by the media, in contrast to crimes committed by ethnically White Italians. The students were engaged by Jami’s talk and asked some interesting questions; for instance, Avry asked about the welfare system, Sam commented on how the situation in Italy resembled the one in Germany, where he had looked at immigrant rights earlier this year and last, and Jamie asked about the educational rights of immigrant children. This was an excellent introductory talk for the students to sink their teeth in this topic. After the talk, we headed out to Piazza Vittorio, the international market. This is one of the most international areas in the city – not only does the market sell all kinds of spices and foods - some by ethnically White Italians, but many manned by Bangladeshi men, but the surrounding area has coffee shops and stores owned by Chinese immigrants and other communities. Earlier in the morning, I had given an assignment to students to try to strike up a conversation with someone they identified as an immigrant and who had a family to as them questions about their history of immigration as well as about their family and children, and how schools are serving their children. The students will come back on Tuesday with notes from their conversations as well as notes from their first 2 weeks of readings – we will be discussing all this as well as having a few guest speakers. On my way out to get ice cream with my family I ran into 2 of the students who had talked to a few Bangladeshis who spoke Korean! I was as shocked as the students – they said that these men worked in Italy and worked in South Korea (and they also said they didn’t like it here but did like it much better in Korea). Many of the students seem to have chosen to stay in Rome while a few others are thinking of visiting other cities in Italy. I can’t wait until next week when I can hear about their personal adventures as well as their stories from their assignments.
glad to see the gelato thread picked up. it's an important aspect of acculturation in italy, right?
Post a Comment