ABSTRACT
Following World War II, “displaced persons” (known in some nations, including the United States, as DPs) were scattered across the world. Forced from their institutional niches as well as their home nations, these individuals faced relocation and the imperative need for adaptive learning. With little readiness for taking on new habits, skills, languages, or types of employment, DPs had in most cases been forced by war to leave behind much of what had previously defined their lives. Forces far stronger than they pushed them out. Throughout this chapter, it will be useful to think of situations faced by the contemporary groups on which the authors focus as somewhat parallel to those displaced in earlier decades by economic, military, political, or social forces of expulsion and exclusion. Authors of this chapter draw from four principal disciplines: anthropology, political economics, learning sciences, and the neurosciences for analysis of their research on the learning of the primary groups included here: political refugees attempting to escape extreme violence and persecution in their home nations; formerly incarcerated individuals whose previous life was marked by unsuccessful formal education; and children and young people forced out of foster care or abusive homes to live on the street or in shelters. The learning circumstances of all these groups call for ongoing voluntary or adaptive learning. The means, materials, and purposes of their new ways of learning differ markedly from features of formal education, and this chapter explores the features of these learning settings, and the principles of learning underlying them.
