Transcript Slide 1

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CAPITAL
OF UKRAINIAN UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS IN CANADA AND THEIR
ACADEMIC TRAJECTORIES
Maksym Antonenko, OISE/UT
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
of minority students is vital for their integration in
increasingly diverse societies. The public attention is
often focused on educational patterns of ethnic groups
suffering from:
- racial discrimination or stereotyping
- exhibiting higher than average drop-out rates
Invisible minorities are often under researched with
only a handful of studies dedicated to these groups
UKRAINIAN STUDENTS IN CANADA
Ukrainian Canadians constitute 1.2 million people
(3.9% of total population) and between 2001 and 2011
30,000 Ukrainians became permanent residents of
Canada. There are four Ukrainian Catholic Schools in
GTA.
Scarce research on Ukrainian students and their
comparative educational attainment is available
(Samuel, Krugly-Smolska and Warren (2001),
Mouzitchka, 2006)
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
To analyze the academic performance of Ukrainian
students in Canada we asked the following questions:
1) How does social, cultural and linguistic capital of
Ukrainian immigrant and international students affect
their educational trajectories in Canadian universities?
What type of capital successfully crosses the border?
2) What are the elements of respondents’ culture that
impacted their educational experience and success
both in Canada and Ukraine?
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
To get an insight into the educational experience of
Ukrainian students we decided to use the concept of
symbolic capital put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and
analyze how this form of capital translates into
university persistence and success among Ukrainian
students in Canada.
SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
(cultural capital, social capital, linguistic capital)
- homologous to economic capital, but pretends to be
disinterested
- reproduces social inequality (Moore, 2008)
Capital is the “currency of the field”, which defines what
has value in the field and what has not, who is included or
excluded and what is required to boost one's power or status
based on distinction. Not surprisingly, distinction creates
hierarchies, which result in inequality (Grenfell, 2009).
Capital fuels the communication between the field and the
habitus.
TYPES OF CAPITAL
- Cultural capital – exposure/participation to/in
highbrow culture (opera, theatre, ballet, galleries and
museums), selected dispositions (reading) and
educational resources (parental education)
- Social capital – current and potential resources
contained in networks of lasting institutionalized
relations (Grenfell, 2009)
- Linguistic capital – competence of a legitimate
language valued at the market (Bourdieu, 1976)
SYMBOLIC CAPITAL IN EDUCATION
RESEARCH
- Through education dominant groups impose arbitrary
culture and value the type of achievement, which
corresponds to their interests (Broadfoot, 1978).
- “Symbolic violence” of education prevents many non-elite
students from succeeding academically as they lack the
values and linguistic capital, which children of privileged
backgrounds share with their teachers.
- Instead of increasing social mobility education preserves
the status quo and even some success of lower-class
students gives the system the appearance of meritocracy
instead of challenging such system (Sullivan, 2001).
LACK OF CAPITAL: POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Fernandez-Kelly (2008) mentions three mechanisms of
making “foreign” capital count:
1) cognitive correspondence as an ability to recognize objects
and behaviors rewarded in the new field;
2) positive emulation of “legitimate” speech, manners, attire
and expectations; and
3) active recollection of habitus and capital left behind during
one’s identity formation.
Cervatiuc (2009) mentions three strategies used by
international professionals, who are “non-native”
speakers of English to compensate for the the lack of
linguistic capital valued in Canada:
- a self-motivating inner dialogue as a counterdiscourse to the social marginalization paradigm
expected by the NS community
- finding ways to gain access into the social networks
of native speakers
- symbolic membership in an “imagined
community” of successful multilingual and bicultural
adult immigrants
METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION
- semi-structured interviews with 9 Ukrainian
immigrant and international students
- questions asked dealt with upbringing patterns,
parental involvement in schooling, extracurricular
activities, social networks and language practices
- participants were recruited among UofT students
(undergraduate and postgraduate)
- analysis of data used qualitative research method and
inductive approach
LIMITATIONS
Low number of participants is to be balanced by the
rich data analysed with the help of emic/etic approach
due to the status of the researcher, who is an insider
and outsider at the same time.
Non-probability sampling was compensated for by the
case study approach helped by a variety of
participants: immigrant/international, male/female,
graduate/undergraduate.
RESULTS
Research question 1: Symbolic capital and academic
trajectories.
Ukrainian students enjoy considerable academic success in
Canadian universities:
-High GPA:
When I came here last year my major academic achievement was
GPA of 4.0. This year it is also pretty good: also As!
-External funding for graduate students:
I am also a recipient of OGS. It’s my second OGS. Also I was
shortlisted this year for the SSHRC. I was told actually to put it on
my resume.
All participants mention that most of their high school
friends continued to the university level:
All my friends from my class went to universities.
…in terms of percentage I think over 90% of people I know went
to universities or at least decided to get some education even if
they think they will not work in this area.
Portable capital: social versus cultural
The cultural capital of respondents proved to be more portable due to
its embodied character and similar value attached in Ukraine and
Canada to education, culture, literacy, numeracy and language skills.
Social capital expressed in networks is more location-dependent,
which required the re-creation of valuable networks in Canada from
scratch. It is especially true for Ukrainian international students, who
usually do not have friends and family members in Canada before
their move to this country.
Research question 2: Ukrainian background and
educational experience
Ukrainian students possess high levels of symbolic capital
due to:
1) the centrality of children (Robila and Krishnakumar,
2004)
My mom spent all her time on me. I went to different groups. I learnt
English since I was five. I was going to the dancing club, swimming,
all of that stuff. All my childhood I spent with her. What about school?
She cared a lot about that, because education is the main part of my
family, so our parents want us to be educated...
2) importance of education (Jankowska, 2011)
I think in Ukraine school is just something you have to do and you
don’t have any other options!
I guess I always knew I would have to go. It wasn't really a choice. It
was something everybody does and I didn't think about it a lot.
Thinking was about where you would, what kind of university, but
whether to go was not a question.
You know, it wasn't a decision, it was an expectation. In the context of
Post-Soviet countries in 1990s and 2000s everybody had to go and get
a university diploma, especially if you were doing good academically,
even now even if you are not doing good academically you need to get
piece of paper, because we knew if we wouldn't get a higher education
we would not get a decent job. It's kind of by default, you had no
choice. The question was what department I was going to enter.
3) high parental educational capital (Mouzitchka, 2006)
Eight out of nine participants had at least one parent with
university education.
4) popularity of reading, which is a clear predictor of
academic achievement (De Graaf and De Graaf, 2000)
If you look at all Soviet families, you know, almost all Soviet
families, especially middle-class, they all tried to have own
libraries at home. Imagine walking into someone’s home and
there will bookshelves somewhere there. My father had a kind of
obsession with getting books. He read them and made us read
them.
5) high level of linguistic capital (Derwing et al, 2010)
One of the best predictors of academic success during study
abroad is the proficiency in the language of instruction and
Ukrainian students are uniquely positioned to reap the
rewards of linguistic capital.
Most Ukrainians have two languages in their repertoire,
which helps to learn further languages (Cenoz, 2013). The
following is a typical answer to the question about the
number of languages spoken:
Russian, Ukrainian, I also speak Polish, but a little bit. I understand it
well enough, but I speak a little bit, English, a little bit of German and
Spanish.
Acquiring cultural capital in Eastern Europe
1) Availability of print
The availability was not a sign of an upper socio-economic class.
Even my grandmother, who lived in a village, she was a
bookkeeper at the sugar plant she had books in her house. She had
different books. These were not cheap romances, she had Balzac
and history books. She lived in the village. When we were going
for the summer breaks we were given the list of literature we had
to read – Ukrainian literature and World literature, so we had to
read, whether we liked or not.
2) Access to extracurricular activities
At the time it was still Soviet Union or post-Soviet Union time
that is why most of the activities were free of charge, which meant
no financial burden on my parents, which meant I could do pretty
much everything I wanted to. For example one of my friends went
to arts school and I decided to go along and I attended an arts
school for over a year… I did track and field, I did volleyball and
even tried basketball, but I was too short for it, so I didn’t make a
team. I did ballet dancing, but my partner quit, so I quit as well. I
did very many things!
3) Popularity of enriched curriculum
I actually wanted to get into that best school –
English/French/German school in our city, but I couldn’t as it was
Ukrainian and I didn’t know a word of Ukrainian at the time that’s
why I had to switch to Ukrainian school, study Ukrainian for a
year, then I attempted to and I passed the exams and was admitted
to that high-end school.
Obstacles experienced by Ukrainian students
1) Though proficient in English many students underlined
the difficulty of making presentations, which disadvantages
them compared to the Canadian-born peers. The following
sentiment was echoed by many participants:
...it’s not that I don’t like it, but I think it is the main disadvantage of
Ukrainian education or Eastern European education, because we did
not learn how to do presentation and we don’t practice, while people
from North American schools used to do it.
2) Many students from post-communist countries find the
curriculum not demanding enough (Asanova, 2005):
In terms of the rigor of the program I think the program could be more
rigorous. I don't feel that they are rigorous enough, so it depends.
CONCLUSIONS
Ukrainian students possess high levels of cultural and social capital,
which helps them to achieve significant academic success in Canada
due to the importance of education and centrality of family.
Ukrainian students have such advantages as free or inexpensive
extracurricular activities, access to print and parents with higher
education credentials, which can be considered the legacy of
communism, but help a more equitable distribution of symbolic
capital, which differs from Canada, US, France or other Western
countries.
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