Imagination and Aspiration: Lighting the Flame of Possibility in a Western Sydney High School

• In Event: Investigating Trajectories of Student Aspiration in Low-Socioeconomic-Status Schools in Western Sydney

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to show how imagination is an important tool in the formation of aspiration and ethnic capital for young high school students and their parents in the city of Blacktown, New South Wales, Australia. Within the demographic space of the school, defined as low socio-economic, ethnicity and cultural background have affected not only educational and vocational aspirations but has also impacted on the imagination of the parents and students. Appadurai’s theory on imagination and aspiration forms the theoretical framework for this paper where imagination becomes “an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility (Appadurai, 1996, p. 31). Since migration according to Appadurai (1996, p.6 ) is the “wellspring of the imagination”, a study of aspirations therefore has to include an understanding of the relationship between imagination and capital in producing migration, since individual imaginings about future lives as the research study will show is intrinsically intertwined with economic considerations and socio-economic status.

The focus of the paper is on data collected from a single sex partially selective girls’ high school in the STAR project. Fifty Visual Arts students from selective and comprehensive strands in Years 9 and 10 participated in a day of activities including creative writing, digital montages, video-recorded peer interviews and editing. This was followed by semi-structured focus group interviews with parents and teachers at the school. A qualitative analysis revealed that despite the limitations in economic capital there was social and cultural capital in their families “which provided reinforcement for the realisation of various goals, especially through education and “hard work”. Parents had social and cultural capital which provided an insider view into education and other institutions.

Transnational people leave their homelands for much broader horizons and, at the same time, confront with forces of marginalisation. However it is within the same framework that hope and imaginings are allowed to exist. The case study showed that for students from ethnic backgrounds, “ethnicity became a resource” and imagination became a positive force that provided the space for new possibilities of empowerment (Bankston & Zhou, 2002) or new imagined alliances. The partially selective girl’s school offered students from ethnic backgrounds an opportunity for transformation because students were able to inhabit and negotiate the field of education more easily because of the strong support from the family. This in turn influenced the effectiveness of ethnic social capital in post school aspirations.

The significance of this research lies in the fact that imagination has expanded the aspirations and range of possibilities for parents and students of ethnic backgrounds making imagination “ today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape” (Appadurai 1996, p. 7).

Author

• Loshini Naidoo, University of Western Sydney