An Uneasy Truce: The Significance of Schooling and Academic Achievement for Rohingya Refugee Youths in Ontario

Abstract

This dissertation explores how Rohingya refugee youths are navigating their historical legacy and past and ongoing lived experiences as they familiarize themselves with the culture of mainstream schooling in Canada and attempt to determine their place within this complex network. In particular, it investigates the role that the habitus and social position of participants within this migration community in southwestern Ontario play in structuring refugee youths’ choices and opportunities in and through education. Given these goals, I pay special attention to the youths’ evolving attitudes to the predispositions of their parents with regard to child language socialization and cultural continuity, and the influences that schooling experiences have in introducing youths to alternate cross-cultural currents. I use two primary conceptual frameworks: (a) Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977a, 1977b) perspective on habitus and cultural capital and (b) linguistic and cultural socialization (Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Schecter, 2015; Schecter & Bayley, 2002, 2004). These frameworks ground ethnographic case studies representing the perspectives I have identified in my empirical research—through participant observations, surveys/questionnaires, ethnographic interviews, and other, secondary data sources. My research findings revealed that participating youths are struggling to adopt a concept of victimhood that their parents, as genocide survivors, have embodied, but that is not part of the youths’ direct experiential reality. In addition, although my focal participants were well aware of the shortcomings and weaknesses of the school system in providing for their learning, they didn’t appear especially surprised or unsettled by these inadequacies; nor did they expect school personnel to initiate imminent improvements in meeting their academic needs. These generally positive attitudes reflected an appreciation of the affordances of the public education system in Canada in terms of freedom of association and life choices as compared with their desperate status in Myanmar and/or horrible existence in refugee camps.