Negotiating the ‘Ghanaian’ way of schooling: transnational mobility and the educational strategies of British-Ghanaian families

Abstract

While scholars are increasingly interested in migrants in the Global North educating their children in their homelands, ethnographic studies of how ideas about being educated are shaped, and young people’s accounts of these transnational educational practices, remain under-researched. This paper attends to these gaps by drawing on the ethnographic cases of four London-based, British-Ghanaian youth in boarding schools in southern Ghana. Using the concept of the educated person, it shows how young people shape their own schooling experiences, and those of their Ghanaian peers, just as the practices at the schools shape them, thereby expanding local understandings of being educated.