From Streets to Developing Aspirations: How Does Collective Agency for Education Change Marginalised Migrant Youths’ Lives?

Abstract

This paper provides an account of migrant youths' experiences of access to education through a social initiative-driven school and highlights how these youths developed pathways of aspirations to work for the good of the community. In doing so, the paper also provides a lens to the issues of migration in Southern Africa and a context in which to understand how collective action for education can deeply transform marginalised migrants' aspirations and offer spaces of equality and agency for change. Drawing on data collected over a span of three years, the paper aims to illustrate how Albert Street School 1 , established as a part of grass-root collective action, supports and impacts on migrants' aspirations and capabilities and how these capabilities lead to aspirations for public good. The narrative methodology used to understand migrant youths' lives and experiences illustrates that collective capabilities have the potential to address different forms of disadvantage and distribute diverse and incommensurable good to local communities.

Orientation, Parent Engagement, Tutoring, Summer Programs, and College Support: How a City is Helping Immigrant Students

“…Kania and Kramer [65] coined the term collective impact when they established a model for social change that described largescale social change can only be possible when there is cross-sector coordination. The earliest examples of collective impact focus on the U.S. public school system because of the fact that amazing teachers can make progress for one child, or in one classroom but that systemwide progress at improving our educational system and decreasing the achievement gap has not happened [65] and this model is still used when looking at education [66], including models specific to advancing Latinx students [49] and immigrant students [67]. The findings from this study show that there are 97 different programs serving immigrants across the city.…”

Aspirations, austerity and agency: adult women learners in the English FE sector and the capacity to aspire in an austerity context

“…The literature on women learners' aspirations is scant, and yet in contrast, youth aspirations have been a dominant feature of educational policy discourse over the last two decades. This is reflected in the growth of research on educational aspirations across a broad range of contexts, both in the UK and internationally (Archer, Halsall and Hollingworth, 2007;Fuller, 2009;Spohrer, 2011;Archer et al, 2013;Loots and Walker, 2015;Stahl, 2015;Gale and Parker, 2015;Zipin et al, 2015;Hart, 2016a;Spohrer et al, 2018;DeJaeghere, 2018;DeJaeghere, 2019;Mkwananzi and Cin, 2020).…”

Participatory art for navigating political capabilities and aspirations among rural youth in Zimbabwe

“…Although aspirations are formed within collective environments (see Mkwananzi and Cin 2020), they have often been individualised for the purposes of understanding individual well-being. Yet there remains a strong collation of relationality in certain aspirations.…”

“…There has been an increasing amount of research in the Global South on the capability approach and aspirations (Mkwananzi 2019;Mkwananzi and Cin 2020), gender equality (Cin 2017) and arts-based participatory methods (see the edited collection by Walker and Boni 2021). In this paper, we use Sen's (1999) capability approach, along with the concepts of aspirations (Appadurai 2004) and political poverty (Bohman 1996), to offer an intersecting framework that explores the aspirations of the youth.…”