ABSTRACT
The lives of poor children in the ‘developing world’ are often characterised as being deficient or simplistically as ‘lacking opportunity’. However, the ways in which children understand their own worlds often challenge this reductionist perspective (Viruru and Cannella 2005). The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the voices of Mexican children in contexts of poverty to highlight children's perspectives on and understandings of the complexities of their socio-economic conditions. The data used are part of a larger ethnographic study on the schooling experiences of children who were observed and interviewed within their school contexts over a period of 14 months from 2006 to 2007. The results of the study show that not only do the politics of schooling and families’ messages have an important influence on the experience of childhood, but also that children develop mechanisms of resilience that allow them to build aspirations for a better future, in spite of their current socio-economic adversities. Analysing resilience in children's lives enables me to expand discussions on the factors that promote human capacities beyond reductive understandings of the conditions faced by poor children. It also demonstrates the power of narrative approaches for educational and social policy making (Roe 1992; Hajer 1995; Fischer 2002; Stone 2002; Jones and McBeth 2010). Boswell et al. argue that:
policy problems do not simply flow from the objective ‘facts’ of the situation, nor can policy preferences simply be inferred from objective, rational interests. Instead, both problems and preferred solutions are constructed by different actors (politicians, the media, academics), drawing on available ideational resources of patterns of thought.
(2011, 2)