Between refugees and educators: caring gestures
Livia Cadei, Padma Ramsamy-Prat
With reference to the intercultural sphere, many studies have highlighted the forms in which educational practices and social inclusion are expressed in relation to different personal representations of professionals. This paper will focus on helping asylum seekers and question how educators manage to perform their tasks. Attention is focused on gestures as the main tool of relationships and communication. Gestures have further value in addition to linguistic value; they play on evocation, inspire representations and are bearers of implicit messages. The interest of the research is aimed, first of all, at understanding how educators manage to assist asylum seekers and, with the aim of establishing an educational relationship, how they overcome the difficulties and barriers posed by language and culture in their interactions and how they use the relational strategies available. In such contexts, it is possible to discover how the use of gestures and the variety of their movements are wider than what can be observed in ordinary interactions.
Keywords
gestures, asylum seekers, educators
