VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY MINORITIES Voluntary (immigrant)…

Question Answered step-by-step VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY MINORITIES Voluntary (immigrant)… VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY MINORITIESVoluntary (immigrant) minorities are those who have more or less willingly moved to the United States because they expect better opportunities (better jobs, more political or religious freedom) than they had in their homelands or places of origin.Refugees, Migrant/Guest Workers, Undocumented Workers, and BinationalsRefugees who were forced to come to the United States because of civil war or other crises in their places of origin are not immigrants or voluntary minorities. They did not freely choose or plan to come to settle in the United States to improve their status.Involuntary (Nonimmigrant) MinoritiesInvoluntary (nonimmigrant) minorities are people who have been conquered, colonized, or enslaved. Unlike immigrant minorities, the nonimmigrants have been made to be a part of the U.S. society permanently against their will. Two distinguishing features of involuntary minorities are that (1) they did not choose but were forced against their will to become a part of the United States, and (2) they themselves usually interpret their presence in the United States as forced on them by white people.The Classification Is Not Determined by Race. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary minority status is not based on race. Rather, it is a part of a general framework that explains the beliefs and behaviors of different minorities, regardless of race or ethnicity, and how these beliefs and behaviors contribute to school success or failure.”My Black ancestors may have been dragged to Jamaica in chains, but they were not dragged to the United States. That is a far different emotional and psychological beginning than that of American Blacks, whose ancestors were brought here in chains” (Colin Powell, 19950 Cultural-Ecological Theory of Minority School Performance.While the Ogbu theory is not a theory of pedagogy and does not propose educational strategies for teaching minority students, it does have educational value. First, it provides educators with an understanding of some of the sociocultural dynamics affecting minority children’s school performance and explains the differences in school performance between voluntary and involuntary minority groups. Second, it highlights the central issues responsible for the school failure of many involuntary minority students, namely mistrust, oppositional identity, and peer pressure not to “act white.”    According to Ogbu’s theory, the treatment of the minorities in the wider society is reflected in their treatment in education. The latter takes three forms, all of which affect school adjustment and performance (see Figure 1 above).   Understanding how the system affects minority school performance calls for an examination of the overall white treatment of minorities. The latter includes the barriers faced by minorities qua minorities. These barriers are instrumental discrimination (e.g., in employment and wages), relational discrimination (such as social and residential segregation), and symbolic discrimination (e.g., denigration of the minority culture and language). Ogbu calls these discriminations collective problems faced by minorities (see Figure 2). To explain the minorities’ perceptions of and responses to education, the theory explores the impact of the white treatment of the minorities. This impact is expressed in their responses, or their “collective solutions,” to the collective problems (see Figure 3). Minorities usually respond or develop collective solutions to the instrumental discrimination (for example, they develop a folk theory of how they can “make it” in the face of economic discrimination), relational discrimination (e.g., they may resort to “collective struggle/’ become mistrustful of white Americans and their institutions), and symbolic discrimination (for example, they may develop an oppositional cultural and language frame of reference or selectively adopt “white ways”) (Ogbu 1995a, 1995b). Explain how Ogbu’s views can provide you with a better understanding of some of the difference in academic achievement performance (and expectations) among Ogbu’s different types of minorities in your own school. For example, an immigrant from Switzerland might have an entirely different experience compared with Honduran EBs. Arts & Humanities Writing SED 529 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)