This paper highlights the agency with which a secondary school student, originally from Burma and who came to Australia in 2005 as a 15-year-old refugee, resists his school’s repeated assignations of low expectations from its refugee students. His refusal of the performative force in his designation as the “Other” in his school – as in “refugee student” or “ESL student” – is a constant in the narratives he tells of himself. The doctoral research project from which this paper is derived is an in-depth, single case study. In this study, this student’s agency is foregrounded by his request to the researcher/author – whom he met at a homework program for refugee students – to be his private tutor. Data were collected during tutoring and mentoring interactions between the student during his final year in a mainstream secondary school in one of the capital cities of Australia and his tutor/mentor, from February 2008 to January 2009. The main theoretical framework is Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field. The study provides an empirically-derived understanding of how the student’s agency, family, community, school, after-school homework program, and tutor/mentor, interacted and influenced this student’s educational trajectory.