Transnational Students’ Perspectives on Schooling in the United States and Mexico: The Salience of School Experience and Country of Birth

Abstract

As schooling becomes an increasingly common institutional presence across the world and as decided majorities of children now attend at least some version of primary school, it is hardly surprising that childhood gets increasingly constructed as a time of dependence, need, and preparation. As this volume’s introduction notes, vulnerability is a common fourth thread of this predominant conceptualization of children. Yet, as the introduction also hints, these conceptualizations suffer in at least two ways: whether optimistic or pessimistic, they tend to homogenize a broad and heterogeneous portion of the lifespan and they direct us away from attention to children’s agency. Instead, adult attention focuses on what children need, what should be done to them or for them, but much less common is the consideration of children’s views of the world they are traversing and their actions and intentions in that traversing.