Exploring the interplay of cultural capital,habitus, and field in the life histories of two West African teacher candidates

This paper captures the life histories of two West African pre-service teachers pursuing their education in the United States. Based on a larger study examining the life histories of 45 undergraduate pre-service teachers, these narratives focus specifically on international student experiences in the US. Grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, capital, and field, the life histories of Bakar and Selma illustrate how their capital and habitus become contingent on the field(s) (i.e. sites, time, and agents within a specific context) in which they are situated. The narratives of Bakar and Selma captured their early educational experiences, teacher preparation practices, and future possibilities as they moved in and out of different fields where the exchange of capital occurred, which then led to restructuring and/or de-valuerization of certain habitus. The experiences of Bakar and Selma heighten our awareness of the capital and habitus deployed in a variety of contexts – fields – in the US and elsewhere. We conclude by incorporating discussion focused on working with international teacher candidates.     

Multicultural Education and Newcomer Youth: Re-Imagining a More Inclusive Vision for Immigrant and Refugee Students

In this article, we draw attention to the discourses and practices of multicultural and culturally relevant education as curricular contexts with long-lasting implications for newcomer youth. To best serve immigrant and refugee students and more explicitly include them in the field's discourse, we argue for a conceptual move to widen the scope of multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy. We highlight the tremendous contributions multicultural education approaches have made to equitable education, while also examining the ways in which some of their widespread theoretical framing have yet to address the particular needs of immigrant and refugee youth. We then suggest conceptual shifts to widen their scope to include newcomer youth's varied experiences and identity positions. These shifts are (a) advancing the role of genuine cross-cultural relationships over traditional forms of cross-cultural competence in multicultural educational spaces and (b) abdicating the search for cultural authenticity implied in some multicultural education practice in favor of facilitating cultural agency for newcomer youth.     

‘They have different information about what is going on’: emotion in the transition to university

Most new students experience school to university transition as challenging. Students from backgrounds with little or no experience of higher education are most vulnerable in this transition, and most at risk of academic failure. Emotion appears implicated in the differential way in which first-generation students and students with family familiarity of university experience the transition. This article draws on the voices of first-year dental and oral hygiene students at a South African dental faculty regarding university transition experiences. It draws on the construct of capital and Archer's [(2002). Realism and the problem of agency. Journal of Critical Realism Alethia, 5(1), 11–20] understanding of ‘competing concerns’ to examine how emotion shapes students' experiences of university transition and how they position themselves with regard to these experiences. The article explicates the ways in which emotional commentary and classed locations intersect, exploring the extent to which this intersection shapes young people's framing of their concerns of ‘being a student’ and ‘becoming a dentist’. The article identifies aspects of the university's material and cultural environments which shape students' emotional responses and which consequently are implicated in the perpetuation of class-based differential life chances.     

Outcasts on the Inside: Graduates, Employability and Widening Participation

The drive to widen access and participation in higher education is rapidly transforming the sector. Despite this, through an interplay of social, cultural and gender-related factors, students from ‘widening participation’ backgrounds can all too frequently become, within their own institutions, ‘outcasts on the inside’: formally accepted by the university without ever acquiring, still less embodying, the traditional social and cultural advantages bestowed by HE. Thus, the irony of widening participation would seem to be that by entering higher education an already disadvantaged educational habitus should be reinforced not transformed. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, this paper explores the factors motivating widening participation students to enrol in higher education, the nature of their experiences, and the extent to which higher education represents an attempt at social repositioning.     

Risking the future: Democratic participation in technological innovation

Drawing on the voices of students, parents and teachers from a secondary school located in a regional area of Australia in a township characterised by its high welfare dependency and Indigenous population, this article explores the tensions between how marginalised students see themselves and how they are seen by their peers, teachers and fellow community members, with reference to Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The article moves towards a theorisation of a reproductive habitus (those who recognise the constraint of social conditions and conditionings and tend to read the future that fits them) and a transformative habitus (those who recognise the capacity for improvisation and tend to generate opportunities for action in the social field). While some teachers appear to be attempting a transformation of students, the article concludes that instead, teachers should value and give voice to who students are, as they identify themselves. They should be more concerned to transform schooling; to provide educational opportunities that transform the life experiences of and open up opportunities for all young people, especially those disadvantaged by poverty and marginalised by difference.     

Estranged students in higher education: navigating social and economic capitals

ABSTRACT

Family is widely regarded as a cornerstone of student support. When family support exist as an essential form of social capital making, rupture of family ties places students in a disadvantageous position. This paper focuses on estranged students’ accounts of their experiences of higher education, highlighting how capital dynamics shape their academic trajectories. Based on interviews with 21 estranged students, our research uncovers different dimensions of estranged students’ struggles and successes as they move through academia. This paper explores the social imagination that surrounds the university student, or ‘student experience’, as resting upon family support. The authors propose that widening participation policies and practices need to be more attuned to the realities that mark estranged students’ experiences, as they are not only impacted by the scarcity of either economic or social capital, but also by the instability of interrelated capitals that contribute to precarious and volatile experiences.     

Here I am Now! Critical ethnography and community service-learning with immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and youth

Here I am Now! is the title a multi-ethnic group of immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and neighboring urban Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee youth gave to their participatory photography installation. The exhibit was the culmination of undergraduate students’ participation in a series of Community Service-Learning (CSL) courses offered through CIRCLE (Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While CSL has become an established educational practice at most US universities campuses, little research has been conducted viewing the educational impact of this pedagogy on diverse student populations. The majority of the scholarship focuses on the experiences of white middle-class students engaged with communities from unfamiliar and different socio-cultural, racial, ethic and economic backgrounds.

This paper examines how immigrant and refugee undergraduate students understood their participation in a creative community service-learning experience where they mentored youth from familiar and similar ethno-cultural contexts. To understand this meaning-making process I employed critical ethnographic approaches and analyzed student narratives and interviews. Through the prisms of critical pedagogy, situated learning theory, and funds of knowledge concept, I viewed the higher education context, analyzed the situation under study and developed an emerging framework for CSL pedagogy with diverse communities. These theories inform the view that culturally relevant pedagogy emphasizing peer-learning, critical thinking, artistic potential and community resources offers diverse undergraduate students alternative and creative spaces of critique and possibility in their higher education and community service-learning experiences.     

Beyond Access: Considering gender deficits in science education

ABSTRACT Despite striking increases in female enrolments in many undergraduate science programmes, women continue to be dramatically underrepresented in graduate training and careers in science. Although there is substantial evidence of differences in male and female students' experiences in university science courses, we know little about how young women interpret and respond to these differences. This article explores the accounts that female science students construct of their aspirations, educational experiences, achievements, and opportunities as they move through their undergraduate education at a large, urban university in Canada. Based on in-depth, longitudinal interviews ( n = 91), the focus is on the processes through which they make sense of their educational and career options and choices. The findings point to the importance of understanding how meanings and subjectivities are produced, understood, and acted upon. What is evident from this study is that women in science confront a complex web of competing and contradictory realities and discourses as they negotiate their career identities. Thus, to stem the progressive and cumulative loss of female students as they move up through the levels of higher education, universities must address the problems they confront in their pursuit of science training before, during, and after their undergraduate education.     

Placing Students at the Centre of the Decolonizing Education Imperative: Engaging the (Mis)Recognition Struggles of Students at the Postapartheid University

Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. Misrecognition refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country’s universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students’ from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual account of the ways in which these misrecognized students develop a complex educational life in their quest for a university education. The article argues that at the heart of students’ university experiences is an essential misrecognition of who they are, and how they access and encounter their university studies. I suggest that gaining greater purchase on their (mis)recognition struggles may place the university in a position to establish an engaging recognition platform to facilitate their educational success. Divided into four sections, the article starts with a rationale for bringing the institutional misrecognition of students into view. This is followed by a theoretical consideration of the notion of recognition, which opens space for what I call the recognitive agency of the education subject, who remains largely unknown to the university. The third section provides an account of the nature and extent of Black students’ survivalist educational navigations and practices in their family, community, school, and university contexts. The final and concluding section of the article presents a normative argument for developing an education platform for facilitating a productive encounter aimed at animating students’ educational becoming. This, I argue, should proceed on the basis of a decolonizing knowledge approach, involving curriculum recognition, which would accord students the conceptual tools for developing the epistemic virtues necessary for complex decolonized living.     

The Table: Christian Education as Performative Art

Children and young people have the inalienable right to be part of a learning community. Nobody can learn on his/her own. Education is always a communal enterprise. In this article the concept of the “spiritual learning community” is developed as a contemporary answer to the socioeducational issues raised by Martin Buber and John Dewey in the 1930s. Cultural and religious diversity today stimulate education and schooling more than ever before to reconsider the narrative-communicative and spiritual dimension of every learning process. The spiritual dimension of the learning community relates to a specific habitus, namely of de-centration from the self and dedication to the other, and to a specific focus, namely on existential questions as content of the learning process. Insights from philosophy of education and from European religious education theory and concrete experiences of teacher education at the universities of Dortmund (Germany) and Wien (Austria) form the horizon for this reflection.     

Power,Freedom and Resistance: Excavating the Design Jury

There can be little argument that the design jury features as a key symbolic event in the education of the architect. However, whilst the centrality of the design jury as a site for learning disciplinary skills, beliefs and values is now widely acknowledged, there continues to be considerable disagreement about what is learnt and how. While critical pedagogues argue that the design jury is a critic‐centred event that coerces students into conforming to hegemonic notions of habitus, those who promote reflective practice see it as a student‐centred event in which a critical dialogue with experts supports students' construction and reconstruction of their own habitus. This article, inspired by Michel Foucault's writings on the analytics of power, reports on the findings of a yearlong ethnographic study carried out in one British school of architecture that sought to excavate ‘what really goes on’ in the design jury.     

Working in the methodological ‘outfield’: the case of Bourdieu and occupational therapy

The article reports on a study of methodological innovation involving occupational therapy (OT) students in higher education (HE). It is based on an original project which examined the experiences and outcomes of non-traditional entrants to pre-registration OT education. A feature of the original project was the application of the epistemological and methodological approach of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, most noticeably in exploring the way that social back ground (habitus) interacted with the educational (field) context in terms of experience and educational outcome. Bourdieu used a ranged of techniques – both qualitative and quantitative – in collecting and analysing data. In particular, he used multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a type of geometric data analysis recognized as a powerful tool enabling the representation of social space and the situating of individuals within it with respect to a number of variables. The article considers methodological principles in comparing ethnographic, traditional statistics and MCA. We show how the original data were reanalysed according to MCA. The article compares the original analyses and findings with those based on MCA in order to explore its strength over the previous approach and the potential it has to cast light on various issues in HE.     

Higher education ‘massification’ and challenges to the professoriate: do academics’ conceptions of quality matter?

Ensuring and assuring the quality of higher education have become dominant policy discourses in many jurisdictions across the globe. Yet, the pressures of massification and its attendant problems mean that academics now have increasingly demanding roles to improve student learning, particularly so in systems ravaged by a paucity of resources. The study reported in this article explores the experiences of and the challenges faced by academics in a large public university in Ethiopia during a period of graduate education expansion. The study found that academics hold onto ‘exceptional’ and ‘transformative’ notions of quality as they made judgements about the quality of education, which they saw as declining since the onset of expansion. As well, academics associated the entire expansion effort with burden, alienation, enhanced workload and loss of autonomy for the professor. The study suggests that policies intended to improve the quality of higher education should, inter alia, attend to the concerns of front-line academics.     

Singing into Language: Sudanese Australian young women create public pedagogy

This article examines the ethnocinematic research project Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, and its relationship to the evolving notion of public pedagogies. The project explores the potential of alternative pedagogies, which include popular culture, especially audiovisual forms, to engage teachers and learners with one another in collaborative pedagogical methods. The author's collaborative work with students from refugee backgrounds involves what Giroux calls a ‘spectrum of social practices’ utilising a variety of media platforms. This article draws from the lived experiences of one particular co-participant, Achol Baroch, and her 15 Sudanese Australian co-participants. Their experiences of secondary education are traced through this arts-based participatory project using the emerging practice of ethnocinema, a type of ethnographic documentary film which is generative, interculturally collaborative and aligned with the transformative goals of critical pedagogy.     

Persevering,educating and influencing a change: a case study of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander narratives of academic success

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ experiences in Australian higher education continue to be influenced by the sociopolitical narratives of alterity which locate the students as more likely than their nonIndigenous peers to struggle academically and need support. These western-centric perceptions of indigeneities not only affect Indigenous students’ everyday university experiences but can even influence their decision whether to persist with their studies or not. Drawing on data collected in a large, metropolitan Australian university, this article presents a case study of Indigenous students’ ways of perceiving and resisting their positioning by the dominant university systems as ‘problematic’, at risk of failure and needing support. Specifically, the article explores educational pathways of three Indigenous students, their narratives exemplifying primary strategies of enacting and articulating resistances to the dominant education structures in order to fuel academic success.     

Retaining female postgraduates in academia: the role of gender and prospective parenthood

Women remain under-represented in almost all academic levels at universities internationally, and previous evidence has suggested that women move out of the university system in increasing numbers as they progress from postgraduate study to an academic career. The current study aimed to explore the role of gender in the reports of study experiences and future career plans of Australian postgraduate research students (n?=?249). Questionnaire data indicated women were significantly less likely than men to rate an academic career as appealing. In particular, female postgraduate students without dependent children were least likely to want to pursue an academic career. On the basis of qualitative analysis, we attribute this finding, at least in part, to a perceived incompatibility between motherhood and an academic career and discuss the implications for gender equity in higher education.     

A Bourdieusian perspective on becoming and being a postgraduate supervisor: the role of capital

The objective of this paper is to map the role of capital in the process of learning to become a postgraduate supervisor. Economic, technological and geopolitical changes in higher education call into question previous assumptions about supervision. Supervision is no longer primarily seen as an intellectual and social enterprise but is increasingly seen as professional work, where one's capital (or lack of) shapes the process of being and becoming a supervisor. It is frequently assumed that the students are the only ones learning in a supervisory relationship. Novice supervisors are, however, often left to their own devices to discover or learn the inherent rules, epistemologies and ontologies in becoming and being supervisors through a process of compromise and negotiation. In this article, we specifically focus on the need for novice supervisors to understand and navigate the field, and plot their career trajectories, as a constant exchange of different aspects of capital. This article is conceptual, rather than empirical. We suggest that it may be helpful to understand the field of supervision in a Bourdieusian sense, with specific reference to the role of (academic) capital in the formative processes of becoming and being a supervisor. We discuss social capital, gender and race, age, values, beliefs and experiences, as well as linguistic abilities, as factors influencing the individual habitus of the supervisor in relation to the doxa of the field.     

OP-ED National testing in mathematics: One province's predicament

Ability grouping is a common practice in many mathematics classrooms. Its negative effects on students have been documented in research spanning two decades or more, and yet it is still widely implemented—in some countries even mandated. Using data from interviews with Australian students in the compulsory years of secondary schooling (14–16 year‐olds), and using the theoretical tools offered by Bourdieu, I argue that the objective practices of school mathematics create an environment through which students internalize the practices to develop a sense of self, a habitus. This habitus potentially is more or less empowering, depending on the experiences within these streamed settings.     

Implementing a new science National Curriculum for England: how trainee teachers see the How Science Works strand in schools

This article reports empirical work conducted by three university teacher education providers into how a major revision of the science curriculum in England, the How Science Works strand, has been translated into practice for 14–16 year olds in schools. Data were collected from pre-service teachers about their understanding, experiences, perceived challenges and resourcing of How Science Works during their final school experience. The results indicate that implementation of How Science Works in schools lies on a spectrum between two extremes referred to as creative implementation and restricted implementation; a recognition that success with this new approach requires a fuller engagement in higher order thinking skills; and that the importance of differentiation is paramount if all pupils are to connect with the new curriculum. The article concludes that support is needed for major transitions in pedagogy with both serving and trainee teachers. This needs to start with teacher education and encompass teacher development, with greater involvement both in school and university programmes.     

A Qualitative Exploration of the Tertiary Education Experiences of Refugee and Asylum Seekers in Australia

Abstract

The world currently has the highest documented level of displaced people in recorded history. This includes a large number of individuals who are spending their youth as asylum seekers or refugees, which often impedes their access to and engagement with educational pursuits. Given that education has been shown to be a fundamental factor to facilitative resettlement and acculturation for newly-arrived refugee families and individuals, continued research attempting to understand the barriers to accessing education is warranted. This study qualitatively examines the educational experiences (with a focus on access to education) of 10 refugee and asylum-seeking students in Australian tertiary education using thematic analysis on semi-structured interview data. Six themes were identified from the interviews as barriers to or facilitators in accessing education. These are: relationships, emotional well-being, logistics, knowledge, instability, and financial hardship. The findings from this study add to a limited empirical knowledge base on this topic, and improve our understanding of the experiences of accessing education for students with refugee backgrounds. This is discussed in relation to its implications for institutes and policy makers.