This edited collection explores the challenges and innovations in providing education for mobile communities across the world. While obstacles such as negative stereotypes and centuries-old prejudice remain problematic, the book also shows how educational innovations such as online education and mobile schools are bringing mobility and schooling together.
Traveller, Nomadic and Migrant Education presents international accounts of approaches to educating mobile communities such as circus and fairground people, herders, hunters, Roma and Travellers. The chapters focus on three key dimensions of educational change: the client group moving from school to school; those schools having their demographics changed and seeking to change the mobile learners; and these learners contributing to fundamental change to the nature of schooling.
The book brings together decades of research into the challenges and opportunities presented by mobile learners interacting with educational systems predicated on fixed residence. It identifies several obstacles to those learners receiving an equitable education, including negative stereotypes and centuries-old prejudice. Yet the book also explores a number of educational innovations that bring mobility and schooling together, ranging from specialised literacy programs and distance and online education to mobile schools and specially trained teachers. These innovations allow us to think differently about how education can and should be, for mobile and non-mobile learners alike.
"Changing Schools addresses an important matter for teachers, principals and policymakers: the teaching of children who need to change schools frequently due to the lifestyle of their families. This is a fascinating book that will help those who teach, or prepare teachers to teach, travelling children. Furthermore, it will broaden every teacher's mind and set them thinking about the diversity of circumstances that are available to their profession." -- Professor Terry Evans, Associate Dean (research) Faculty of Education, Deakin University
"This book will interest educationists no doubt, but more than that it would also open up a new avenue in migration research to unravel a hitherto little known marginalized group of migrants." -- Binod Khadria,Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and author of The Migration of Knowledge Workers (1999)
"Open education philosophy has much to learn from the real life experiences carefully analyzed in this book. Needless to say that it is a must need for those involved in framing flexible curricula and [those who]advocate [a] constructivist approach to democratization, openers and innovation in education." -- P.R. Ramanujam, Indian Journal of Open Learning (May 2009), Vol. 18, No. 2: 106-107
