Landscapes of Education and the New Role of Social Work International Models of How to Combine Formal, Non-formal and Informal Education

Landscapes of education are a new topic within the debate about adequate and just education and human development for everybody. In particular, children and youths from social classes affected by poverty, a lack of prospects or minimal schooling are a focal group that should be offered new approaches and opportunities of cognitive and social development by way of these landscapes of education. It has become apparent that the traditional school alone does not suffice to meet this need. There is no doubt that competency-based orientation and employability are core areas with the help of which the generation now growing up will manage the start of its professional career. In addition and by no means less important, the development involves individual, social, cultural and societal perspectives that can be combined under the term of human development. In this context, the Capability Approach elaborated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has developed a more extensive concept of human development and related it to empirical instruments. Using the analytic concept of individual capabilities and societal opportunities they shaped a socio-political formula that should be adapted in particular to modern social work. Moreover, the Capability Approach offers a critical foil with regard to further development and revision of institutionalised approaches in education and human development.

Approaching Migrant Youth Marginalization through the Capabilities Approach: Methodological Proposals

Adopting the capabilities approach and the terminology that has been respectively developed, we could assume that Amartya Sen’s “capabilities” consist in the actual living that people manage to achieve (“functionings”) as a result of actual free will. Sen’s freedom does not “only [depend on the] mere degree of the presence or absence of coercion or interference (from others)” (Otto and Ziegler 2006) but also on “the range of options a person has in deciding what kind of life to lead” (Dreze and Sen 1995, 10). In his book, Identity and Violence, Sen, without explicitly connecting the capabilities approach with his views on “genuine multiculturalis” (Sen 2007), in fact, introduces this extended conception of freedom in the way we examine identity matters. Since freedom becomes perceptible as the range of options a person has, concerning the kind of life he wishes to live, cultural freedom can be defined through the concept of the multiplicity of belonging. In other words, cultural freedom constitutes itself a capability, which is realized when nothing and no one, not even myself, can tie me down to a kind of cultural rigidity that tends to exclude and marginalize me. This latent connection of “capabilities” with “multiple identities” (Sen 2007) challenges us to search for the contribution Sen’s approach could have in the understanding and confrontation of issues concerning migrants, away from theoretical patterns that overemphasize the cultural otherness as an impediment to inclusion. Besides, Sen himself, without of course focusing exclusively on migrants, has already approached the matter of social exclusion with terms of his capabilities approach (Sen 2000).