Paper short abstract:

Supplementary schools are set up by migrant communities whose children are raised in the UK. Through poetry and performances children inhabit their parents countries of origin, which continue to reside in children's imaginations.

Paper long abstract:

My research focuses on supplementary schools set up by migrant communities and their collaborative works with the Museum of London. A mixed curriculum with an emphasis on mother-tongue language lessons, storytelling and performances becomes a tangible and personal way for children to connect with their parents' countries of origin.

The case studies are of London-based Albanian, Tamil, Lithuanian, Iranian and Brazilian supplementary schools that occupy and rent State school classrooms over the weekend, and perform in museum festivals. Looking at school rehearsals, I examine how children remember their parents' places of origin post migration, how these places are reconstructed through language and mythology, how children's performances revise geographies, and finally, how performing becomes a route through which new and old places are revisited.

Observational drawings and films of children's rehearsals point to how "the body itself serves as a field of localization" (Merleau-Ponty) and the ways in which children as actors generate space and continually adjust their positions (Johnstone 2007). In performances,

Children visualise distant pasts and their immediate futures, in what Sennet terms 'prehension', as movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data (2008). Heritage becomes a site of play where children reinterpret traditional roles and improvise new cultural forms, remembering, anticipating and reconstructing places through their embodied moving representations.

With multiple place-attachments the children remain aware of their parents' past and connected to different countries, developing their local and transnational identities and keeping their futures open.