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Abstract
This study examines the extent to which indigenous Nigerian students attending international schools in their own country are able to successfully negotiate their identities from conflictual perspectives within their schools and home communities. Using a sample of 66 students aged 12 to 18 years, from two international schools in Nigeria, the findings show the students appeared to display different identities in relation to the degree to which they conformed to expectations of both environments. The article argues that the negotiating of indigenous students’ identities results in the forming of a third space within which they are subjected to ideological and cultural pressures. They are thus referred to as third culture indigenous kids (TCIKs).
Introduction
Traditionally, children of expatriate workers have formed the majority of the student population of international schools, which provide an educational experience in the style of western systems of education. Generally, the schools use English-medium teaching and offer a curriculum not of the countries in which they are located. In recent years, however, there have been growing numbers of indigenous students attending international schools, especially in developing countries in the global south. It has been estimated that, currently, eight in ten of all international school students are indigenous to the countries in which the schools are located (ISC Research, 2015).
In order to understand more fully how indigenous students make sense of their experiences, the research reported here is aimed at developing an insight into their perceptions about themselves as members of their local community whilst attending an international school. Consequently, this article draws on research that was undertaken in two such schools in Nigeria. It provides evidence that indigenous students in the sample schools experience a learning environment that contributes to the development of conflictual cultural and personal identities.
It is clear that the concept of identity is highly contested, having emerged ‘as a kind of unsettled space, or an unresolved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses’ (Hall, 1989). Within that space, individualist and psychologistic perspectives have tended to dominate the discussions (Lawler, 2008). For example, psychological and individual differences, expressed in observable behaviour, are seen as the product of a set of enduring characteristics that arise from intrapersonal processes (Marcia et al., 1993). This view has been criticised for its inattention to the wider social issues impacting on the development of identity (Côté and Levine, 1988).
Lawler (2008), meanwhile, argues convincingly that identity is far from being personal and individual and is a social construct resulting from experiences and interactions with others. Indeed, a young person’s indigenous culture plays an important role in their identity development, since they need a foundation against which they can comfortably define themselves. They achieve this through ‘concepts, terms, values and ideologies provided by their cultural … environments [and which provide a] normative orientation specifying values and standards toward which one should strive’ (Cross and Gore, 2003: 536-537).
Exposure to difference is subsequently an important element of further development where both sameness and difference are needed in order for a young person to fully develop their identity, as ‘both are necessary to and neither is sufficient for survival and well-being’ (Brewer, 2003: 489). Experience of both will also enable young people to move in and out of different cultural worlds. The research reported here, however, challenges the assumption that a developing child can manage the idiosyncrasies and challenges of the different, often conflictual, worlds they experience. As the research reported here demonstrates, this is not always the case.
Identity is an interesting concept. Unfortunately, there is not the space here to discuss it in any substantial detail. The argument of Brubaker and Cooper (2000) is, however, acknowledged, proposing as it does that the term and concept can be ambiguous and should be substituted with other clearer terms which provide more appropriate explanations. Despite this criticism, it is a useful concept in relation to this study. For the purposes of this article, therefore, identity is seen as a psychosocial product of the interactions of an individual’s cognitive development and his/her social, cultural upbringing as theorised by Côté and Schwartz (2002). This interpretation enables sense to be made of the research participants’ experiences by taking into account social influences as well as individual behaviour.
Global Citizenship And International Education
International education, from UNESCO’s perspective, sought to develop individuals who understand and accept the concept of social and political differences of peoples and nations, as well as valuing human rights and fundamental freedoms (UNESCO, 1974). Drawing on UNESCO’s approach, Tate (2013: 254) refers to international education ‘as something based on an explicit ideology that encompasses … international understanding/international-mindedness and/or global awareness/understanding and … world citizenship, intercultural understanding, respect for difference [and] tolerance’. In its truest sense, global citizenship would suggest belonging to a global community and a concern for the wellbeing of the world: a global citizen is internationally-minded and is driven by a responsibility to contribute to the maintenance of the world and its environment.
Sylvester (2005) identified the changing perspectives on international education over a period from 1893 to 1998. He found that definitions of the term ranged from education for international understanding to education for world citizenship. However, what qualifies an individual to be a world citizen may be different from the experiences that endow a person with international understanding (Heater, 1990). Indeed, Bates (2012) has questioned the idea of citizenship on a global scale, making the obvious point that there is no global state that issues citizenship.
An alternative perspective argues that international education is a response to global demands for transferable qualifications and the reproduction of the local and globally mobile elite (Cambridge, 2002). Tate (2013), meanwhile, points out that despite extensive anecdotal evidence from students which indicates that the stated ideological aims of international schools are being achieved, in practice this is not always the case. In some cases the schools’ focus on global citizenship has been at the expense of developing local and national awareness, widening the gap between transnational elites and the concerns of ordinary people in their societies. This has also resulted in some students becoming detached from local allegiances and traditions, as will be demonstrated by the empirical findings of the study reported in this article.
The question of what values are actually shared within an international school is a matter of debate (Mattern, 1990). The idealistic aim of sharing internationally-focused values often conflicts with the pragmatic mission of selling a global brand (Cambridge and Thompson, 2004; Hayden and Thompson, 2008) that is underpinned by western values. A large number of internationally minded schools claim to provide an education with universal values which have been linked, by the International Baccalaureate (IB), to the idea of a ‘civilised society’ (Pearce, 2009: 30). Use of the term ‘civilised society’ reinforces historical, colonial ideas about conqueror and the oppressed, raising as it does a number of issues about what parameters characterise a civilised society. The term also suggests the exclusion of values originating from societies that may be deemed ‘uncivilised’, referring to its archaic uses and its residual undertones from a colonial and directly racist past that still resonate today, naturalising the exploitative relationship between the west and the neo-colonised (Kayani, 2015). The dualism of civilised and uncivilised served to represent the colonised as a lesser entity in need of salvation by the coloniser (Glanville, 2010) who is constructed as progressive and endowed with the inherent and structural ability to liberate the former (Anghie, 2006). Such inferiorising representations of the colonised, which also carry with them the assumption of western superiority, are what Said (1978) argues to be the basis for imperialism. Therefore, the seeming promotion of values from a civilised society may indicate the spreading of western values.
Values of internationalism, which are mainly focused on intercultural understanding and global citizenship, are reflected in the mission statements of most international schools (Cambridge, 2003). However, the inclusion of these values is an ambitious one: as Betts (2007) notes, many international schools are struggling with defining the notion of global citizenship and thus putting theory into practice. Betts argues that most international schools do not show an understanding of the concept of preparing students to be globally responsible citizens since, according to Lewis (2006), they fail to incorporate and address global issues in their study programmes.
The implication for students from countries such as Nigeria is that they are not being educated to develop the competences needed to be truly global citizens. Since international education (as offered by international schools) is propelled by the increasing intensity of globalisation, student identities become a response to current neo-liberal trends. Many international schools claim that they provide an environment in which the development of global perspectives and sensitivities are important aims of the international schooling experience. According to Matthews and Sidhu (2005), the alignment of such institutions to global market trends makes it inevitable that they will produce students who take part in a ‘neo-liberal variant of global subjectivity’. However, they also argue that globally-related flows and exchanges do not necessarily result in identities that are internationally ‘oriented and supra-territorial forms of subjectivity’ (Matthews and Sidhu, 2005: 49).
At the same time, international schools do not generally expose indigenous students to the economic, social and cultural realities of their home communities or larger societies, especially in developing countries. Instead, the global form of education offered that is western-centric results in the strengthening of class inequalities in post-colonial societies such as Nigeria, and the reproduction of a transnational capitalist class. The pursuit of western education by the local elite in such societies has always been seen as a means of achieving advantage over the less privileged in post-colonial countries; arguably this can be seen to be a new form of colonialism.
The inequalities in such societies are reinforced through this process. The form of education that students experience when they attend international schools may be alien to their home cultures and will ultimately result in acquiring neo-colonial values. Such students, therefore, may be thrust into conflict. They live in one world where the set of values and expectations are in contrast to those of the other world in which they receive their schooling (Feinberg, 2007). This situation can be related to what has been referred to as a third culture.
Third Culture Kids (TCKs)
Within the international education literature, a number of studies have explored student identities in relation to their experiences within international school communities. Students who have spent most of their developmental years’ schooling in a foreign country have been referred to as ‘Third Culture Kids’ (TCK). A third culture kid is ‘a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture’ (Pollock and Van Reken, 1999: 19). Students experience different and often conflicting cultures: that of their original home country as well as that of their immediate community. However, they have been observed not to have a full sense of belonging to either cultural context, and are likely to feel most comfortable in a ‘third culture’, which ‘is created, shared and carried by persons who are relating societies, or sections thereof, to each other’ (Useem, 1976) and which can impact significantly on the development of their identities (Pollock and Van Reken, 2001). Such students occupy a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) within which they are subjected to ideological, economic and political pressures structured by dominant influences that aim to control the nature of social relations and actions (Lefebvre et al., 2013).
International schools often pride themselves on being promoters of global citizenship through the cultivation of intercultural dexterity. They are hailed as being ‘melting pots of cultures’ (Cambridge, 2009) where a homogeneous global culture is produced and where it thrives. However, this intercultural mix most often results in the production of a variant of the dominant western culture (Poore, 2005). Bhabha (1994: 218) argues that:
The non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space - a third space - where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences.
Such tensions brought about by global flows result in the production of conflicting norms and values between individual and collective identity (Golubović, 2010). This conflict is heightened when perceived universal values become relativised, exposing communities and individuals to different external political and ideological influences. One result is the production of a model of global identities underpinned by individualistic cultures of the west, which have been diffused within the collectivity of indigenous communities.
Such individualism, which underpins neo-liberal globalisation, provides the basis for a conflict of identities within communities due to the contrasting ideologies at play, not only at societal level but also on a day-to-day basis (Leve, 2011). So the continuities of the nationalist tradition of the host country, which previously had provided a defence against colonial cultural imposition, have now been overwhelmed by the tide of modernist representations of western cultures in the forms of, for example, information and communications technology (ICT), dress and language (Bhabha, 2006). These are new sites of cultural evolution and expression, and have somehow transformed what was previously perceived to be an oppressive regime into one that is emancipatory (Fanon, 1967). Bhabha’s ideas challenge essentialist notions of the fixed nature of identity and give more emphasis to socio-cultural, political and ideological influences which impact on the construction of a collective sense of communal or personal identity, which is fluid or post-modern. We demonstrate in this article that inhabiting such a site, or third space, is a revealing and important part of the lived experience of students at international schools. This particularly applies to those students who are indigenous to the country where the international school is located. They experience conflictual demands on their social, personal and cultural development.
The source of the conflict appears to lie in the tensions resulting from the dislocation experienced by students from their own local knowledge and values (Tate, 2013). Such dislocation takes different forms, and can include a loss of the indigenous language and culture leading to students experiencing conflicts within their immediate communities (Wylie, 2011). Such outcomes are symptomatic of the lived experiences of neo-colonialism, described by Fanon (1968), where a colonised person rejects their indigenous culture for its perceived inferiority and then claims an affinity with western culture in order to achieve global citizenship.
Third culture indigenous kids (TCIK)
In relation to international schooling, and the evidence presented in this article, the creation is being seen of a new phenomenon – third culture indigenous kids (TCIK). These are a different type of TCK. They form a third culture as they navigate through different cultural expectations from their schools and their indigenous communities. They differ from TCK because the conflicts they experience are of a different order and are related to the neo-colonising nature of the educational provisions within an indigenous context. They share a metaphorical third space within which they are subjected to cultural and ideological pressures, and where they attempt to dissociate their personal identities from their indigenous identities.
Apart from Wylie’s study conducted in 1993 (Wylie, 2011) which explored the impact of western education on indigenous students attending a school in Vanuatu, we have been unable to find any accounts of empirical research on issues relating to colonialism in international education in the context of the indigenous students’ schooling experiences. Perhaps the apparent paucity of such research reflects the lack of importance attributed to the experiences of students from host countries, which would reinforce Quist’s (2005) argument that there is a tendency for international educators to ignore the positionality of international schools as active players in what he refers to as the post-colonial discourse. Perhaps this also reflects the background of scholars in the field since, as Quist (2005) argues, the international education discourse is characterised by the prevalence of western scholarship. This westernised face of the international education discourse creates an urgency for the inclusion of more non-Western perspectives if the field of research is not to be viewed as a ‘postcolonial enclave’ (Lave, 2001). There is thus a need for research to study more closely the potentially damaging conflictual cultural issues that exist in the international school landscape today.
This article argues that neo-colonialism is a powerful force that impacts on the development of the identities of Nigerian students attending international schools in their own country. Their schooling experiences reproduce the neo-colonial inequalities located in national and global contexts.
The Empirical Research
The empirical research described in this article was located in Abuja, Nigeria, and questioned the extent to which indigenous Nigerian students attending international schools in their own country are able to successfully negotiate their identities from conflictual perspectives. In undertaking the research it was important to deploy an approach that would elicit innermost feelings and understandings about the context of the study, the influences of schooling experiences on students’ sense of belonging, and their behaviours and responses to Nigerian cultures. An interpretative strategy was therefore employed to inform the methodology. ‘Interpretative’ does, of course, cover a broad range of research approaches. It is idiographic, which is related to studying particular context-bound issues, rather than nomothetic, aimed at developing general laws or generalisations. The purpose is ‘to uncover how people feel about the world and make sense of their lives from their particular vantage points’ (King and Horrocks, 2010: 11). To achieve this, semi-structured interviews were employed, followed by emergent theme analysis of the narrative data generated (Charmaz, 2006). This enabled prominence to be given to the richness of the voices and the data generated (Stephens, 2009) but, at the same time, allowed for the identification of common themes that emerged from the narratives. The analysis provided a hermeneutic understanding of the cultural frameworks within which the students were, at times, struggling to make sense of their lives.
Even with small samples, it is possible to provide an understanding of the intersubjective meanings shared by the whole community (Elliott, 2005). In this case, the community was a sample of indigenous Nigerian students attending international schools in their own country. The meanings were associated with the students’ reported experiences about how they negotiated their identities from conflictual perspectives. Participants were recruited from two international schools in Abuja. One school was British, following a curriculum from the UK, and the other was American, following a curriculum from the USA. Teaching staff included expatriate westerners and indigenous Nigerian teachers. The former were in a minority in both schools.
A total of 66 students took part in the research: 38 from the American school and 28 from the British school. All students were Nigerian, aged from 12 to 18 years. Methods of data collection consisted of ten semi-structured group interviews with an average of seven students in each group, and all interviews were led by the first-named author of this article. The interview questions served as guides that allowed for focused and open conversations (Gubrium and Holdstein, 2001). The interview schedule can be found in Appendix A.
The interviews provided an opportunity for the participants to narrate their stories, providing an insight into how they perceived both Nigerian and western cultures and the conflictual perspectives they experienced. The narratives indicate how participants understand and represent social relationships that define their identities (Schiffrin, 1996). Worthy of note is the notion of ‘positioning’ or situating identities that the stories the participants tell are likely to reveal (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1999). These narratives become pointers to the ideological orientation within which the participants locate a sense of self (Bamberg, 2004). In addition, narratives reveal how they want others to position them (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008). We do acknowledge, however, the possibility of participant reactivity in responses to the interview questions (Sapsford and Dupp, 1996). Students may have taken the opportunity to overstate their positions because of their audience (the interviewer, as well as other students in the group) and thus responded in a way that promoted their aspirations for global citizenship.
The data analysis identified common themes that emerged from the data with the aim of producing a coherent explanation of the participants’ experiences. Due consideration was given to ethical standards with regard to obtaining informed consent from all participants and maintaining participant anonymity. Consent was also sought from and granted by parents of the students who took part in the research. In reporting the findings, participants were assigned individual code names: for example 10M, where 10 refers to year group 10 (ie 15-16 year olds) and M is a letter used uniquely to identify the individual student in the year group.
Findings And Discussion
Two main themes emerged from the data analysis, relating firstly to students’ attitudes towards their indigenous cultures and, secondly, to the personal conflicts experienced as a consequence of their attendance at an international school.
Neo-colonial attitudes towards indigenous cultures
The indigenous students in this study come from an elite background. They are in a place of privilege in a local community that is characterised by inequalities that have resulted from the country’s colonial past: a society in which the concept of modernisation is equated with westernisation, which is in turn a marker of privileged status. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that students appeared to idealise western cultures and denigrate their own indigenous customary practices in order to validate their desire to emulate western attitudes and behaviour. Their comments reflect David and Okazaki’s (2006) view that a colonial mentality bestowed an inferior status on indigenous cultures whilst attributing superiority to cultures and values of western origin. For example, young people within Nigerian cultures are generally expected to show a level of respect to adults that they would not usually accord their friends (Gannon and Pillai, 2013). Children who do not exercise the expected caution in their speech and mannerisms when speaking to adults are considered ill-mannered (Timyan, 1988) and a source of embarrassment to their parents. This contrasts markedly with students’ experiences of international schooling, where students claimed they were able to express themselves and could relate freely to their teachers. Bearing in mind that the western teachers were in a minority in the schools this is an interesting, if not paradoxical, finding. It suggests that all teachers were expected to promote and take part in pedagogical practices that were based on a westernised perspective, which contrasts starkly with the students’ experience outside of school:
When adults are talking and a child tries to contribute to the conversation, the adults shut him up because they think it is disrespectful … It’s not the same in our school or in England. (Student 10C)
Students did not see the need for such deference to adults. They also considered the behavioural expectations of Nigerian cultures too restrictive:
All these traditions about not looking adults in the eye when you speak to them or not being free to air your opinions are just too demanding. (Student 6L)
Students appeared to position different and contrasting cultural practices as a yardstick for measuring and authenticating their own behaviour and views (David and Okazaki, 2006). One student said:
I think home and school are just two totally different places. Our school is modern … but our homes are just Nigerian. (Student 9C)
The use of the word ‘just’ in Student 9C’s statement appears to position the home as relatively unimportant and inferior. According to Anand (2007), chronopolitics (the politics of time) is a medium for forms of representations by the west to justify claims of modernity and is one way by which neo-colonialism is realised (Hindess, 2008). One student said:
Nigerian cultures are old-fashioned. There are newer and easier ways of doing things now. (Student 10M)
The students believed they were operating from a modern and hence superior position to that of their parents and other members of their communities. One student pointed out that:
Nigerian customs are not important to me but they are important to other … [Nigerians] because we are twenty first century people. Other people see these customs as a sign of respect. We don’t show respect any more but others do. (Student 6E)
According to most students in this study, local cultural practices appeared not to fit their concept of modernity. One student complained:
Times have changed. It is modern times now. People shouldn’t dwell on old values, we have to adapt to newer times, you have to let go of the customs that are not necessary, like the killing of twins. If people let that go, why can’t they let other unnecessary customs go? (Student 9B)
Student 9B’s reference here to the killing of twins alluded to a practice brought to an end in the city of Calabar in southern Nigeria with the intervention of western influence personified by the much celebrated Mary Slessor, a missionary living in Nigeria between the late 1800s and early 1900s (Obinna, 2011). At that time, the birth of twins was perceived to be an evil omen and they were killed at birth. Student 9B appears to note the historical shift in cultural behaviours but still equates present cultural practices with past traditional beliefs that were eradicated by the influence of western colonialism. More recent representations or conceptualisations of Nigerian cultural milieus and identities found in media and literature (Adichie, 2009; Gannon and Pillai, 2013) depict a nation with a hybrid of western and African cultures, with a tendency for people in urban areas to be more accepting of western traditions. Such representation echoes Sen’s (2006) argument against one-dimensional identification. However, this appears not to affect the students’ perceptions of the cultures.
A further example from our study that exposes an implicitly colonising mechanism refers to traditional indigenous people as uncivilised (Welch, 1988). One student, for example, wondered:
Why can’t we extend our civilised attitudes from school to home, but most of the things we do at home are traditionally African. (Student 9J)
In other words, African cultures are not a significant constituent of modern, global cultures. Such a perspective highlights and reinforces the continuing colonisation of the cultural experiences of the students in this research. According to Friedman (1994: 82), ‘Authentic culture tends to be seen as blockage and superstition and is lumped together with the natural, irrational, savage and juvenile, also relegated to the spatial and temporary periphery of civilized identity’.
On the other hand, westernisation is seen as the driver of modernisation, which is now seen as today’s globalisation (Jiafeng, 2009) and appears to be the universalisation of modernity as prescribed by the west (Escobar, 2010). More importantly perhaps, globalisation can be seen as the imposition of western ‘provincialism as universalism’ (Quijano, 2010: 31). It appears that conventions requiring conformity to indigenous cultural standards were rejected by the students in this research and substituted with what was thought to be modern, and therefore western. Students appeared to believe, similar to David and Okazaki’s (2006) definition of a neo-colonial mentality, that anything from the west is viewed by the colonised as better than or superior to anything indigenous.
Personal conflicts
Although the students appeared to have undergone a process of western acculturation as a result of their educational experiences, two sub-narratives regarding how they considered their individual identities emerged from an analysis of the interview data. These sub-narratives were associated with students, firstly, with characteristics of ‘not belonging’ and secondly, with characteristics of ‘contrived belonging’.
Not belonging
Most of the students in the study represented themselves as not having a sense of belonging to their local cultural communities and not conforming to cultural expectations. They did, however, acknowledge that they were of Nigerian heritage, but they negotiated their identities by differentiating themselves from other Nigerians. For example, one student said:
We have a different background to the Nigerians. We do things differently. (Student 10U)
According to Harré (1998), representations of the self are made in terms of the ‘other’. In comparison with others who were more inclined towards indigenous Nigerian cultures, this group of students saw themselves as being different. It also appears that they relied on social interactions and structures within their schooling experiences to cultivate a sense of self. An understanding of themselves was, therefore, grounded in the nature of interactions within a particular context (Pham and Saltmarsh, 2013) which, in this case, were their schooling experiences:
We think at a higher level and our mentality is somewhat British. We have a broad perspective towards things. I think this is because we learn about the UK. When we talk, we seem to be more versatile than students who attend Nigerian schools. (Student 9J)
However, these representations appear to draw on neo-colonial values of western superiority that assume there is less, or a lack of, intellectual capital in the educational practice of Nigerian schools. Fafunwa’s (1995) description of the nature of interactions between students who attended missionary boarding schools in Nigeria during the colonial rule and other Nigerian people can be associated with some experiences described in this study. He suggested that the colonial education resulted in the students acquiring western values and denigrating indigenous cultures. These values also esteem western individualism above communitarian ideologies embedded in indigenous communities. In other words, the students in Fafunwa’s account upheld their sense of individuality above the demands of their individual cultural communities.
Individualism was also seen in our study through the students’ lack of inclination towards being citizens of Nigeria. For example, the singing of the Nigerian national anthem, which is a customary practice in Nigerian schools, appeared not to hold any meaning for one student who explained:
I never sing the national anthem because there is no need. It’s not like we have an assembly like the Nigerian schools that sing the national anthem as a sign of allegiance. We don’t do that here because this is an American school and … [the Nigerian national anthem] is not important here. (Student 12R)
A national anthem embodies a nation’s founding principles (Pontiff, 2005) and singing it reinforces those values. Therefore, the students’ narratives raise such questions as to whom or where they owe allegiances and which community’s rules they follow. The sense of belonging or citizenship of a global society by the Nigerian students in this study may not be surprising. Aspirations for global citizenship are notably high in Nigeria compared to, for example, Kenya and Ghana (GlobeScan, 2016). This perhaps reflects Nigeria’s position as the country currently with the second highest GDP in Africa (BBC, 2016). One student believed:
We are not conformed to society like Nigerian students [who attend Nigerian schools]. (Student 12M)
Student 12M appeared to assume that students in Nigerian schools engage with their communities and participate in citizenship roles. However, international school students appear to live in a ‘foreigner’s bubble’ with no apparent inclination towards their indigenous country. One student said:
I don’t have any responsibility towards Nigeria – just go to school and live abroad. (Student 9T) [other students nod and laugh]
It is assumed here that the word ‘abroad’ means ‘the west’, as it is commonly and conventionally referred to by Nigerians. Thus, the inference can be made that acquiring Nigerian cultural values was not needed if the students were going to be globally mobile and live outside Nigeria or, alternatively, become elite members of Nigerian society. These students felt that they were just as likely to be considered as different, by others. This difference was observed in the way other Nigerian people treated them. One student said:
I feel random and I don’t feel free because we have different backgrounds. They treat me like an ‘oyibo’ [westerner or white skinned person]. (Student 11N)
Student interviewees in this study were being positioned in the same way that they positioned themselves (Bamberg, 2004).
Contrived belonging
The number of students presenting ‘contrived belonging’ characteristics was fewer than those who presented as ‘not belonging’. The former appeared to conform to expectations from both cultural environments. They were inwardly rebellious towards their indigenous culture but chose to project a contrived belonging, or chameleon identity, to manage their feelings. However, despite or perhaps because of this, they experienced internal conflicts. One student said:
To me, it’s all about doing what is expected of me in different places. I know how I am expected to behave at home and school. Though they are different and sometimes I am not happy, I just try. (Student 11B)
This group of international school students appears to have developed dual identities, and hence be more easily adaptable to different cultural environments, as the studies of Willis et al. (1994) and Sears (2011) indicate. One student explained:
Going back home from school every day is a very big difference for me because it feels like I am living in two worlds (Student 9B).
Students in this ‘contrived belonging’ group responded differently to the demands of the two worlds. Some felt more positive about school, others more positive about home. From the former, one said:
I am free in school but at home I am expected to act in a certain way to look responsible and respectful. (Student 9B)
Another claimed:
At home I am not who I am, but in school I am who I really am (Student 11U).
The students who felt more comfortable in their indigenous, home culture believed that they had to repress their sense of Nigerianness when they were at school, as two students complained:
Whenever I go back home I just feel like I can do what I am not usually allowed to do in school. It is really not very easy to act in the way that I do in school. At home I can take off my ‘oyibo’ behaviour and be myself again. (Student 10M)
It’s quite tiring. When I am in school, I have to worry about how I speak but when I go home, I don’t have to keep my British accent. I don’t talk like this originally, I have to use this accent in school. (Student 9C)
Students in this ‘contrived belonging’ group were able to resist the cultural imposition of the international school they attended and retain a sense of Nigerianness of value to them. They were able to leave behind their cultural practices to cope with the complex demands of being a member of an international school community.
Conclusion
The above narratives provided a context through which the negotiations of student identities could be understood and consequently ideologically located. The claim to an identity was based on students managing and navigating their school culture as well as the cultures of their home community (Fail et al., 2004). The students appeared to display different identities in relation to the degree to which they conformed to expectations in both environments. These data, however, may suggest that what is perceived to be ‘adaptive adjustment may be really hopeless resignation to an unchangeable reality’ (Gould, 2001; 79).
Most students appeared to imagine that their indigenous cultures are inferior to those of the west and that their perceived cultural dispositions confer a superior social status. They also appeared to be colonised by their own imaginations about western life. However, these imaginations are fed by idealistic representations and cultural expectations within their schools which conflict significantly with those of their indigenous communities. Therefore, they navigate between conflicting worlds, resulting in personal conflicts regarding their ideological positioning of themselves. This study has argued that these experiences underpin the subsuming of the students’ indigenous cultural identities by neo-colonial individualism that is cultivated by their schools.
The narratives of the students in this study strongly reflect that they are acquiring the individualism that underpins their schooling experiences. With notions of cultural and intellectual superiority, they mentally detach themselves from their family beliefs and indigenous communities. They appear to be so drawn and captivated by the cultures in their schools that they willingly give up their indigenous beliefs and customs to follow a western and, therefore, what is perceived to be a better and preferable, way of life. Their rejection of indigenous behaviours is often undisguised. It appears to be legitimised by the neo-colonial expressions in their schools, indicated by the curricula and dominant western culture embedded in the schooling system. This reinforces the argument that international education as provided by the schools in this study may be essentially about the transmission of western culture.
It is ironic that, while western education systems are hailed for encouraging critical thought (Ryan and Louie, 2007), the students in this study are more likely to question and resist Nigerian cultures, rather than interrogate the western cultures that are thrust upon them.
Appendix A
Student interview guide
How often do you sing the Nigerian national anthem?
What Nigerian customs do you know about?
To what extent are they important to you?
Why are they important?
Which do you choose to ignore?
Why do you choose to ignore them?
To what extent are you aware of your roles and responsibility towards your country?
What is it like going back home after a day at school?
What are the things you do at school that you do differently at home?
To what extent do you think you are different in terms of behaviour and thinking from your friends who attend Nigerian schools?
To what extent do you think you are different in terms of behaviour and thinking from your parents?
Funding
The author(s) received no funding for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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Author biographies
Nkechi Emenike completed her doctorate in Education at the University of Hull with the thesis title: Third Culture Indigenous Kids in Nigeria: Neo-colonial Tensions and Conflict of Identity. She has taught at international schools in Nigeria and worked as a researcher in the UK. Her research has focused on teaching and learning, and the impact of practices within international schools.
David Plowright has been involved in primary, secondary, further and higher education since the early 1970s. He has extensive experience as a doctoral supervisor and is currently a consultant PhD and EdD supervisor at the Open University in the UK. He is also a research fellow in the Department of Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His current research interests focus on using mixed methods and pragmatism in social and educational research.
