Across Europe many education systems struggle with continuous and strong performance inequalities between students form a minoritized and majority background. (Hadjar and Gross, 2016). Despite many policy actions to tackle these inequalities the latter seem quite persistent. What remains particularly puzzling in this regard is that ethnic minority students are generally highly motivated to perform well in education, yet their educational outcomes remain, on average, low. This is also known as the achievement-motivation paradox (Hadjar & Scharf, 2019; Mickelson, 1990; Salikutluk, 2016). Much time and effort have been spent researching this paradox and the causes of these inequalities, focusing on theories around the reproduction of inequality, capital theory and deficit thinking theory (Agirdag, 2020; Dewitt & Van Petegem, 2001; Triventi et al., 2022). Yet, this research has mostly focused on mainstream education institutions. The role and the agency of the ethnic-cultural minoritized communities to mitigate themselves the inequalities they are most affected by has been mostly overlooked. In addition, research in education initiatives beyond the boundaries of the mainstream institutions which produce or reproduce these existing inequalities has been limited until now.

One of these alternative forms of education are the supplementary or complementary education various ethnic-cultural minoritized groups organise for their youth. These community-based educational initiatives (CBEI) are bottom-up learning environments offering not only support for minoritized youth in their mainstream academic studies, but also providing (positive) recognition of their ethno-cultural identity and familial and community heritage (Baldridge et al., 2017; Steenwegen et al., 2022). These initiatives (which range from homework support and mathematics instruction, to language classes (Hall, 2002)) have been documented in ethnographic studies and serve as important examples of minoritized communities organising their own education specifically to fill in gaps they experience in their children’s education. This is particularly important in contexts where mainstream education often caters to the cultural (religious and linguistic) needs of dominant ethnic majority groups but fail to be as sensitive to similar needs among minoritized communities  (Clycq, 2017; Van Praag et al., 2016; Yosso 2005).

Current research in this field has documented both the organisational nature of these CBEI and the motivations of minoritized communities to organise these schools (Steenwegen et al., 2022). Yet, the processes within these initiatives, the resources they provide, and the potential impact on the educational trajectories of minoritized youth, all remain largely unknown. Through extensive qualitative observations and interviews conducted with students, teachers, and organisers, across various CBEI, this research offers new insight into the educational organising various communities are involved in. It also shows how these initiatives serve as important networks of support for minoritized youth. We present these CBEI through the lens of the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005) and offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of many of the CBEI included in this research. We also showcase the importance and impact of these (third) spaces through centring the words and experiences of minoritized young people attending these schools.

The research took place in Flanders, a particularly interesting context to study educational initiatives as this Flemish speaking region of Belgium is notably marked by one of the largest, and quite tenacious, ethnic achievement gaps in education in Europe (Jacobs & Danhier, 2017).

To provide an answer to the research questions posed in this paper we spend a full academic year (9+ months) documenting the various educational processes present in 6 community-based educational initiatives in Flanders, all organised by various ethnic-cultural communities. This documentation process started with building strong and trusting relationships with the various organisers from the schools, aimed at creating a mutual understanding of the research purposes and methods which would be used later in the process, taking inspiration from the participatory research method and the importance of building relationships with the communities we research. Secondly, multiple observations took place of full schooldays with teachers, pupils, parents, and volunteers present. Attention was then turned towards the bulk of the research; capturing the social networks making up these CBEI and the resources present in or made available through these networks. We designed a network-mapping method to fulfil the goal of both capturing the actors present in the CBEI, as well as the personal relationships and proximity between these actors, and the resources made available for all actors involved through the personal relationships (or ties) that made up the social networks. This method combined actor- and resource mapping via concentric circle (Crossley et al., 2015; Yousefi Nooraie et al., 2012; Froehlich et al., 2020) In practice this means that we first asked actors present in the schools (teachers, organisers and pupils) to draw their personal network (egocentric mapping) using a concentric circle-technique which captures both the other actors in the school they are in regular communication with, and the proximity they feel towards these actors. This was then combined with resource-mapping; asking the same actors in the school to also name and list the various resources made available via the interpersonal relationships in the egocentric networks. This method was employed in interviews with teachers and volunteers, and in focus groups with pupils (ranging from 9 to 16 years old). More than 50 interviews took place using this method, resulting in a dataset with observational data and over 70 drawings of personal networks, detailing both the actors present in schools as well as the resources the actors have access to or can be made available to them. This data was coded and analysed in Nvivo, for which we based our deductive coding on the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005).

Preliminary results from this study showcase that CBEI have expansive social networks, with resources that reach much further than simply the ones made available through the curriculum offered to the pupils. Additionally, not only pupils benefit from the resources present or made available; Parents, teachers and volunteers regularly rely on the social networks of these alternative educational spaces to access resources in or beyond the initiatives. In general, the resources present and available in the studied CBEI can be categorized using the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005). We also offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of the CBEI included in this research. Previous quantitative analysis of data on community-based educational initiatives within this larger research project already showcased that CBEI are widely attended by ethnic minority youth but that mainstream education actors (mainly teachers) are rarely aware of the role these CBEI play in the lives of their pupils. Combining these various results has several implications, specifically for social policy attempting to tackle the ethnic achievement gap in education; A first and important step to take is to create greater awareness of the existence of CBEI both in mainstream education institutions and beyond. This can help expand the idea of educational spaces which includes CBEI and values the education they offer. Additionally, we hope to showcase with further analysis of our data that these CBEI are important social networks for minoritized youth that offer several streams of impactful resources which could be highly useful to influence the ethnic achievement gap in education. These CBEI are thus important sites of educational innovation that should be valued by social policy makers, teachers, and researchers alike for the important role they play in the lives of minoritized youth and the larger ethnic-cultural communities they belong to.

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