Building Educational Resilience Through Transnational Mobility Trajectories: Young People Between Ghana and The Netherlands

Abstract

Trips by migrant youth to their origin country are seen by institutional actors such as teachers and social workers as disrupting youth’s educational progress, and some European countries have financial and legal consequences when these trips take place during the school year. We follow Ghanaian youth living in The Netherlands on their journeys to Ghana and study how they experience such trips and are affected by them. Trips allow young people to reconnect with family and old friends, recollect memories, and confront them with poverty in their country of origin, making them resilient and motivated when facing adversities in school in the Netherlands. This study investigates how young Ghanaians’ mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16–25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people’s educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

‘Giving back’ through mobility trajectories: motivations for engaging in development encounters in Ghana among transnational youth

“…This work highlights the generative role of emotions: they can trigger individuals to engage in development encounters and can produce connections and disconnections between people (Wright 2012 , 1115). Using the notion of ‘comparative confrontation’, van Geel and Mazzucato ( 2020 ) describe how young Dutch-Ghanaians’ experiences of being confronted with poverty during homeland trips, engendered strong emotional responses that broadened their horizons. We adopt this term to highlight how emotions are experienced within the complex social and structural relations in which these individuals are transnationally embedded.…”

Navigating Education in the Context of COVID-19 Lockdowns and School Closures: Challenges and Resilience Among Adolescent Girls and Young Women in South Africa

“…We use the concept of resilience within our analysis. Resilience is understood as a process of positive adaptation in response to adversity (Van Geel and Mazzucato, 2020). In this paper we use the concept of "educational resilience" to refer to resilience manifested in the educational domain, specifically the likelihood of succeeding in school despite adverse conditions and experiences (Waxman et al, 2003;Van Geel and Mazzucato, 2020).…”

“…Resilience is understood as a process of positive adaptation in response to adversity (Van Geel and Mazzucato, 2020). In this paper we use the concept of "educational resilience" to refer to resilience manifested in the educational domain, specifically the likelihood of succeeding in school despite adverse conditions and experiences (Waxman et al, 2003;Van Geel and Mazzucato, 2020). As a process, educational resilience can be understood as an on-going interaction between an individual and their environment (Lynnebakke and de Wal Pastoor, 2020).…”

Changing relationships to the country of origin through transnational mobility: migrant youth’s visits to Ghana

“…Vathi and King 2011). Second, studies could investigate the consequences of transnational mobility experiences and changing relationships to the country of origin for the lives of migrant youth in their countries of residence, on which there exists very little research (Van Geel and Mazzucato 2020).…”