Document Type
Praxis
Abstract
Jesuit Commons-Higher Education at the Margins (JC-HEM) offers a Jesuit education for students living at the margins in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya; Dzaleka (Za-lēka) Refugee Camp, Malawi; and in Amman, Jordan. I have enjoyed teaching (and learning from) our diverse learners in our Program over the past few years. Having fled their warring homelands, our learners’ families, careers and lives scatter like shrapnel and fall to the dust of their forsaken refugee camps. In Kakuma Refugee Camp alone, there are more than 100,000 refugees3 most of whom have lived there for many years. The students in our three-year program indeed feel like the “chosen ones” and are a paragon of leadership and education for the others in the camps. With volunteer faculty from many Jesuit universities teaching online liberal arts curricula, the JC-HEM students and faculty together bring their passion for (freedom through) education, a need for strengthened community within and beyond the Camps. As the lead faculty of several communication and leadership courses, I awaken a bit more to our interconnectedness and mutual learning with each new student and course. Nelson Mandela reminds us, “Ubuntu: I am who I am because of who you are to me.”4 This paper reveals my students’ and my own online learning woven together in Ubuntu, various Jesuit teachings and many other scholars’ theories.
Recommended Citation
Lawrence, Mary. "Education at the Margins: Ubuntu at our Core." Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal Vol. 2: No. 2 (2013) . Available at: https://epublications.regis.edu/jhe/vol2/iss2/3
