Session Information
14 SES 04 A, School-related Transitions - Communities' Aspect
Paper Session
Contribution
Minoritized communities have a long history of self-organizing education. Supplementary schools, sometimes referred to as complementary schooling, are organized after the hours of mainstream schools or in the weekend (Creese et al., 2006). This type of schooling situates itself explicitly at the intersection of the mainstream (public) school and the home and community environment (Arthur & Souza, 2020). The position of supplementary schools at this intersection urges initiators to engage with what the communities’ educational desires while considering expectations in mainstream education. This complex interplay of different needs makes it important to analyze the purposes pursued by the initiators and their underlying motives. This study will deepen and broaden our understanding of supplementary schools and the key role of initiators in positioning their school (Burman & Miles, 2018).
We argue that supplementary schools are established on the premise of the so-called Achievement-Motivation paradox: the challenges youth face in mainstream education and minoritized communities’ strong educational desires and high aspirations (Mickelson, 1990). The challenges the initiators respond to relate to enduring academic and social inequities in mainstream education that manifest themselves on the academic, social and individual level. At the same time, minoritized youth and their parents have equally high (and often higher) educational aspirations compared to majority youth (OECD, 2018), though the attitude-achievement paradox shows that this does not necessarily corresponds with higher results (Salikutluk, 2016). Initiators of supplementary schools are therefore in a position wherein they need to respond to the challenges in mainstream schooling and to the educational desires within the community and do this by formulating specific purposes to obtain with their pupils. The educational needs they respond to are changeable and initiators adapt the purposes pursued to an ever-changing society.
Beyond deepening our understanding of supplementary schooling by taking an in-depth approach toward the purposes and motives, we present an overview of the diversity in appearances of supplementary schools. Most of the research into supplementary schooling as community educational spaces has primarily looked at single cases and has often done so in Anglo-Saxon countries. Though many religious and ethno-cultural communities in Western-Europe self-organize education, research into these spaces organized by ethnic, religious or cultural minorities remains surprisingly scarce (exceptions Hall et al., 2002; Piqueray et al., 2016; Tereshchenko & Archer, 2013). The emphasis on case studies in Anglo-Saxon contexts has as a consequence that the functioning of such spaces in different settings, specifically those characterized by (more) significant achievement gaps, remains to a large extent unaccounted for.
To address these gaps in the current state of the art, we take an in-depth qualitative approach and use semi-structured interviews to analyze the perception of supplementary schools’ initiators on the schools’ purposes and their underlying motives. This study will look at a variety of cases in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Flanders knows a significant achievement gap between ethnic majority and ethnic minority students (one of the largest in Europe), with minoritized pupils being referred disproportionately more to vocational tracks, being underrepresented in higher education, and being overrepresented in early school leaving rates (Danhier & Jacobs, 2017). Furthermore, for years Flanders has a strict monolingual education system wherein pupils are often not allowed to use their heritage language in mainstream public school (Agirdag, 2010). This makes the educational situation for minoritized pupils very challenging, and this is likely to affect the purposes supplementary schools seek to meet.
Method
In order to learn how initiators describe the purposes pursued in the supplementary schools and the motives that underly them, we specifically sought a variety of communities self-organizing education. In an initial phase of explorative fieldwork, we contacted community leaders and different umbrella organizations. Through some contacts in the field and further snowballing effect we then sampled twelve after-hours supplementary schools in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The twelve cases included in this study are the Russian, Thai, Chinese, Albanian, Syrian, Black, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Italian and two Polish community schools. Within these schools we spoke to the school leaders who, in all of the cases, also initiated those schools. To grasp the initiators’ perception of the schools’ purposes and their underlying motives a semi-structured interview guideline with open-ended questions was used (Silverman, 2020). Semi-structured interviews were chosen for their flexibility in allowing respondents to express their ideas in their own words (Savin-Baden & Howell, 2013). The open nature of semi-structured interviews offers the opportunity for new and rich information to emerge (Yin 2003) and participants can speak in their own words which is specifically important when taking an explorative approach. The interviews took place between October 2020 and January 2021. Most of the interviews were conducted in Dutch and some in English, depending on the preference of the interviewee and took between 35 and 75 minutes. Due to Covid restrictions 10 of the 12 interviews were conducted online. To analyze the data the interviews were ad verbatim transcribed and then coded using Nvivo 13- software. The codes used to analyze the purposes were deductively extracted from the literature, while leaving the opportunity for new codes and themes to emerge from the data. Understanding the schools ‘purposes in the threefold way of qualification, socialization and individual development we added codes to each strand of those purposes. Looking at the motives we took a more deductive approach. There were three thematical groups to be distinguished for coding the motives ‘negative experiences in mainstream education’, ‘connection to heritage country’ and ‘seeking to bridge experiences gaps between mainstream and heritage culture’. We will elaborate on these themes and use citations extracted from the interviews to clarify the variances and regard how the different motives relate to the pursued purposes. Conclusively, we combine the purposes described and the underlying motives to assess which purposes answer to which motives.
Expected Outcomes
Previous literature assumed that supplementary schools respond to the gaps experienced in mainstream education (Andrews, 2014; Hall et al., 2002). Our findings indicate that they not only respond to gaps in education, but they exist within as well as respond to the complex social situation they find themselves in. Not only are they often located within the mainstream classrooms, which they borrow “after-hours” (Tsolidis & Kostogriz, 2008), they also continuously negotiate mainstream education’s expectations. The schools sought to formulate responses to negative experiences in mainstream society, to the need for connection with the heritage country as well as the urge to successfully ‘integrate’ in the Flemish society. They are resourceful in the ways they respond to contemporary minoritized youth’s educational needs. These findings indicate that to encompass the richness of these space we must go beyond the dichotomy of resistance and preservation that can be found in the current state of the art. Our findings in this study indicate that minoritized communities are respond to a variety of educational desires. They organize volunteers, use their networks to find places which they can use, they teach heritage tongue classes, dance, tutoring as well as homework support, they mediate between parents and mainstream schools, they bridge the gaps they perceive between parents and children, they respond to experiences of racism and exclusion. These educational spaces offer a richness of support for minoritized youth. Yet, supplementary schools tend to exist in the margins of mainstream society (Fishman, 2001; Lee & Wright, 2014) which hinders the use of these spaces as a resource. By expanding our knowledge of supplementary schools, they could be more commonly involved in the support of minoritized youths’ educational trajectories not only in Flanders, but in other European countries too.
References
Agirdag, O. (2010). Exploring bilingualism in a monolingual school system : insights from Turkish and native students from Belgian schools. 5692. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425691003700540 Arthur, L., & Souza, A. (2020). All for one and one for all? Leadership approaches in complementary schools. Educational Management Administration and Leadership. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143220971285 Burman, E., & Miles, S. (2018). Deconstructing supplementary education: from the pedagogy of the supplement to the unsettling of the mainstream. Educational Review, 72(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2018.1480475 Creese, A., Bhatt, A., Bhojani, N., Martin, P., Creese, A., Bhatt, A., Bhojani, N., Martin, P., & Creese, A. (2006). Multicultural, Heritage and Learner Identities in Complementary Schools Multicultural , Heritage and Learner. Language and Education, 20(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780608668708 Danhier, J., & Jacobs, D. (2017). Segregatie in het onderwijs overstijgen. Analyse van de resultaten van het PISA 2015-onderzoek in Vlaanderen en in de federatie Wallonië-Brussel (Issue September). Fishman, J. A. (2001). 300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States. In Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 81-97.). Hall, K. A., Özerk, K., Zulfiqar, M., & Tan, J. E. C. (2002). “This is our school”: Provision, purpose and pedagogy of supplementary schooling in Leeds and Oslo. British Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 399–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920220137467 Lee, J. S., & Wright, W. E. (2014). The rediscovery of heritage and community language education in the United States. In K. M. Borman, A. B. Danzig, D. R. Garcia, & T. G. Wiley (Eds.), Review of Research in Education, Vol 38: Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education (Vol. 38, pp. 137–165). https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x13507546 Mickelson, R. A. (1990). The Attitude-Achievement Paradox Among Black Adolescents. Sociology of Education, 63(1), 44. https://doi.org/10.2307/2112896 OECD. (2018). The Resilience of Students with an immigrant background: Factors that shape well-being. Piqueray, E., Clycq, N., & Timmerman, C. (2016). The Polish community school in Flanders: bridging the gap between school and home environment. In Youth in Education (pp. 171–191). Routledge. Salikutluk, Z. (2016). Why Do Immigrant Students Aim High? Explaining the Aspiration-Achievement Paradox of Immigrants in Germany. European Sociological Review, 32(5), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcw004 Tereshchenko, A., & Archer, L. (2013). Eastern European complementary schools in London: Bulgarian and Albanian migrant pupils’ identities and educational experiences. London: King’s College, Department of Education & Professional Studies, 1–33. Tsolidis, G., & Kostogriz, A. (2008). “After hours” schools as core to the spatial politics of “in-betweenness.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 11(3), 319–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320802291199
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