Community building education and Greek diasporic networks

Globalisation has proven a prevailing and flexible system with great impact on social, economic and political values and principles. In addition, globalisation was a destabilizing factor for ethnicity due to the greater global connectedness and de-territorialisation (ethnicities are not tied to any specific territory of polity) of the symbolic links between individual and their imagined communities. The continuous immigration flows show that normative expectations for assimilation were interrupted by experiences of people who maintained multicultural, multilingual and diasporic attachments to places outside the national shore. At the same time global market crises and the loss of public social and economic security have been said to lead to a more sophisticated version of the old assimilationism (the fear about racial differentiation-the racial 'others') and nationalisms. Finally, globalisation has had a profound impact on education and in particular ethnic schooling by forcing educational agencies to reposition themselves. Rethinking the role of part-time school networks is, thus, an urgent task. The new complexities of the knowledge economy demand new thinking and contemporary skills and attributes as well as the capacity to deal with cultural diversity. Education needs to develop global learners open to autonomous, assisted and collaborative learning enhancing at the same time their global/diasporic consciousness and sense of identity. The globalisation of education provides opportunities for building transnational and diasporic collectivities thought collaborative action learning projects among global students. This paper will focus on the so-called cultural globalisation and the dynamics of diasporic educational networks as change forces.