Capital, agency, family and the Diaspora: an exploration of boys’ aspirations towards higher education in urban Jamaica

Abstract

The paper discusses factors impacting on boys’ educational aspirations at two case-study schools in urban Jamaica. It focuses on boys’ experience of their educational environment in relation to social, cultural and economic factors, which shapes the nature of their aspirations towards higher education. The study utilised Bourdieu’s notion of ‘capital’ grounded in a critical realist meta-theoretical framework, the narratives of the participants and the researcher’s experiential understanding as a participant observer to explore boys’ aspirations over a 12-month period. The findings from the study suggested that boys’ educational aspirations are complex and affected by their level of capital in relation to persistent narratives from family and the Jamaican Diaspora within high-income countries like the UK, the USA and Canada.

Keywords:

• educational aspirations
• capital
• family
• Jamaican Diaspora

Notes

1. Each school had from four to seven performance streams in each year group. Based on the instruction of the year group supervisors, I collapsed the groups to create three composite streams (so each performance group became larger and a little less distinct), then used systematic random sampling technique (placing all names per composite-stream and year group in a bag) to select one name. This was done to ensure that year groups/performance streams were initially represented across the schools.