Understanding Marginalized Youth’s Secondary Education Experiences: A Mixed-methods Study of Colombia, India, and Malawi

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Study Objective and Rationale

Hopes for global peace and prosperity rest on the shoulders of the world’s youth, especially the more than one billion young people living in low- and middle-income countries. Yet states and the global community have provided these youth few opportunities or resources to meet this charge, and have not recognized youth’s own dreams, aspirations, and contributions to society (Bennell, 2007). Against this backdrop, powerful global and national policymakers are offering the rapid expansion of “relevant” secondary schooling as a key mechanism for improving the lives of marginalized youth. This push for relevance will have a profound effect on the policies, processes, and pressures that affect marginalized students around the world. It is therefore important to ask how responsive these secondary education discourses are to the youth they aim to serve. Drawing on common and contrasting insights emerging from our study of youth living in marginalized rural and urban communities in Colombia, India, and Malawi, our objective is to understand and make visible marginalized youths’ schooling experiences, needs, and aspirations to inform improved global and national secondary education discourses, policies, and practices.
Background
In the current global context, we are concerned that “relevance” will become reified as decontextualized skills for an idealized form of economic and labor market success. This conception is decoupled from the lives of marginalized youth–the vast majority of whom, under current capitalist conditions, will never work in the formal sector–and from the economic, reproductive, social, and political barriers that complicate developmentalist visions of marginalized youth’s linear journey from school to work.
Emerging models of “relevant secondary education” that are uninformed by marginalized youth’s experiences, needs, and aspirations will be at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive to improving their wellbeing. Our study responds to an urgent need for research that is global in scale and ambition to inform the secondary education relevance discourse from a youth-centered perspective.
Conceptual Framework
Our study derives its strength from a conceptually grounded research design. We decenter the state (Carney, 2009) as the primary comparative unit, leading us to “study through” the levels of social organization that shape educational policy and practice (Wright & Reinhold, 2011). We use this approach to explore youth’s perceptions of secondary school relevance, which we conceptualize as their perceptions of links among schooling experiences, current needs, and future aspirations. We conceive of youth’s experiences of marginalization as intersectionally constituted by multiple forces—including but not limited to global categories like poverty, orphanhood, illness, disability, rurality, or gender—that create conditions deeply limiting of educational and life chances. We posit that youth’s experiences, needs, aspirations, and decisions shape and are shaped by forces near and far; careful comparisons of globalized educational phenomena are therefore essential to understand convergences and divergences in patterns of experiences and outcomes. This conceptualization makes methodological demands: multi-sited, multi-method, multi-year approaches allow for a meaningful exploration of these complex notions and their interconnections (James et al., 1998; Burde, 2014; Young Lives, 2015). Such an approach allows for “contextual comparison” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2010) of similar processes in diverse cases. Resulting analysis will reveal linkages, differences, and points of analytic “transferability” across diverse learning and living contexts (Lyons, 2006).
Methods
Our study is occurring in marginalized rural and urban schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi. This diversity in sites allows us to explore similarities and differences across countries and communities where youth face distinct and overlapping sources of marginalization.
We have conducted several iterative phases of qualitative data collection and one round of quantitative data collection in these sites. This ensures that emerging national and cross-national analytical insights from one method inform the other. At the center of the research, we have engaged deeply with more than a dozen focal youth from two focal schools (one rural, one urban) in each country, as they pursue secondary school. We have also collected qualitative data on policies and practices through document review; institutional ethnographies of focal schools; and interviews with international and national officials, focal school leaders, and teachers. We have gathered quantitative survey data from approximately 250 youth in up to 16 schools in each country. This approach provides robust data with which to understand and explore marginalized youth’s pathways into and out of school from a global, national, and institutional perspective, to the fine-grained level of day-to-day activities in a smaller subset of focal schools.
Importance
Our work has implications for policymakers, school leaders, and teachers, and for curricular offerings, discipline practices, teacher education, and many other core components of secondary school practices. The stakes are high, as over a billion young people across the developing world struggle to imagine and attain the kinds of futures we hope to achieve as a global community. Secondary schools will play a key role in these struggles, which means that secondary school policies and practices become a key site through which we negotiate our shared future. Research that collectively engages youth voices and experiences to inform policy and practice can support responsive institutions and caring relationships across great distances and power differentials.
Organization of the Panel
Our presentation will feature initial results from each of the three countries. The first paper examines the role of exceptional teachers (referred to as “magic teachers” by focal youth in our study) in making secondary schooling relevant for Colombian youth. The second paper examines the particular “magical thinking” that encourages secondary school resources in India to be highly concentrated in the 10th grade to support preparation for Board Exams, stripping resources from the lower grades. The final paper examines how marketized reforms “magically” exacerbate educational inequities in Malawi and beyond, by comparing teachers’ and students’ experiences of scarcity and educational achievement across the two focal schools and with schools in Colombia and India. Finally, two expert discussants will offer reflections on the value and limitations of our research and suggest avenues for future research.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• 1. The Role of “Magic Teachers” in Colombian Youth’s Secondary Education Experiences - Yenny Chavarria, The University of Wisconsin-Madison; Thomas Luschei, Claremont Graduate University

• 2. The “Magic” of Class 10: Schooling in India in the long shadow of the Board Exam - Miriam Thangaraj; Arpith Thomas Isaac, Michigan State University; Amita Chudgar, Michigan State University

• 3. The “Magic” of Marketization: Scarcity and Inequity in Secondary Education in Malawi - Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussants

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina

• Joan Dejaeghere, University of Minnesota