Capital,agency, family and the Diaspora: an exploration of boys’ aspirations towards higher education in urban Jamaica

The paper discusses factors impacting on boys’ educational aspirations at two case-study schools in urban Jamaica. It focuses on boys’ experience of their educational environment in relation to social, cultural and economic factors, which shapes the nature of their aspirations towards higher education. The study utilised Bourdieu’s notion of ‘capital’ grounded in a critical realist meta-theoretical framework, the narratives of the participants and the researcher’s experiential understanding as a participant observer to explore boys’ aspirations over a 12-month period. The findings from the study suggested that boys’ educational aspirations are complex and affected by their level of capital in relation to persistent narratives from family and the Jamaican Diaspora within high-income countries like the UK, the USA and Canada.     

Economic,social and embodied cultural capitals as shapers and predictors of boys' educational aspirations

The author presents the result of a quantitative survey as a part of a larger mixed-methods study conducted across two case study schools in urban Jamaica. It focuses on Black Caribbean boys' levels of educational aspirations in relation to their economic, social, and embodied cultural capital. The study utilizes Bourdieu's notions of capital, reconceptualized to match the sociocultural context of the research and set within a critical realist metatheoretical framework. Logistic regression models, supported by participants' narratives, show boys' educational aspirations to be highly predictable by their level of capital—including dispositional beliefs held through influence of the maternal family both locally and in the Jamaican diaspora of the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada.