Immigrant Student and Parent Strategies Toward Social-Educational Futures: Analyzing the Complexities Behind “Simple” Expressions of Aspiration

• In Event: Researching Power-Marginalized Young People’s Aspirations and Strategies Toward Social-Educational Futures in Difficult Times

Abstract

Objectives
This paper begins where Paper 1 left off: that is, it carries the theorization of ‘doxic’, ‘habituated’ and ‘emergent’ aspirations into the data field of a different, larger-scale project (ARC2), in a different suburban region of a different Australian capital city. The paper is more data-rich than Paper 1, giving close reading to two interviews: with ninth-grade Indian- and Ethiopian-heritage schoolboys and parents. Focus is on doxic aspirations, which were most prominently expressed. The chief objective is to analyze how apparently ‘simple’ expressions of doxic aspiration—as mainstream and normative ideas about who and how to become a future somebody (Wexler 1992)—are infused with subtle and complex calculations and strategies.

Theoretical framework
This paper develops Paper 1’s theoretical framework further in giving empirical attention to the doxic mode of aspiring. Along with Bourdieuian elements of the framework, the paper takes up conceptual work (for example, Scott 1998) that attends to tensions between (a) complex strategic negotiations of lived conditions; and (b) powerfully normative policy/populist simplifications of complexity that sustain status quo social arrangements.

Methods and modes of inquiry
Overall, the longitudinal ARC2 research (2012-2015) involves (a) interviews with students and parents/guardians; (2) curricular work in which students research local community change and develop future scenarios; and (3) dialogue across student, family, community, school and university stakeholders about curricular approaches to resource both learning engagement and viable pursuits of desired futures. This paper works with early-stage ethnographic interviews.

Data
The two semi-structured interviews, each an hour and a half in duration, were conducted at the homes of the Ethiopian- and Indian-Australian families. In the Funds of Knowledge methodology, the home context is important for defusing power, establishing mutual interest and trust, and enabling ethnographic observation of cultural milieus. Questions and prompts covered trajectories of life in prior and current social spaces; place-based senses of identity; local community networks that resource life; family work histories; subject choices and other educational strategies; family connections to schools and other institutions; and more.

Results and substantiated warrants
Close reading of interview transcripts finds that, while ‘doxic’ aspirations may channel simplistic normative messages from populist airwaves, family strategies that work upon and around them are greatly complex. There is much understated strategy—involving not just hopes but concerns and fears about social worlds and where they are heading—behind expressions of doxic desire for futures as ‘business owner, ‘architect,’ etc, and talk of educational pathways for realizing ‘dreams.’ There is also much emotionally tense intra- and inter-subjective negotiation across fantasy and reality principles.

Significance
At this historical juncture that can fairly be called ‘difficult times’, it is important—for developing curriculum and pedagogy to engage power-marginalized young people meaningfully—that educators appreciate complexities of learners’ lived situations and, within inter-generational family strategies (Connell 1982), the ways in which they respond epistemologically, emotively and ethically. This paper’s analyses offer insights to school staff and policy makers about how their ‘commonsense’ messages about future options, and learner appearances of absorbing them, conceal more complex dynamics needing consideration.

Authors

• Trevor Gale, Deakin University

• Lew Zipin, Victoria University - Melbourne

• Jessica Susan Bok, Deakin University