Educating the Next Generation

Wills Kalisha is Associate Professor of Education at NLA University College in Norway. He holds a PhD in Education from The University of Oslo and wrote his thesis on the phenomenological experience of waiting for asylum by unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Norway. His work focuses on continental education, phenomenology of practice, and the intersection between education (continental) and migration. He has researched on the intersection between different existential phenomena and education and as it relates to children living in protracted refugee situations and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Kenya and Norway respectively. His work has primarily focused on the lived experiences of young people first in protracted refugee situations and secondly in host nations. This research has been anchored on existential questions of what education might mean for those in protracted situations and whether its meaning matters to them in their realities in the refugee camp? He questions whether it only matters that children are educated, or it equally matters what they are educated about. He has also interrogated what it might mean to educate children who seek asylum alone and what education- in “temporality” means for unaccompanied children. In these explorations, he amalgamates hermeneutics phenomenology as a research methodology and educational theory to describe lived experiences of the young people on the margins and their teachers.