Transnational cultural capital in migrant youth’s school transitions: mobility trajectories between Ghana and Germany

ABSTRACT

Research on migrant youth’s school transitions has focused on the country of residence, ignoring migrant youth’s pre-migration lives in the country of origin. Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between Ghana and Germany, this paper instead analyses school transitions through migrant youth’s mobility trajectories, encompassing all geographic moves and concurrent family constellations over time and space, both before and after migration. A mobility lens shows how resources gained in the country of origin – including confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability – help migrant youth navigate their school transitions in the country of residence, thus becoming forms of transnational cultural capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant youth
• school transitions
• transnational cultural capital
• secondary education
• mobility trajectories

Introduction

I sat at the table with Nana (14), his parents and new teacher for his school intake interview in Hamburg. He looked relaxed and confident: chin up, hands resting in his lap, bright red trainers flat on the floor. Throughout the meeting, conducted mostly in English, Nana dropped some phrases in German, indicating he had already taught himself the basics since migrating from Ghana three months earlier. His mother handed the teacher his passport, residence permit, and Ghanaian private-school report cards from a well-organised folder. When asked how many years he had studied English, Nana replied with a smile, ‘all my life’. His mother added that she had been an English teacher for 23 years in Ghana. As the teacher completed some paperwork, Nana’s father placed his hand on her arm to gently interrupt: ‘I want to explain something to you. Nana means “king”. I gave him this name because my father was a king in Ghana.’

Little of Nana’s royal background was visible in his life in Germany. He shared a run-down apartment in a working-class neighbourhood with his parents and other relatives; his father received a small retirement pension and his mother was unemployed; and he attended a public high school in an ethnically diverse and low-income suburb. However, it is clear from this vignette that Nana’s life in Hamburg is only part of the story. As I followed his transition to school in Hamburg for more than a year, I observed how the behaviours and attitudes Nana developed in Ghana helped him consistently perform at the top of his reception class and prepare for the mainstream track of secondary school.

Migrant youth’s lives in the origin country before migration are, however, rarely considered in research. Migrant youth studies have established that family and school contexts in the residence country are important shaping forces in migrant youth’s education (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and MacLeod 1996; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, and Martin 2009; Haller, Portes, and Lynch 2011), but these same factors in the origin country have not been studied. Where parents’ pre-migration characteristics are considered, the effects on their children’s education remain unexplained (Ichou 2014; Feliciano and Lanuza 2017). Similarly, qualitative research on how cultural capital shapes young people’s education has focused on social structures and school systems within nation-states (Lareau and Weininger 2003; Dumais 2015), even for migrant youth (Berggren, Torpsten, and Järkestig Berggren 2021; Emery et al. 2020;). This methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) leaves significant gaps in our knowledge of whether and how young people’s cultural capital operates transnationally.

In this paper, I take a different approach by applying a mobility lens to the study of migrant youth’s school transitions. This involves analysing young people’s mobility trajectories, encompassing all their geographic moves over time and space and their concurrent family constellations (van Geel and Mazzucato 2018). As such, a mobility lens involves paying attention not only to what occurs in the residence country after migration, but also to young people’s lives in the origin country before migration. Viewing migrant youth’s school transitions through a mobility lens enables me to consider whether and how experiences, relationships, and resources from one context might have impacts in another, thereby making visible how their cultural capital operates transnationally. The paper draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with seven young people who migrated from Ghana to Germany and entered secondary school in Hamburg as teenagers. I focus on their initial school transition, that is, the time during which they attended reception classes in Hamburg before joining mainstream classes. I analyse four types of transnational cultural capital they gained in Ghana and then used to navigate their school transitions in Germany: confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability.

Understanding migrant youth’s cultural capital through a mobility lens

Migrant youth and education: the role of parental origin-country characteristics

A rich literature on migrant youth has investigated the educational fortunes of foreign-born youth and native-born youth with migrant parents in their countries of residence. This literature has established the importance of family and school factors for migrant youth’s educational performance and attainment (Kao and Tienda 1995; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, and Martin 2009). This research has, however, traditionally focused on such factors only in the residence country, where migrants are commonly disadvantaged. As such, high-achieving migrant youth are seen as being successful despite their low socioeconomic status in the residence country (Haller, Portes, and Lynch 2011) and because of their optimistic expectations of upward social mobility (Ogbu and Simons 1998), a perspective mirrored in policy literature on migrant youth’s education (European Commission 2018; OECD 2018). The migrant youth literature has thus treated young people who migrate as ‘blank slates’ upon arrival in the residence country and obscured resources that move with them from the origin country (Mazzucato and van Geel 2022).

However, some recent migrant youth studies have acknowledged that migrants’ backgrounds and resources, including their cultural capital, ‘are not adequately assessed by typical measures of socioeconomic status’ (Feliciano and Lanuza 2017, 212; Feliciano 2006; Ichou 2014). These few quantitative studies have begun looking to migrant parents’ characteristics in the origin country to explain their children’s educational attainment in the residence country. Feliciano and Lanuza (2017) developed the concept of ‘contextual attainment’ to measure migrant parents’ education levels within the origin-country context, thereby revealing higher class backgrounds and increased access to resources that support their children’s education in the United States compared to their status and resources in the residence country. Meanwhile, Ichou found that, in France, migrant parents’ levels of education in their origin countries affect their children’s educational attainment more than their socioeconomic status in France does, leading him to conclude that migrant youth’s family backgrounds in the origin country are their ‘true starting point’ (2014, 761).

These relationships between origin-country characteristics and migrant youth’s educational fortunes in the residence country, however, remain unexplained (Mazzucato 2015). As Ichou himself acknowledges, ‘The data at hand do not allow one to directly identify the specific sociological mechanisms that account for’ these effects (2014, 760, emphasis added). Similarly, while Feliciano and Lanuza (2017) show that cultural resources stemming from migrant parents’ backgrounds in the origin country shape their children’s educational performance in the residence country, they do not show how this effect occurs. Qualitative research in this field has similarly focused on migrant youth’s lives within the residence country. For example, Fernández-Kelly (2008) investigated the role of migrant parents’ origin-country cultural capital in their children’s schooling in the United States; migrant youth’s own pre-migration experiences were not analysed, despite the respondents all having lived in the origin country. While these studies identify that origin-country resources affect migrant youth’s education in the residence country, they all focus on resources transmitted from migrant parents to their children, leaving a missing link in explanations of this effect. That is, they do not consider young people’s own experiences in the origin country and cannot explain how young people develop and use resources themselves over time and space.

Cultural capital and education: migrant youth’s embodied resources

The literature on cultural capital and education provides a fruitful starting point to investigate the mechanisms that connect origin-country resources with migrant youth’s school transitions in the residence country. This scholarship explores how educational institutions reproduce social privilege and inequalities by rewarding students whose cultural capital aligns with schools’ standards and values, while disadvantaging students without such capital (Lareau 2011). While cultural capital exists in three forms – institutional, objectified, and embodied (Bourdieu 1986) – much of this literature focuses on the role of embodied cultural capital in education. Embodied cultural capital – which refers to ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’ (ibid:47) – is particularly useful to understand how students negotiate their schooling because it captures the ‘micro-interactional processes whereby individuals’ strategic use of knowledge, skills and competence comes into contact with institutionalized standards of evaluation’ (Lareau and Weininger 2003, 569). Furthermore, while institutionalised cultural capital (e.g., educational credentials) and objectified cultural capital (e.g., cultural goods and materials) are often not transnationally mobile, embodied cultural capital is – in the minds and bodies of migrants. As such, it provides an insightful window into how migrant youth’s behaviours, attitudes, and dispositions from the origin country shape their school transitions in the residence country.

While most studies of cultural capital and education have focused on non-migrant youth, some research explores migrant youth’s embodied resources. Some of these studies focus on how parents transmit origin-country cultural capital to their children in the residence country. Coe and Shani (2015) show that Ghanaian migrants’ parenting strategies in the United States draw on cultural capital from Ghana, instilling behaviours and attitudes in their children that are valued by American teachers. Carnicer (2017) analyses how Turkish migrant parents’ high expectations and social mobility ‘projects’ contribute to their sons’ educational successful in Germany. Other research focuses specifically on the school transitions of newly arrived young people who have migrated themselves, showing how they accumulate cultural capital in the residence country (Devine 2009; Hopkins et al. 2013) or draw on their ongoing transnational attachments and imaginaries in the classroom (Lightman 2015; Jaffe-Walter and Lee 2018). Few recent studies analyse how migrant youth use pre-migration cultural capital (Berggren, Torpsten, and Järkestig Berggren 2021; Emery et al. 2020). However, they do not explore how origin-country cultural capital is accumulated prior to migration. For instance, Emery and co-authors (2020) identify that embodied cultural capital – including a sense of entitlement and strategic knowledge – helps newly arrived students successfully navigate the Belgian school system; however, they do not explore how these students gain such capital prior to migration. Similarly, Jaffe-Walter and Lee (2018) focus on the ways in which newly arrived students’ ongoing transnational attachments and identities are valued within the classroom, yet their pre-migration experiences remain invisible. Embodied cultural capital thus provides a way of exploring how migrant youth draw on mobile resources in their school transitions. But unlike its use in the literature thus far, I trace migrant youth’s embodied resources from their development in the origin country to their use in the residence country.

Transnational youth mobility: gaining and using cultural capital over space and time

Enriching our understanding of how migrant youth navigate their school transitions can thus benefit from an approach that considers their lives here and there. A growing body of research considers migrant youth’s transnational lives, exploring how the social environments, relationships, and resources in the countries of origin and residence are interlinked. Fürstenau (2005) shows how Portuguese-background youth in Germany obtain valuable resources like multilingualism and employment opportunities through their mobility between the countries of origin and residence. Carnicer and Fürstenau (2021) use a multi-sited ethnographic approach to reconstruct the opportunities afforded and constraints imposed by different socioeconomic positions in Brazil on the education of young Brazilian migrants in Germany.

In this paper, I employ a mobility lens to study migrant youth's school transitions between the countries of origin and residence. I use the concept of ‘mobility trajectories’ (Mazzucato 2015; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018), which encompasses all geographic moves in time and space that a young person makes, both nationally and internationally, and their concurrent family constellations. Analysing mobility trajectories thus brings young people’s lives in the origin country into view, enabling researchers to analyse the experiences, relationships, and resources they gain before migration. Emerging research on mobility trajectories is revealing the diverse mobility patterns of migrant youth and the significant effects mobility has on their lives. Recent studies have shown that, through their mobility trajectories, migrant youth build educational resilience (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021), gain social capital from peer relationships (Ogden and Mazzucato 2022a), shape changing relationships to the country of origin (Ogden and Mazzucato 2022b), engage in development activities (Akom Ankobrey, Mazzucato, and Wagner 2022), and experience personal growth (Anschütz and Mazzucato 2022). The mobility lens thus enables me to study the mechanisms through which migrant youth gain embodied resources in the origin country prior to migration and translate and use them in the residence country after migration – that is, how these resources operate as transnational cultural capital over space and time.

Data and methods

The data for this paper come from an ethnographic study conducted as part of the Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives project (motrayl.com; Mazzucato 2015). The study included 20 young people (aged 15-25) of Ghanaian background with diverse mobility trajectories between the two countries (Ogden 2022). This paper focuses on a sub-sample of seven participants who migrated from Ghana to Germany and entered five different secondary schools in Hamburg between the ages of 14 and 17. One of the seven was born in Germany but raised mostly in Ghana, while the others were born in Ghana. I accessed three participants through schools where I was conducting fieldwork and four through snowball sampling. In line with my youth-centric research design, I obtained informed consent directly from young people rather than their parents (Williams 2006; Spriggs 2010) and approached consent processually, by regularly reminding participants of the research aims and re-confirming their willingness to participate (Cutliffe and Ramcharan 2002; American Anthropological Association 2012). The study was approved by Maastricht University’s Ethics Committee.

I conducted multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hamburg (12 months) and Ghana (2 months) in 2018 and 2019. In Hamburg, I volunteered in reception classes, observed participants at school, and interviewed participants’ teachers. I also spent time with participants at home, at church, and in their free time. I accompanied two of the seven participants on trips to Ghana and visited three participants’ former schools there, deepening my understanding of their educational and family backgrounds beyond what I could learn in Hamburg. Further, I conducted mobility trajectory mapping with all seven participants and concentric circle network mapping with six. Mobility trajectory mapping gathers detailed information on participants’ mobility throughout their lives, including their places of residence, caregivers, and schools in the countries of origin and residence (Mazzucato et al. 2022). Concentric circle network mapping creates a visualisation of young people’s transnational social networks, including important people in their extended family networks in the origin country (Ogden 2022, 65).

My positionality shaped my access to and relationships in the field. As a highly educated, middle-class, white, Australian-British woman, my main similarity with my participants was our individual and family histories of transnational migration and mobility. Yet while our differences undoubtedly limited my access to and understanding of certain aspects of their lives, they also offered certain benefits to my participants (who regularly asked for my help with schoolwork, especially English) and enabled good rapport with their teachers, many of whom were similarly white, middle-class, and highly educated. With the participants I observed in school, I adopted a ‘least-adult’ role (Mandell 1988) to distinguish myself from their teachers by avoiding disciplining students, spending break times in student spaces, and moving research interviews to non-school settings. I conducted fieldwork in German and English, according to my interlocutors’ preferences.

I analysed my data iteratively during and after fieldwork. In the field, regular re-readings of fieldnotes and transcripts spurred refinements of interview and observation topics. Following fieldwork, I analysed my data to identify themes related to transnational cultural capital and school transitions. These themes were then refined through back-and-forth engagement with relevant literatures during the writing process.

The transnational context

This section outlines background information on the Ghanaian and Hamburg school systems and positions my participants’ socioeconomic profiles and educational trajectories within this transnational context.

The Ghanaian school system continues to be based on the British colonial curriculum (Pinto 2019) and contains a mix of public and private schools, whose prestige and quality vary depending on the stage of schooling. The highest-quality Junior High Schools (JHS) tend to be fee-paying private or international schools, largely attended by students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The highest-quality Senior High Schools (SHS), however, are a select group of public schools, entry to which is decided through competitive exams. As such, the student bodies at top SHS tend to be more socioeconomically diverse. Ghanaian schools, especially boarding schools, are known for their strict discipline, competitive practices, and arduous study routines that aim to instil the importance of formal education and culturally important values like respect, hard work, and perseverance (Coe and Shani 2015; Abotsi 2020).

Education in Germany is administered at the state (Länder) level and is characterised by its early tracking of students into different secondary school types, which is blamed for perpetuating disadvantage among migrant youth (Auernheimer 2005; Crul et al. 2012). In Hamburg, students enter either a Stadtteilschule or a Gymnasium in the fifth grade, based on teacher recommendation and parental choice. Stadtteilschulen are neighbourhood high schools that offer transfer to the vocational track after the ninth or tenth grade, or continuation onto an academic track leading to the university-entrance qualification, the Abitur. Gymnasien are academically oriented schools that mainly prepare students for university. The students at Stadtteilschulen are generally more culturally and socioeconomically diverse than those attending Gymnasien (Auernheimer 2005; BSB 2019). Newly arrived students who do not speak German attend reception classes (Internationale Vorbereitungsklassen, or IVK) within secondary schools – usually Stadtteilschulen. Reception classes focus on teaching students German, but also include subjects such as Mathematics, English, and Social Sciences (Fürstenau 2017; Plöger and Barakos 2021). While most students attend IVK for one year, some remain in advanced IVK classes to complete the standard ninth- and tenth-grade examinations.

All seven participants featured in this paper were high-achieving students in both countries. They had all attended prestigious schools in Ghana, usually a fee-paying primary school and JHS, followed by a highly rated public SHS. Many had attended boarding schools in Accra, Cape Coast, or Kumasi ­– cities known for their high-quality educational institutions. During fieldwork, all seven were attending or had attended IVK classes in Hamburg. Some transitioned to mainstream classes within a year, while others completed the standard ninth- or tenth-grade exams in advanced IVK classes. They had all attended Stadtteilschulen, while two subsequently or concurrently attended Gymnasien. All participants were thriving at school in Hamburg. This does not mean they faced no obstacles: many found learning German difficult and felt the strain of a new curriculum, while some experienced social isolation or unfair treatment by the odd teacher. But despite these challenges, they experienced overall successful transitions. By this, I mean that they described their school transitions in largely positive terms and obtained objectively good outcomes, often at the top of their cohorts. My classroom observations and interactions with participants’ teachers confirmed this interpretation. For all seven, the university-entrance qualification, the Abitur, was a viable option. By the end of fieldwork, two had completed the Abitur; four were in the academic upper-secondary track (Oberstufe) which leads to the Abitur; and the teacher of the seventh was sure he ‘will get the Abitur and go to university.’

Importantly, the seven young people featured in this paper share similar social-class positions in both Ghana and Germany. Research has shown that most Ghanaian migrants are not the poorest of the poor (Mazzucato, van den Boom, and Nsowah-Nuamah 2008; Noll 2020). Similarly, my participants belong to extended family networks in Ghana rich in diverse resources, including economic capital, social status, and high levels of education (Budniok and Noll 2018). Not all families possessed all these resources – some participants’ caregivers were not economically prosperous but were highly educated or practiced respected professions (e.g., teachers), while others enjoyed multiple forms of privilege. Most of their parents had completed high school and some had attended university in Ghana, making them relatively highly educated within the Ghanaian context (Barro and Lee 2013)¹, while their extended family networks included engineers, civil servants, nurses, teachers, and local chiefs. However, participants’ families would all be considered working class in Hamburg, the city home to Germany’s largest Ghanaian community (Nieswand 2008; Mörath 2015) where more than half of the youth population has a migration background (Statistikamt Nord 2021). Three of the seven lived in single-parent households; three had at least one unemployed parent; and employed parents usually held low-wage jobs as cooks or cleaners, while two were undertaking vocational training for management positions in the service industry.

The successful school transitions of my participants were common among other Ghanaian-background youth I met in Hamburg with similar transnational social-class backgrounds and mobility trajectories. Teachers and education officials I interviewed in Hamburg also perceived newly arrived Ghanaian students as generally having strong academic backgrounds and abilities. Therefore, while I cannot claim my sample is representative of newly arrived Ghanaian students in Hamburg, my participants are by no means anomalies.

Transnational cultural capital in young Ghanaians’ school transitions

My data analysis revealed four types of transnational cultural capital that these young Ghanaians used to navigate their school transitions from Ghana to Hamburg: confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability. Below, I analyse how these embodied resources operate transnationally through these young Ghanaians’ mobility trajectories – that is, I show how they are developed in Ghana and then translated to and used in migrant youth’s school transitions in Hamburg.

Confidence

Kwaku (21) was raised in Ghana by his grandmother, during which time he attended ‘one of the best’ international schools in his hometown in the Eastern Region. He graduated from Junior High School with excellent grades and was admitted to one of Ghana’s most prestigious Senior High Schools, a boys’ boarding school in Kumasi whose spacious compound with manicured hedges I observed during my own visit there, and whose alumni include prominent Ghanaian academics, businesspeople, athletes, and politicians. Following his grandmother’s death, Kwaku spent the school holidays with his aunt, whose husband was a successful mechanic.

Before moving to Hamburg aged 17 to join his mother and siblings, Kwaku’s mother told him that he would not achieve as highly as his German classmates. Kwaku confidently brushed off her warning. ‘I was like, “No, I’m gonna pass them” and stuff.’ Four years after his migration, Kwaku obtained his Abitur and started an engineering degree, inspired by his uncle, the mechanic, in Ghana. He told me that the transition between the Ghanaian and Hamburg school systems ‘all depends on who you were in Ghana, […] on how you see yourself and what you want to achieve. […] If I could succeed there, I can succeed here.’

The young Ghanaians in this study all possessed enormous confidence in their academic abilities, which permeated their self-image and interactions with others and accompanied them throughout their mobility trajectories. Confidence not only helped them get off to a positive start in Hamburg, as in Kwaku’s case; it also helped them overcome obstacles they encountered along the way. Discussing the challenges of learning German in his first year of schooling in Hamburg and referring to his record of high achievement in Ghana, Kingsley (16) said, ‘I know I am not unintelligent, I know I can do it, it’s just a question of the language’ – a sentiment echoed by several participants and their teachers. Rather than perceive challenges like learning German as reflections of their intelligence or abilities, participants framed them as external obstacles, which they believed themselves capable of overcoming thanks to the characteristics they possessed as members of resource-rich extended family networks and based on their own academic records in Ghana.

Ella (19), who in Hamburg recycled drinks containers from her mother’s cleaning job to supplement family income, drew confidence from her prestigious extended family in Ghana, who were a ‘big name’ in her hometown. Her family’s academic achievements served to bolster Ella’s confidence and reinforce her own school successes. She recounted proudly how one of her favourite uncles, a university-educated high-school teacher, had told her upon seeing her final JHS results in Ghana, ‘You have my head.’ Like many participants, Ella’s belonging to an accomplished extended family in Ghana built her confidence as being destined to ‘follow in [her uncle’s] footsteps,’ wherever she lived.

The confidence of Nana drew not only from the royal lineage of his family background, invoked by his father in the opening vignette, but also from his academic record in Ghana. Nana described himself as always having been ‘very smart’, usually ranked near the top of the class at the private international school he attended in his hometown near the capital, Accra. Fourteen months into Nana’s schooling in Hamburg, he was confident about his prospects in the upcoming ninth-grade examinations, which would determine whether he could continue his secondary education. ‘I know some students who have schafft [‘achieved’ in German] the ESA, so I’m like, “Okay, I can do it, if I just put in some effort.” So far, I feel confident.’ The effort that contributes to Nana’s confidence constitutes the second type of transnational cultural capital analysed here: discipline.

Discipline

Austin (17) grew up in Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city, with his aunt. They made weekly visits to her husband, who worked in the Ashanti royal palace. When Austin was 13, they moved into a large 8-room house built by a relative living in France. Austin’s mother, who had lived in Germany since he was 5 years old, sent money each semester for Austin to attend private schools in Ghana that ‘only the rich people’ attend. At one of his schools, which I visited in Ghana, painted slogans reminded students that ‘Education is Worth More than Silver and Gold’ and ‘Excellence is Always a Choice’.

When Austin was 14, he moved to Hamburg, where he lived with his mother, stepfather, and two younger siblings in a low-income neighbourhood and attended the local Stadtteilschule. His IVK teacher told me that, ‘From the beginning, he worked extremely hard. He was the student that “got it” and sat every afternoon to learn his vocab list.’ The teacher followed Austin’s progress once he transitioned to mainstream classes, noting that he ‘can keep up with the tenth grade, but that’s a result of his work ethic.’ Austin explained his disciplined approach thus: ‘The people who have “made it” are also human, so how did they do it? Through inspiration, through effort. Yeah, that’s why I believe I can make it. But only when I work hard.’

Discipline was a key form of transnational cultural capital that moved with the young Ghanaians in this study throughout their mobility trajectories. I use ‘discipline’ to refer to young people’s hard work and perseverance, internalised from the strict rules, high standards, and clear hierarchies of their school and family environments in Ghana. Similar to Nana’s discipline in teaching himself basic German before starting school in Hamburg, described in the opening vignette, other participants commonly described studying long hours and voluntarily taking on additional homework assignments for extra credit in Hamburg. They perceived this type of discipline as commonplace in their Ghanaian schools and uncommon yet valued in Hamburg schools, which my observations and teacher interviews confirmed.

Various participants attributed their discipline to their schooling in Ghana, including relentless studying and the use of physical punishment. As a headmaster in Ghana told me matter-of-factly, ‘Here, we beat children with the cane. There [in Europe], you cannot do it.’ While several school staff in Ghana told me about young people being sent back from abroad for lack of discipline, the young Ghanaians in my study took their discipline with them to Germany as a form of transnational cultural capital. I observed Kingsley’s (16) discipline regularly: he often asked me to help him study at the public library on weekends; I even ran into him there unexpectedly. He recounted how the strict school standards in Ghana, including being caned for failing a test or arriving late, had shaped the discipline he employed during his school transition in Hamburg:

Everything [at school in Ghana] was about punishment […] I found it to be very important because it has now trained me to be someone very different. […] Anytime I have a presentation, I normally wake up earlier, maybe let’s say, sometimes at 3, sometimes at 3:30, sometimes at 4, to learn [study] before I do anything. So it’s the way I prepare […] that make[s] me able to do certain things extraordinary.

Discipline is also transmitted through young peoples’ extended family networks in Ghana. Isaac (21), who attended prestigious schools in Ghana until his move to Germany at age 16, credited his discipline to the influence of various educated and successful relatives. ‘I got this mindset from my father,’ who worked in politics and business, ‘because he’s like, “Wherever you are, you have to make it”.’ This influence also came from other relatives he lived with in Ghana, including his university-educated grandmother and studious and competitive cousins. Being surrounded by relatives in Ghana who took education seriously and demonstrated hard work instilled this same discipline in the young people in this study, who then drew on this capital in their school transitions. Like discipline, another type of transnational cultural capital was developed in Ghana and yet highly valued by these students’ teachers in Hamburg: respect.

Respect

Ahoufe (20) grew up between several households within her extended family and subsequently attended numerous schools in Ghana, including a highly reputed girls’ Senior High School. Her extended family included a school headmaster, an engineer, and academically successful cousins who ‘really inspir[e] me a lot.’ Ahoufe adored school in Ghana. She often told me stories about boarding-school pranks with friends and the classroom antics of her favourite teachers. But this playfulness existed alongside ‘beatings, marching, and punishment’ that Ahoufe accepted as ‘all part of the fun’ of school in Ghana.

Aged 16, Ahoufe migrated to Germany, where her parents work as a cook and cleaner and the family share an apartment in Hamburg’s east, where the majority of youth have a migration background and mean incomes are below the city’s average. At school in Hamburg, Ahoufe was struck by what she saw as students’ disrespectful interactions with teachers. Teachers in Ghana, she said, ‘have a limit for us. You can talk with them, laugh with them, but you can’t cross that limit. And here it’s like, […] the students tell the teacher to shut up or something, then I’ll be like, “You can’t do this in Ghana.” […] The relationship between the students and the teachers [in Hamburg], I see it to be kind of disrespecting, because of how I was being brought up in Ghana.’

Respect emerged repeatedly in my observations and interactions with my participants and their teachers in Hamburg, and it was enacted in two main aspects of their school transitions. First, they showed respect for their teachers. They accepted teachers’ authority, never talked back, and were polite and attentive. This was not the norm in student-teacher relationships in Hamburg, which were often characterised, both in teachers’ commentaries and my observations, by (sometimes mutual) disrespect. All the participants’ teachers I spoke to enjoyed having these students in their classes and had developed warm feelings towards them. One of Ella’s first IVK teachers in Hamburg remembered Ella as one of her best-ever students. Such positive relationships with teachers had been a consistent part of Ella’s schooling experience throughout her mobility trajectory: she told me that, in Ghana, ‘I was very good, very respectful to my teachers, and they always liked me.’ This was confirmed when I accompanied Ella on a visit to one of her former schools in Ghana in 2019, where former teachers praised her academic achievements and good behaviour.

Second, young people showed respect for the learning environment. I observed and heard participants describe how the value of education was inculcated in their school and family environments in Ghana, through the example set by highly educated relatives, the strict prioritisation of study above recreation at home, and the importance of punctuality, neat uniforms, and cleanliness at school. In Hamburg, I observed my participants remind other students to remove their hats when entering class and turn down music on their phones. An IVK teacher told me how Nana briefly attended advanced English classes but found the attitude of the older students ‘disrespectful’ – a story Nana confirmed. Teachers often remarked on Nana’s neat clothing as a marker of his respect for education, calling him ‘a good college boy’ and ‘always dressed for Eton’ (the famous elite boys’ school in England). Nana’s class teacher credited his respectful demeanour to his family’s influence, noting that he was ‘totally respectful’ of his mother during parent-teacher meetings.

Teachers in Hamburg appreciated the ease of interactions with their Ghanaian students and the respect shown for their position and knowledge. Similarly, they perceived their Ghanaian students’ respect for the learning environment as a good influence on their classmates. However, these young people did not only show respect for the learning environment by transplanting cultural capital gained in Ghana into their new educational context in Hamburg; they also adapted to its specific requirements and standards.

Adaptability

Kingsley’s (16) main caregiver in Ghana was his grandmother. While she had limited financial resources, she was a respected local teacher and instilled in Kingsley the value of education. ‘She always brought me up in a way and manner that I would be thirsty for success based on my background,’ he told me. Members of his extended family network provided other resources. His aunt, a nurse, gave Kingsley her old university textbooks and paid for his private-school fees for a few years. His JHS report card was full of top grades, which brought him wide social recognition. ‘My name is still in the school,’ he beamed.

Kingsley moved to Germany aged 16, where he lived with his unemployed mother and six German-born siblings. About six months into his schooling in Hamburg, I asked him how it differed to school in Ghana:

Kingsley: In Ghana it doesn’t concern how much you talk in class, you just have to write your examination very good and pass. But in Germany, I heard even if you are very intelligent […] you [can] fail your examination because you don’t raise your hand so much in class. […] So I also try so much to raise my hand so many times in class. […]

Laura: Has it become easier for you to do it?

Kingsley: Yeah, [now] I just find my hand to be in the air, just like that [laughs].

His IVK teacher confirmed how quickly and easily Kingsley adapted to her class: ‘Often [newly arrived] students here are very undisciplined because they think there are no rules. I didn’t have that at all with Kingsley.’

While participants brought with them embodied resources developed in their educational and family settings in Ghana – like confidence, discipline, and respect – they also actively adapted to the pedagogical style of their Hamburg schools. Participants generally depicted their Ghanaian classrooms as teacher-centred, with passive participation from students and an emphasis on rote learning and theoretical knowledge. By contrast, they perceived their Hamburg classrooms as student-centred and focused on applied and practical learning. Many also pointed out that participation was assessed in Hamburg, contributing to their results. As such, in order to succeed in this new environment, they had to adapt to its different standards.

Various participants described their adaptations to the pedagogical environments of their Hamburg classrooms as conscious and quick. Kwaku told me that he ‘integrated very fast’ by ‘studying the behaviour’ of his German schoolmates and adapting his own behaviour accordingly. As he put it: ‘When you go to Rome, you do what the Romans do.’ Participants’ teachers also depicted their Ghanaian students’ adaptability in positive terms. An IVK teacher of both Nana and Austin described them as having ‘zero problems’ adapting to her classroom. Austin was ‘extremely cautious’ when he arrived, ‘starting every sentence with “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am”.’ But, ‘after a few weeks, he got it out of his system’ and actively participated in her class.

At least two explanations of these young Ghanaians’ adaptability emerge from my data. First, analysing their mobility trajectories made visible the multiple moves many had made between different caregivers, schools, and neighbourhoods before migrating to Germany. Ahoufe, for example, attended nine schools and lived with three caregivers in Ghana; Isaac lived with three caregivers in various neighbourhoods of Accra and attended four schools, including boarding school in another region. As such, these young people had ample experience adapting to the different rules, relationships, and expectations of the various settings in which they schooled and lived in Ghana. Second, these young people framed their seemingly easy adaptation to the different pedagogical norms encountered throughout their mobility trajectories as driven by their motivation or ‘thirs[t] for success,’ in Kingsley’s words. While young people’s target of being educated did not change post-migration, they pursued this goal in ways adapted to their new context to best ensure a successful school transition between Ghana and Hamburg. As Isaac (21) explained to me:

The thing is, when you set a target, […] then there’s nothing that will actually swerve your target, because you are focused on it. I think when you are focused and determined, your personal attitude toward education won’t change, no matter where you go.

Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, I have studied the school transitions of seven young people who migrated from Ghana to Hamburg, Germany, as teenagers. Despite their low socioeconomic status in Hamburg, all seven experienced successful school transitions, as indicated by their own perceptions, performance, and teacher evaluations. What explains this outcome? An analysis of their mobility trajectories brings their pre-migration social-class positions, extended family networks, and educational backgrounds to bear on understandings of their post-migration school transitions. At the core of this understanding is migrant youth’s transnational cultural capital: the embodied resources – including confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability – that they develop in the origin country and then translate to and use in the residence country.

In contrast to existing research on migrant youth’s school transitions, I show that, far from arriving as ‘blank slates’, newly arrived migrant youth possess transnational cultural capital that moves with them. While migrant youth research has shown that family and school factors in the residence country are important (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Haller, Portes, and Lynch 2011), a mobility lens reveals that migrant youth’s lives before migration also matter for their school transitions. In Ghana, these young people all had access to quality education and were part of resource-rich extended family networks through which they gained cultural capital in the form of confidence, discipline, respect, and adaptability. While certain markers of their social-class positions in Ghana were not visible nor valued in Germany, such as the names of their private schools or families’ prestigious reputations, the embodied resources they developed within these contexts were.

The analysis also revealed migrant youth’s agency in translating and using their cultural capital in their school transitions, making it truly transnational. Their agency is evident in the way they harnessed discipline in the face of obstacles, maintained confidence when facing the unknown, and nurtured positive relationships through respect for teachers and the school environment. But young people’s agency is most visible in their adaptability, by consciously adapting elements of their transnational cultural capital for maximum academic benefit. This finding does not, however, imply that adults are unimportant in migrant youth’s lives, nor that young people’s agency is unfettered. All seven participants lived with one or both parents, were (at least partially) financially dependent on them, and migrated to Germany at a time chosen by their parents. Adults in young people’s extended family networks in Ghana also facilitated their development of transnational cultural capital. Yet the reviewed literatures have largely positioned young people as either adopting their parents’ capital (Lareau 2011; Ichou 2014) or accumulating and using their own cultural capital within the residence country (Devine 2009; Emery et al. 2020). Considering mobility trajectories reveals how migrant youth gain embodied resources in the origin country, often through relationships with important adults like caregivers and teachers, but then agentically use and adapt such resources in the residence country. As such, a mobility lens reveals new aspects of migrant youth’s agency as active brokers of their own transnational cultural capital.

The young people in this study navigated not only different educational contexts but also different status positions, as evident in the opening vignette about Nana, whose royal lineage in Ghana co-existed alongside his working-class position in Hamburg. In Ghana, all participants experienced a certain privilege and high status, including attending prestigious schools and belonging to resource-rich extended family networks. In Germany, by contrast, they all occupied working-class positions, living in low-income neighbourhoods and in partially employed or low-wage households. Transnational migration research has long acknowledged that migrants often hold different social statuses in their countries of origin and residence (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Nieswand 2011), including many Ghanaian migrants (Anarfi et al. 2003; Mazzucato, van den Boom, and Nsowah-Nuamah 2008; Noll 2020). A recent focus on social class in transnational migration research is revealing the fluidity, instability, and interaction of migrants’ social-class positions across time and space (Coe and Pauli 2020). Yet most research has focused on adults’ social-class, often in relation to their economic and employment statuses. The ability of the young Ghanaians in this study to translate and use transnational cultural capital between contexts in which they are differently positioned suggests that the social-class dynamics of migrant youth’s transnational education warrant further investigation.

Focusing on migrant youth’s school transitions through a mobility lens raises other questions that future research should address. For example, it remains to be seen whether these young Ghanaians’ transnational cultural capital is valued in other contexts as their trajectories continue, including higher education and the workforce. Finally, this paper shows how a specific group of migrant youth can successfully activate certain types of transnational cultural capital in a particular reception context. Future research should investigate which combinations of transnational cultural capital and reception contexts produce such ‘chemical reactions’ that enable positive school transitions for diverse newly arrived migrant youth in various educational environments – an issue relevant to researchers, policymakers, educators, and migrant youth themselves.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Valentina Mazzucato, Sara Fürstenau, Javier Carnicer, Emma Abotsi, Simone Plöger and the MO-TRAYL team for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant number 682982].

Notes

1 Most participants’ parents would have attended secondary school and university in Ghana between 1990 and 2000. In this period, the proportion of the Ghanaian population 15 years and older that had completed secondary school ranged from 11 to 15 per cent. The proportion with any tertiary education ranged from 2 to 3.4 percent (Barro and Lee 2013).