Hungarian Youth in Transylvania Discuss Hybrid Notions of Civic Identity: Making the Case for Cultural Preservation and Multilingualism

Abstract

This study aims to understand ways in which Hungarian high school students describe and articulate their civic identity, as members of varied civic communities. We conducted our study in Romania, an emerging democracy with an Hungarian national minority, as it provides a unique opportunity to examine the development of a democratic civic identity in increasingly transnational spaces. We situated our site school as a figured world where students and teachers constructed a place to cultivate and preserve Hungarian identity within an interdependent world. Findings suggest that the figured world of the school provided a space for students in which their Hungarian heritage is preserved and cultivated through language and tradition. Further, students expressed a sense of agency when describing their educational and professional opportunities, allowing them to envision a future built on their own terms. The implications for civic education in Romania, other emerging democracies, as well as the United States and other diverse nations, speak mainly to the notions of hybridity of ethnicity and heritage as youth begin to explore these identities in their own individual terms as well as in the official spaces of schooling.