A Refugee Student in Mainstream Schooling: The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper, from recently completed doctoral research, continues the exploration of aspirations for educational success and future possibility among ‘migrant’ students and families—in this instance a Burmese-Chin refugee boy (called Liam) and family, settled in a power-marginalized suburb not far from an Australian capital city. The objective is to analyze and theorize the hopes, concerns, struggles and emotional labors of this boy-becoming-young-man, noting how aspirations are, as Appadurai (2013: 187) observes, ‘never simply individual … [but] always formed in interaction and in the thick of social life.’

Theoretical framework
The data is analyzed through a Bourdieuian lens, featuring pursuit of empowering ‘capitals’ of diverse species: social, cultural and symbolic (Bourdieu 1986). The paper also takes up, and contributes to theorizing, feminist/Bourdieuian conceptions of ‘emotional capital’ (e.g. Reay 2000, 2004), and post-colonial/Bourdieuian conceptions of ‘diasporic habitus’ (e.g. Parker 2000), which the paper extends to a conception of ‘diasporic capital’ among refugee communities. The paper considers how these ‘weaker’ modes of capital, in ‘non-markets’ of family and marginalized community, enter into power ‘markets’ of mainstream schooling that privilege dominant social-cultural capitals.

Methods and modes of inquiry
The approach is ethnographic within a practice field that, by chance, became a data field. The author’s casual interactions with Liam in a homework club where she worked turned into a substantive pedagogical and ethical-emotional relationship throughout his final high school year as Liam pursued aspirations to complete secondary school sufficiently well to gain entry to a university law program.

Data
Tutorial dialogues were recorded, transcribed and, in the dissertation writing (which will transfer into this paper), sometimes presented in verse form to accent emotional ground tones, furthering analysis of both Liam’s and the author’s emotional labors in struggling for needed capitals against powerful systemic discouragements of institutional schooling.

Results and substantiated warrants
Analysis discloses how mainstream schooling’s low expectations of Liam both: (a) caused much anguish, and (b) contributed to his determined pursuit of aspirations. His school identification as ‘refugee student’ meant he was not considered ‘university material,’ let alone for a law program. His identity beyond school, however, included status as a church elder, often asked to interpret on behalf of older community members; and celebration as a role model for younger members. Burmese-Chin networks, in Australia and overseas, mobilized diasporic capital to facilitate his pursuit of social mobility in mainstream Australia. In addition, affective support from family women—including the author, his tutor, as surrogate mother—constituted ‘emotional capital’ that fortified his will to crack codes of academic capital and achieve distinction (symbolic capital) for himself and his community.

Significance
The paper offers empirical and theoretical insight into how emotional labors of refugee families and diasporic communities—not usually considered in the equation of ‘capital accumulation’ for school success—nonetheless contribute to struggles for success in educational domains. Despite systemic discouragements, aspirations are ‘embedded within … deeply normative grammars’ of refugee family/community networks, exerting ‘prospective and regulative influence on actual life chances and choices’ (Ball et al 2002: 69).

Author

• Iris Dumenden, Victoria University