Involuntary Minorities Research Articles

Ser mapuche en la universidad: Condiciones de ingreso a la formación inicial docente, La Araucanía

El artículo problematiza en factores sociales que inciden en el ingreso y permanencia de estudiantes de origen indígena pertenecientes a culturas minoritarias involuntarias en la educación superior. Sostenemos como tesis que estudiantes mapuches enfrentan problemas personales y sociales que se constituyen en tensiones interculturales que tienen su origen, entre otros factores, a causas relacionadas a la vida académica previa al ingreso a la universidad. El objetivo es describir las características demográficas, de procedencia y académicas propias de estudiantes mapuches de la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad Católica de Temuco. La metodología empleada fue el análisis estadístico descriptivo de la base de datos de la Universidad, lo que permitió la caracterización demográfica con base en las identidades territoriales de la cual provienen este estudiantado. Se llevó a cabo la triangulación de las condiciones académicas de ingreso, esto es, el promedio de notas de la educación media (NEM), con la procedencia de estudiantes y sus preferencias de formación profesional en el área de educación. Concluimos que conocer esta triada (demografía, condiciones académicas y preferencias de carrera) nos permitirá avanzar en la gestión de estrategias y pistas de acciones para apoyar a este estudiantado en su proceso de inserción en la vida universitaria.

Cultural minorities in Finnish educational opportunity structures

In many countries, there are differences in school performance between and within cultural minorities and the majority. For, instance, differences between the learning outcomes of immigrant-origin and Finnish-origin students are considerable, and the risk among young people of immigrant origin of becoming positioned outside education and work life is higher than that among young people of Finnish origin. The aim of this paper is to develop a holistic approach to educational inequalities by offering two theoretical viewpoints concerning cultural minorities in particular. First, we introduce the idea of the opportunity structure, which clarifies why the education system does not offer the same opportunities to all minority groups. Second, we highlight the need to understand the cultural variety of minorities when explaining differences in educational attainment. Here we make the distinctions of cultural differences (primary and secondary) and minority status (autonomous, voluntary and involuntary minorities). Finally, we discuss the question of equal educational opportunities by reflecting on these two theoretical viewpoints.

Understanding Cultural Differences and School Learning

Paper presented to the Special Libraries Association, 83rd Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA., on June 9 1992. Focuses on understanding cultural differences and school learning in minority groups from a comparative perspective. Looks at conventional explanations as to why some groups adapt better than others. Defines and emphasizes the need to recognize the different types of minorities, i.e. autonomous, immigrant or voluntary minorities and non-immigrant or involuntary minorities. Explores primary cultural differences existing before immigrants arrived in United States and secondary cultural differences arising after a group has become a minority. Concludes that, generally, immigrant minorities tend to be more successful in school than involuntary minorities but that both types of minorities can benefit from additional help in school to manage their different cultural problems. Recognizing these differences is the key to better school adjustment and performance.

Aloha teachers: teacher autonomy support promotes Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students’ motivation, school belonging, course-taking and math achievement

Among 110 Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, teacher autonomy support in 9th grade significantly predicted intrinsic motivation for math in 9th grade as well as math course-taking over the next 2 years, both of which in turn significantly predicted math achievement by 11th grade. In a second model, teacher autonomy support was positively associated with sense of school belonging; however, school belonging did not predict math achievement. Because of the Hawaiian cultural concept of Aloha and the effect of teacher autonomy support on intrinsic motivation, school belonging, math course-taking, and math achievement, researchers may wish to develop interventions for Hawaiian students that focus on elevating intrinsic motivation and belonging via increasing teacher autonomy support. Because Native Hawaiians and most other Pacific Islanders are involuntary minorities, this research may have implications for other involuntary minorities across the world, such as the Buraku in Japan, and the Maori people of New Zealand.

Exploring Minority Youths’ Police Encounters: A Qualitative Interpretive Meta-synthesis

Recent deaths by police of unarmed minority youth have raised important questions about the nature and outcomes of involuntary minority youth-police encounters. Youth are the most surveilled group of Americans and minority youth frequently live in neighborhoods disproportionately targeted for proactive policing (i.e., using broad police discretion to “target” those most likely to be engaged in criminal activity before criminal acts become apparent). Understanding the experiences of minority youth who encounter police officers is of critical concern for social workers in many practice and research areas. Social workers must examine how a minority person’s perceptions are formed through repeated, frequent, involuntary encounters with the police. The purpose of this qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis was to capture these experiences through the voices of minority youth in recounting their contacts with the police. Four themes were identified: dangerous, controlling, prejudiced, and ineffective. Further reduction of these themes resulted in an overarching theme that captures the essences of these youth’s experiences: dehumanization. These results enhance understanding of minority youth experience with police officers and, thus, inform social work advocacy efforts around this issue in both practice and research arenas.

The creation and maintenance of a ‘learning‐loving minority’ in conventional high schools: a research‐based response to John Ogbu

This research focuses on the adaptation strategies of students from an innovative elementary school run as a community of learners who have been involuntarily ‘thrown into’ competitive, credentialism‐based high schools. We apply the anthropologist John Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological framework of ‘minority’ to the innovative school graduates in their new school contexts. The students in our study, whom we refer to as a ‘learning‐loving minority’, were generally academically successful in their new conventional schools, yet expressed distinctly ambivalent attitudes toward conventional schooling practices. Discourse analysis revealed distinct response patterns, some paralleling those of (unsuccessful) involuntary minority students and others paralleling those of (successful) immigrant minority students described by Ogbu. We suggest that Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological approach can be useful for education research but should be modified to take into account the effect of the institution of conventional schooling itself—its competitive, credentialistic and meritocratic nature—which has to date been under‐analysed within Ogbu’s theoretical perspective.

The road not taken: two African‐American girls’ experiences with school mathematics

This article is a cross‐case study exploring two young African‐American adolescent girls’ experiences with school mathematics and the impact of the socio‐cultural context upon their motivation and mathematical identity. Based on repeated in‐depth interviews and ethnographic observation of their mathematics classroom, the researcher portrays contrasting pictures of two sixth‐grade African‐American girls who are ironically faced with the same end‐of‐the‐year‐results despite their differing personal and academic profiles. Overall data analysis reveals the profound impact of ethnicity and class, especially the influence of cultural and social capital, upon the girls’ experiences with school mathematics as well as their construction of identities in the discipline. Applying social constructivist approaches to motivation, Ogbu’s theory of involuntary minorities, and cultural reproduction theory, the researcher discusses possible variation and complexity existing in African‐American girls’ experience with school mathematics and calls for more thorough, in‐depth examination of race and gender issues in mathematics education.

ANNA FENYVESI (ed.), Hungarian language contact outside Hungary: Studies on Hungarian as a minority language

Anna Fenyvesi (ed.), Hungarian language contact outside Hungary: Studies on Hungarian as a minority language . Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xx, 424. Hb $162.00. Hungarians living outside Hungary left the country in various ways: Some were voluntary migrants who began to seek economic opportunity or political asylum, while others became involuntary immigrants to neighboring countries when the Treaty of Trianon shrank the borders of Hungary by two-thirds in 1920. Because these involuntary minorities were difficult for researchers to discuss under the communist regimes that ruled until 1989 (p. 4), this edited volume introduces a recent body of research that previously has been published mostly in Hungarian.

Ideologically Driven Science of School Organization and Whitewashing Oppositional Culture

the organization of schooling have profound implications for American Sociology, particularly subfields concerned with education, labor, race, and stratification. The late anthropologist John Ogbu upset the discourse on the sociology of education with heretical claims against accepted assimilation perspectives by reintroducing the notion of domination in the organization of schooling and in the process of education. In short, Ogbu advanced a perspective on the organization of education stressing its political economic processes. He noted that minorities in pluralistic industrial societies are unable to achieve educational parity with the dominant groups of their societies. He recognized three types of minorities: 1) autonomous minorities, 2) immigrant minorities, and 3) involuntary or caste-like minorities. Autonomous groups have numerical minority status, they could have experienced some prejudice, but usually have some cultural frame of reference that observes and

Rural Native Hawaiian Perspectives on Special Education

Native Hawaiians are an involuntary minority group who became Americans through an overthrow of their monarchy and colonization in the late 1800s. They have a history of separate and substandard schooling, and political and economic oppression. Currently, Native Hawaiians are overrepresented in special education, due in large part to the mismatch between western schooling and Hawaiian culture and speaking Pidgin English as their first language. In addition to overrepresentation, special education issues for Native Hawaiians include conducting unbiased assessment, providing culturally-relevant instruction and behavior management, and supporting families of students with disabilities. These issues overlap significantly with higher education challenges of recruiting and retaining Native Hawaiians in special education teacher preparation programs and developing culturally competent special educators.

Using Coolabah Dynamic Assessment to Identify Canadian Aboriginal Children with High Academic Potential: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

In this pilot study, 19 Canadian Aboriginal students in grades 3 or 4 were taken through the Coolabah Dynamic Assessment process, a form of dynamic (test-intervention-retest) assessment. While many of the children made little or no gain from pretest to posttest, several others improved markedly as a result of the intervention. Indeed, some showed substantial growth, reaching levels that placed them in the “invisible underachiever” category. Since both might be considered to be members of a marginalized, “involuntary minority” population, the performance of the Canadian children was also compared with that of an Australian Indigenous group examined in an earlier investigation.

Diagnosing inequalities in schooling: Ogbu’s orientation and wider implications

Throughout his life, John Ogbu worked untiringly to diagnose the educational problems of minorities, with the goal of remedying them. Although his earliest works propose a comprehensive anthropological approach, his last works seem to settle into exhortations to parents and teachers to put more pressure on (involuntary) minority children whose achievements are low; and to pupils to stop grumbling and get down to taking their schoolwork seriously. In this paper, I claim that Ogbu’s work can be seen to be showing the way to the deployment of more sophisticated theoretical tools in order to attain (1) a more refined analysis of the minority status; and (2) a broader social understanding of the basis for rejecting school standards among different kinds of minorities. By resorting to the broader theoretical approach he pioneered, researchers will be able to propose more effective remedies. ‘The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication …. compels all nations … to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst … In one word, it creates a world after its own image’ (Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1935, p. 27).

Reexamining Resistance as Oppositional Behavior: The Nation of Islam and the Creation of a Black Achievement Ideology

Influential work on oppositional culture explains involuntary minorities' disadvantage as the result of a culture that discourages academic effort by branding it as acting white, which leads students to resist schooling. Much of this work depicts involuntary minority cultures as internally uniform. This article challenges the oppositional-culture explanation in three important ways: (1) by demonstrating that through the religious tenets and practices of the Nation of Islam (NOI), young female members develop a black achievement ideology, resulting in the adoption of the kind of studious orientation to school that is usually demonstrated by voluntary immigrant groups; (2) by demonstrating the ways in which black people differentially make sense of and enact what it means to be black that challenge previous binary or dichotomized accounts of black oppositional social identity; and (3) by illustrating how resistance for NOI young women is transformative, as well as reproductive, of existing patterns of social, racial, and gender relations. The evidence, from a two-year ethnographic study of female high school students who were in the NOI suggests a systematic reexamination of the oppositional theory and its main suppositions

School Resistance in American High Schools: The Role of Race and Gender in Oppositional Culture Theory

Oppositional culture theory has been primarily used to explain race and ethnic differences in education. It argues that members of involuntary minority groups tend to underachieve for fear of being...

School Social Context Effects on Gender Differences in Academic Achievement Among Second-Generation Latinos

This study considers involuntary minority concentration effects on gender differences in achievement and finds increasing levels of involuntary minority enrollments decrease grade point averages and math scores for immigrant boys versus girls, net of individual and school socioeconomic status. Immigrant achievement declines in involuntary minority schools where a climate of apathy and failure inhibits performance. Yet, differences in gender roles and socialization renders girls less vulnerable to assimilation of adversarial attitudes and behaviors responsible for academic failure.

Oppositional Culture and Academic Performance among Children of Immigrants in the USA

A series of ethnographic case studies around the world has pointed to the lower academic performance of non-immigrant (involuntary) minority youths such as blacks and Mexicans in the USA, Maoris in New Zealand, Burakumin in Japan, and Crusians in the Virgin Islands. This outcome results from a set of negative perceptions, interpretations and responses towards schooling which have been conditioned by a history of group subordination. If indeed such attitudes and behaviors are held in considerable amounts by non-immigrant minority youths, it may be expected that academic performance among immigrants would suffer in schools with large proportions of non-immigrant minorities, where a 'normative climate' of apathy and failure may inhibit school performance among immigrant youths. The author uses longitudinal data to analyze involuntary minority enrollment effects upon grade point average and mathematics performance for samples of Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Haitian immigrants in South Florida, USA. Nicaraguan grade point average and Cuban and Nicaraguan mathematics performance decline with higher percentages of involuntary minority enrollments.

Identifying Gaps in Mathematics Preparation That Contribute to Ethnic, Gender, and American/Foreign Differences in Precalculus Performance

Prior to a precalculus course, 2,000 Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White college students were graded on three dimensions of mathematical achievement-Early Skills, Later Skills, and Formulation. Later Skills was substantially most important to successful completion of course. Poor preparation in skills most needed for subsequent mathematics success may reinforce a tendency toward lack of academic striving, which Ogbu (1992) identified as contributing to academic difficulties for members of involuntary minorities such as African Americans. Black and White American students, especially Black males, learned disproportionately fewer Later Skills than their foreign-born counterparts. This study provides evidence that for both Black and White students, environment (American vs. foreign-born) can play a decisive role in of skills needed for academic success in precalculus. Attempts have been made to explain widely observed ethnic differences in academic performance. Lomax, West, Harmon, Viator, and Madaus (1995) found that minorities in America are receiving less quality education. In mathematics education, Tate (1997) found that course taking was a powerful variable, often resulting in similar achievement gains across diverse (p. 652). The 1995 Summer Yearbook of The Journal of Negro Education was devoted to theme of Myths and Realities: African Americans and Measurement of Human Abilities. This followed release of Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) book, The Bell Curve, in which authors claimed that it is implausible that environmental differences alone could explain substantial differences in Black and White student test performance. The lead editorial of 1995 Summer Yearbook called for the presentation of experimental results that refute pseudoscientific findings of such works, and of constructs that present a more soundly based and equitable approach to educational practice, assessment, and intellectual development (Johnson, 1995). Viewing immigrant and American-born ethnic groups in terms of their minority status has proven effective in explaining differential performance. Ogbu (1992) cites several instances where members of an involuntary minority (a minority group that has been incorporated into a society by colonization, conquest, annexation, or slavery; Ogbu, 1987) did not perform as well as members of same ethnic group in another country where their presence was voluntary. Moreover, he points to less academic striving as a significant impediment to school success for members of involuntary minorities. Gibson (1991) found that when both American- and foreign-born minority groups could, instead, be classified as an immigrant minority (the case where separate minority group identity is maintained beyond first generation), more comparable performance between American- and foreign-born minority groups could be expected. In this study, three empirical dimensions of student responses are investigated on a standardized test to determine what levels of procedural or conceptual knowledge matter most to subsequent success in a college precalculus course. Precalculus is important because it represents a gateway to careers in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET). Data on differences in mathematical preparation are gathered, comparing (a) American- and foreign-born students, (b) ethnic groups, and (c) gender groups. Analysis proceeds with an eye toward possible reforms in American educational practice that might enhance career opportunities in SMET for groups that are underrepresented in those fields. Current efforts to reform mathematics education in United States were first introduced by National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989), prompting use of standards across K-12 mathematics education curriculum. Of interest in present study is Curriculum Standard 1 for K-12: Mathematics as Problem Solving. …

Puerto Rican High Achievers: An Example of Ethnic and Academic Identity Compatibility

Although research finds that members of some involuntary minority ethnic groups tend to develop oppositional identities, Puerto Rican students studied in this research project at an urban high school did not associate school success with “whiteness.” These students were academically successful while still maintaining their ethnic identity. They were not accused of acting white, did not mask their academic accomplishments, and did not assume raceless personas. Different conceptualizations of ethnicity, sociohistorical context, and class may account for their maintenance of ethnic identity while achieving success in school.

Assessing the Oppositional Culture Explanation for Racial/Ethnic Differences in School Performance

The oppositional culture explanation for racial disparities in school performance posits that individuals from historically oppressed groups (involuntary minorities) signify their antagonism toward the dominant group by resisting school goals. In contrast, individuals from the dominant group and groups that migratedfreely to the host country (immigrant minorities) maintain optimistic views of their chances for educational and occupational success. Because of its historical and cross-cultural appeal, this explanation has been well-received by academics, although key implications of the theory have not been carefully tested. Proponents have failed to systematically compare perceptions of occupational opportunity and resistance to school across involuntary, dominant, and immigrant groups. Using a large sample of African American, Asian American, and non-Hispanic white high school sophomores from the first follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Study, we provide the first rigorous test of the oppositional culture explanation. Upon close scrutiny, its key predictions fail. DR espite recent improvement on some measures, the gap in educational performance across racial groups persists. Finding explanations for that gap continues to frustrate academics. Some scholars point to characteristics of the minority family itself (Moynihan 1965), while others see differences in educational performance as primarily a function of social structural conditions (Bourdieu 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976), such as the types of neighborhoods students live in (Massey and Denton 1993) and consequently the kinds of schools they attend. The oppositional culture explanation draws from both of these traditions, recognizing that social structural conditions shape opportunities but arguing that these conditions form students' motivation for schooling.

Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural‐Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education

This article has three objectives. First, it describes Ogbu's classification of minorities: autonomous, voluntary or immigrant, and involuntary or nonimmigrant minorities. Second, it explains Ogbu's cultural‐ecological theory of minority school performance. Finally, it suggests some implications of the theory for pedagogy. The authors regard the typology of minority groups as a heuristic device for analysis and interpretation of differences among minority groups in school experience.