Who dares to dream the American dream?

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Introduction

In the research about the educational experiences of refugee students, few articles describe how recently-arrived refugee students and their families make their transition to public schools in the U.S. and how they negotiate success in a formal schooling environment. In order to illuminate these processes, I conducted an in-depth study of how Somali Bantu male high school students and their families adapted to U.S. public schools during the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

Specifically, my research question for the study was "What are the socio-cultural factors that influence and constrain the success of Somali Bantu male high school students?" Primary emphases for this research project have been on the contexts of reception for Somali Bantu male students at Central City High School (1) and in the local communities into which they have settled, the social networks they use to help them gain information and succeed in school and after school, and how the cultural capital they possess is valued or under-valued by teachers and other service providers in Central City.

It is my hope that this type of research will bring greater attention to the needs of recently-arrived refugee students for teachers, administrators with refugee teen-age students in their schools, and for educational policymakers.

Numerous reasons compel me to study this particular ethnic group, including but not limited to the following: the historical repercussions of lower-caste status in Somalia for the Somali Bantu; their lack of experience with formal schooling in their home country; the discrimination they faced from other refugees in refugee camps in Kenya; and their seeming lack of capital (financial, social, and cultural) in navigating the public school system in the U.S.

These obstacles suggest that Somali Bantu families and their children will have difficulty adjusting to public schools in the United States and may, as a consequence, not succeed academically. The choice to study Somali Bantu young men in school is also important to me because of the unique stresses placed on these young men to be both successful students in school and wage-earners for their families (C. Suarez-Orozco, 2000; Olsen, 1998), the gendered roles they must undertake as males both in the Somali Bantu community and also in an American public high school (Feliciano & Rumbaut, 2005; Valenzuela Jr., 1999), and the stereotypes they face being Black males, refugees, and part of the underclass in U.S. society (Steele, 1997; Rong & Brown, 2002; Davidson, 1997; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu, 1987, 1991).