Transition from lower to upper secondary education among ethnic minority youth in Denmark – on the importance of family and community

Author(s):

Vibe Larsen(submitting)Üzeyir Tireli(presenting)Tekla Canger(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 13 B, Family Education, Parenting and School-Family-Community Links IV

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-11

11:00-12:30

Room:

109.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Aitor Gomez

Contribution

The transition from primary school to further education in Denmark is an important focus area both politically and pedagogically. This is partly due to about 15% of young people dropping out of the education system, or not get started training after secondary school. It has social, economic and human costs. Our research project "Transition from lower to upper secondary education among ethnic minority youth in Denmark - on the importance of family and community" should be seen in this context. It turns out that about 35% of young people (15%) who drop out of the education system, have an ethnic minority background. Dropout complexity thus has an ethnic bias ( SFI 2010).

Therefore, it is interesting and important to examine how ethnic minority youth handle the transition from school to further education in a so-called ghetto area in Copenhagen.

In this paper we want to argue that among ethnic minority youth there is a strong emphasis on the relation between further education/upper secondary and their notion of societal inclusion. We investigate how family, school and social relations influence minority youth’s understanding of social belonging and how thoughts on transition and choice is closely linked to family, social position and community. The main interest is how youth define,do and understand social community and in which way they use social community as a strategy of educational attachment. We are interested in the construction of the communities and how the procsess of social inclusion and exclusion is related to this.

The relation between further education among ethnic minority youth and societal inclusion and the expectation of social mobility is not an unknown relation (Coleman 1988, Wacquant 2008, Gilliam 2006) , but what we want to discuss in the paper, is how different actors play different roles in this relation; how the youth draw on a variety of understandings as to why it is important and also draw on a variety of central actors in order to achieve goals and future trajectories.

Our project is carried out in a suburb of Copenhagen in an area known as challenged/ghetto and with a heavy concentration of ethnic minorities. It is an ethnographic study with a focal point on understanding processes of education, inclusion and exclusion from a participant view, and it is therefore embedded in an understanding of the youth in question being experts in and on their own lives.

Method

The study is based on an ethnographic fieldwork and takes its point of departure in the local school and the surrounding youth clubs. It consists of a number of observations within the school and outside the school, 10 semi-structured interviews with pupils from the departing class of the school and 8 individually interviews and 3 group interviews with young people who attend the youth clubs. Furthermore we have interviewed a number of teachers and social educators/ youth workers in order to get an all-round understanding of the youth in question(Ambrosius 2003; Gilliam 2006). Besides the main ethnographic study, we are conducting a study circle with practitioners, who will discuss cases from the material – both as a way of validating the data, but also as a way of bringing practice into research and the other way around. The theoretical framework in the project draws on different orientations which allowed us to understand social inclusion and exclusion as complex social processes. One orientation is the theory of social capital inspired of Putnam and Coleman’s concepts of social network, community and social capital. R. D. Putnam focuses on the function of social capital for communities and the impact of social ties and relations. For Coleman social capital is a key explanatory concept of social mobility through a focus on family relations and community relations and argues why some pupils perform better than others in school. As late modern sociologists as Baumann have repeatedly emphasized, our time is characterized by a huge degree of uncertainty, ambivalence and contingency where the primary competence demanded is, the ability to handle the “chaotic” present and future. This requires that the young people do not bind themselves to one specific education and work – as well as social Networks. The theory of Bauman give the possibility to study how the youth managed these challenges of modern life and how it affect the meaning of social Capital ( Bauman 2001). Another orientation is therefore the impact of local areas and ethnicity in relation to the construction of the youth social communities. Here we draw on the theory of L. Wacquant and his concepts of advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation. (Coleman 1988, Putnam 2000, Wacquant 2008).

Expected Outcomes

At the time of writing, we still analyzes on our empirical data. What results we will finally achieve is therefore difficult to say anything definite about. However, preliminary results indicate that the “ethnic” community itself plays an important role; in part because it is understood, in the general public, as a deprived community, and hereby as a place where few young people achieve higher education. What the young people show us in the study is that this understanding of the community adds to their wish to succeed in the educational system. The community also plays another role in the youths’ understanding of further education, since it provides a close-knit network, where experience is shared, and an in-depth knowledge of other, older youth in the community leads the way to further education. Another central argument is that the extended family plays a central role in how youth perceive their future education. And in turn it represents a far more important actor than teachers and social workers. This re-enacts the question of representation, and the question of trust and mistrust of the ‘white’, ‘middleclass’ advisor in questions related to education and future perspectives on life among youth. A third and final argument is that, in spite of the youth in question all being minority youth, many of their thoughts and ideas are easily recognized in a more late-modern frame of context than actually understood in what one would define as a intercultural frame of context; that many of their statements and actions, are of a more general character identified in youth in general and closely connected to the uncertainty of the what the future holds… their wish is to educate themselves although they do not know to what it leads.

References

Ambrosius, Ulla (2003) Pædagogisk etnografi . Klim. Bauman, Z( 2001) Fællesskab. En søgen efter tryghed i en usikker verden. Hans Reitzels Forlag Coleman J. S (1988), Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital , American Journal of Sociology. Gilliam, Laura (2006) De umulige børn og det ordentlige menneske - identitet, ballade og muslimske fællesskaber blandt etniske minoritetsbørn Graversen, Thore D( 2012) Om boligkvarterets betydning for unges uddannelsesprioriteringer. Ph.D. Afhandling. KU Putnam, Robert D. (1995b) "Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America". PS 28: 664-83. Putnam, R (2000) Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon& Schuster Lindgren, J.(2010) Spaces, Motilities and Youth Biographies in the New Sweden. Studies on Education, Governance and Social Inclusion and Exclusion. Umeå University Seeberg, P. (2004): "Ethnic Minorities and Educational Performance -Reflections on Segmented Assimilation and Education Strategies" i: Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, Universityof Southern Denmark, Working Papers. Sernhede, Ove 2009: .Territorial stigmatisering. Unges uformelle læring og skolen i det postindustrielle samfund., Social Kritik, vol. 118. SFI(2010) Køn og etnicitet i uddannelsessystemet Wacquant, Loïc (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press Wacquant, Loïc 2002: .Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality and the Pi falls of Urban Ethnography., American Journal of Sociology, 107 .

Author Information

Vibe Larsen (submitting)

University College Capital

Department of research and developement

Kbh N

Üzeyir Tireli (presenting)

University College UCC

Social Education

Copenhagen

Tekla Canger (presenting)

UCC

Frb. C

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