Abstract
This study (The study has been developed under the framework of an FP7 research project, RESL.Eu – Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe (Project scheme: SSH-2012-1; number: 320223).) aims to contribute to a line of research initiated at the beginning of the twenty-first century that inquired into the conditions that favoured the academic success and school continuity of Spain’s Roma youth (Abajo and Carrasco 2004) and also investigated the sociocultural impact that successful academic trajectories might have on Roma individuals, families and communities. This chapter will comparatively explore the experiences and trajectories of academic success of two sets of Roma youth that have been identified as ‘pre-Decade generation’ and ‘Decade-generation’, in relation to the changing policy contexts to which they have been exposed and in which they have been navigating through formal education: namely, before and in parallel with the development of the ambitious European agenda known as the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005–2015) and corresponding national and local initiatives undertaken in Spain. Data of the first dataset were collected in 2002/2003, while those of the second set in 2015. For this analysis we have selected a total of 16 interviews. Data analysis will call for a wider framework including recent critical revisits of Ogbu’s cultural ecological theory in the context of urban schooling, but developing a success perspective that draws from literature on different forms of social and cultural capital, minority youth and education. We will firstly inquire into how social capital is operating in the family and ethnic community, in peer relations and with regards to institutional agents, including the case of ethnically targeted interventions. Secondly, we aim to identify what sociocultural changes are triggered by school success.
Keywords
- Spanish Roma
- Academic success
- Social capital
- Sociocultural changes
- Impact of success
- Institutional agents
Authors in alphabetical order. The co-authors share equal responsibility for the ideas expressed in this chapter.
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- 1.
- 2.
In this article we apply the term “Spanish Roma” to refer to the Gitano or Caló population, instead of using these latter emic concepts, in order to link our contribution to the academic literature of the emergent field of “Roma education”. We will clearly highlight when we allude to other ethnic-cultural groups described by their environment as Gipsy, Sinti, Roma, Cigány, Ţigan, etc. collectively identified under the umbrella terms of Roma/Gypsy/Travellers.
- 3.
The unprecedented transformation of sociological and anthropological theories of education until today, with the works of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) in France and Paul Willis (1977) in the UK, has been by far well acknowledged and synthesized.
- 4.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, emblematic contributions by Fordham (1985); Gibson (1988); Valdés (1997) or Valenzuela (1999) in the US or Gillborn and Safia Mirza (2000) in UK have to be mentioned, although they initially focused on originally immigrant students.
- 5.
Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu (1986) in their widely cited work sustain that one major reason for academic underachievement among Black youth in the USA is a general cultural devaluation of educational attainment among African Americans, which bases on an oppositional cultural identity.
- 6.
Again: we do not refer to the initiative of the Decade of Roma Inclusion in the strict sense, but rather to a wide range of policies, programmes and projects that have recently emerged targeting the improvement of the Roma populations throughout Europe.
- 7.
“Comprehensive Plan for the Romani People in Catalonia” or “Pla Integral del Poble Gitano a Catalunya” in Catalan.
- 8.
The “school promoter” is a Roma person who acts both as a tutor and an intercultural or community mediator keeping strong relationship with school teachers, families and Roma children both in primary and secondary school.
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Bereményi, B.Á., Carrasco, S. (2017). Bittersweet Success. The Impact of Academic Achievement Among the Spanish Roma After a Decade of Roma Inclusion. In: Pink, W., Noblit, G. (eds) Second International Handbook of Urban Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40317-5_62
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