Session Information
31 SES 13 B, Negotiating Language Legitimacies in Transnational Educational Spaces. Institutional and Individual Perspectives
Symposium
Contribution
The contribution is based on an ongoing research project about “Transnational education and social positioning between Brazil and Europe”. In this project, we investigate relations between spatial mobility, social mobility and educational strategies in transnational families (Fürstenau 2015). The theory of transnational social fields (Levitt und Glick Schiller 2004) is the conceptual framework we use to analyse interconnections between social positioning and educational strategies. Language related issues are brought into play by families who participate in the transnational education market and who consider international mobility a means to seek educational advantages for their children. Waters (2015), for example, holds that parents of the East Asian “cosmopolitan middle-class” who send their children to schools in Anglophone countries seek, i.a., the opportunity for them to acquire English language skills (ibid., p. 284f). According to Waters, transnational education experience “indicates a degree of privilege and exclusivity” (p. 287). This also applies for the Brazilian context, where proficiency in foreign languages can hardly be acquired in public educational institutions. Therefore, foreign language proficiency is an effective marker of social distinction, and families from social elites are a target group of international schools in Brazilian cities, including German Schools Abroad (Deutsche Auslandsschulen; GSA). GSA are up to 30% funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. At the same time, the school fee for a GSA in a Brazilian city is not less than 500 € per month and child. In my contribution, I will triangulate institutional and individual perspectives to understand the role of GSA in transnational educational spaces between Brazil and Europe, focussing on language education. To capture the perspectives of the school management, teachers and parents in the GSA of a big Brazilian city, we have conducted ethnographic field research. The methods include participant observation, qualitative interviews and network analysis. The findings corroborate divergent views of different parties concerned. Some interviewees, for example, find it culturally valuable to acquire the German language, others want to learn English only, but consider the certificate from a German School Abroad as symbolic capital. The presented case study does not only give insights into an ongoing negotiation of language legitimacies, but also into educational strategies for social distinction.
References
Fürstenau, S. (2015). Educação transnacional e posicionamento social entre o Brasil e a Europa. Um estudo qualitativo com famílias migrantes. In: Bahia, Joana/Santos, Miriam (Hrsg.): Recortes interdisciplinares sobre a migração entre o Brasil e a Alemanha. Porto Alegre: Letra & Vida, p. 69-86. Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society. International Migration Review, 38 (3), p. 1002-1039. Waters, J. (2015). Educational imperatives and the compulsion for credentials: family migration and children's education in East Asia. Children's Geographies, 13 (3), p. 280-293.
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