Abstract
This article shows the significance of college-going aspiration in the future identities of young girls and the sources of such influence in their worlds. Using the figured worlds theory, the paper analyzes the process and implications of these young girls’ college-going aspirations. Drawing on interviews and observations with nineteen young girls living in urban India, the study shows that their response to the normative good girl figure gives them a chance of going to college. Their imagined identity is linked to values and communicative competence, and their figuring shows their investment in their own cultural transformation.
Aspirations of educational attainment among individuals gain importance when viewed as motivation toward those educational goals. It is difficult to delineate aspirations from expectations (Goyette, 2008) but sociologists’ attempts to understand educational aspirations as assertions of identity have contributed to our knowledge linking aspirations toward attainment. Archer and Francis (2006) highlighted the culturally held value for education among British Chinese children and identified that value as the factor driving them toward higher educational goals. One of the important insights from the study is that values may be used to draw discursive boundaries among people and thus, valuing education gets closely linked to self-identity processes. In a significant statement about this valuing of education, Vaisey (2010) suggests, “. . .if you want to know if a poor teenager will be in school five to six years later, ask her what she ‘would ideally like’” (p. 92). Furthermore, from Vaisey’s perspective, a culture of educational aspiration for different social groups is likely to drive action differently toward attainment. He, therefore, suggests studying how sociocultural factors create values which in turn interact with skills and structures, producing human conduct (Vaisey, 2010, p. 96). Linking values to human conduct, as Vaisey as done, lays the ground for understanding even present human conduct as an indication of values in the future being. A further assertion of identity formation and human conduct is seen in Frye’s (2012) study that establishes perceptions of imagined futures as an opportunity to refine the present self. She states identity as “an individual’s ongoing narrative account of who she is at present, modeled on the future self that she imagines becoming” (Frye, 2012, p. 1576). It is the value that education holds for the young Malawian girls in Frye’s study that defines their behavior along a moral index, claiming hard work and avoidance of any sexual temptation as essential investments for the future, while they single-mindedly focus on educational achievements. According to Frye, the girls’ educational aspirations, that appear irrational against their circumstances, are their assertions of identity, and the moral positioning of those aspirations might provide the emotional force that keeps them on the path to educational attainment. The value placed on higher education, especially by the disadvantaged, is based on the drawing of moral boundaries between certain kinds of occupations, also seen in Baker (2017). Baker’s study re-emphasizes that the meaning, held within educational aspiration, shapes the authoring of the self. Educational aspirations are also claimed as constitutive of moral identity among young immigrant students aiming to go to university after their vocational training in Ljunggren and Orupabo’s (2020) study. All the studies cited have shown that meanings situated in culture toward education can be drawn as young students reveal identities tied to their educational aspirations. Vaisey (2010) had cited critical sociologists in stating that it might be not possible to find a singular way of framing culture that explains an identical manner in which individuals perceive and evaluate the world, but this process might still be studied through a sociocultural lens. Studying identity formation across different groups might also help in understanding how different or similar these values might be. This paper studies the important link between identity and valuing of education among young girls in urban India through the lens of the figured worlds theory of Holland et al. (1998). The framework is used in answering the questions:
How do young girls perceive themselves?
What force or who persuades their aspirations?
This research was conducted with girls living in economically segregated urban areas, facing routine life challenges, and going to school. Through the girls’ interactions, I see the present world that they live in, not just as a product of gendered socialization but more as space where they create opportunities for attaining their aspirations, and the identity that they wish to construct as an envisioning of their transformed selves. Holland et al.’s theory of figured worlds provides a framework for making sense of the girls’ identities in their worlds, through their behavior and discourse. According to this perspective of identity formation, identities are created through participation in figured worlds. Figured worlds are “collective ‘as if’ worlds” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 52) in which people are recruited into or formed by, through the activities in these worlds. There are several key aspects of the theory of figured worlds that are particularly valuable in the meaning-making of the identities of the girls in this study. First, the construction of meanings in activities may take place in lived worlds as well as “imagined worlds” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 55). The imagined world may exist in the mind space and inner dialog as one goes about figuring how to act in such worlds and what may be valued in such worlds. It also shapes the relative positions one occupies with respect to the others in another, not-yet-existing world. According to Holland et al. (1998), such spaces may allow for refiguring of agency of the participants, because “without the capacity to formulate other social scenes in the imagination, there can be little force to a sense of self, little agency” (p. 236). Second, the emphasis on identity, as a reflection of that which a person values, allows for drawing meanings from a person’s figuring of identity. Appropriating from what surrounds us to create a world of our own is similar to what Shweder (1991) explains in “intentional worlds” (p. 74). Schweder (1991) posited that sociocultural environments are “arranged to provide meanings and resources to seize and to use” (p. 74). The choice of answering to the world rests with the individual, either ignoring what is in it or in creating meaning from them. Thus, there is meaning in accepting or rejecting figured worlds. Third, the context of practices within such figured world provides the participants with “spaces of authoring” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 45), the resources for improvisation. These spaces for authoring may emerge from the lived worlds or often from play in imagined worlds, the self often perceived definitively in “words and categories” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 178). The authoring is arguably agentic as the individual draws her identity from the words and dialects that are preexisting and are those of others to form an imagined self. Performing as an actor in a rather powerless position, the girls show their agency in figuring the world and taking what is available for charting their aspirations. Fourth, the creating or altering of an individual’s subjectivities is dependent upon social interaction that is not just deliberate but also rests on the assumption of a position with respect to others. This positioning, freighted with affiliations and/or power, is termed as “valence of identification” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 251). The valence of identification is the political persuasion carried within an inner voice toward groups or categories one imagines in opposition to an existing self. Holland and Lave (2001) explain the struggle implied within this positioning as that created in the boundaries we live by. We may either embrace the words and practices of others or we may reject them completely, thus choosing to mark them as outsiders. The boundaries between the self and the others hence may be determining and determined by the valence of identification with the others. This valence of identification is related to the affiliations and disaffiliations that individuals have in their worlds, and provides a tool of analysis for how these affiliations are constructed, also applied in this study.
Defining Identity, and Valence of Identification
This paper defines identity as stated by Holland et al. (1998), as “self-understandings” (p. 3) that people use to describe themselves to others and then acting according to those self-understandings. Further, identities signify what the person values and cares for as it is a “higher order psychological function that organizes sentiments, understandings and embodied knowledge relevant to a culturally imagined, personally valued social position” (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007, p. 113). This definition of identity is meaningful to, and regulates the person (Holland et al., 1998; Valsiner, 2007). Identification has been referred to in literary scholarship as readers’ identification with the character(s). It is a process of empathizing with the character(s) in the story with whom the reader sees a reflection of herself. The greater the degree of similarity, the stronger is the degree of character identification (Altenbernd & Lewis, 1969). I frame valence of identification as persuasion held in those ideas or categories with which an individual identifies herself.
Holland et al.’s Theory in Literature
This section reviews some of the research work dealing with students, their school education, and their identities that have used the theory of figured worlds by Holland et al. (1998). Figuring the world of school subjects or disciplines offers “precursors to participation” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 51). Certain aspects of disciplinary practices are cultural resources in becoming legitimate members of such practicing communities. For example, in the literature and language arts, using language in material and non-physical forms such as recitations and oral presentations, are part of the identity formation process and Bartlett (2007) refers to these as “cultural artifacts” (p. 55) that allows an individual to engage with the practices as a worthy practitioner or learner. Teachers may set these cultural appropriations as markers of identity within the language arts and use these to evaluate learners’ progress (e.g., Dagenais et al., 2006). Further, language can be discipline-specific and its use can be challenging for students in identifying themselves in the science and mathematics classrooms also. Using interdisciplinary and innovative ways for students to appropriate mathematics and science use helps them in figuring the worlds of mathematics and sciences (e.g., Horn, 2008; Jurow, 2005; Price & McNeill, 2013; Tan & Barton, 2010). Using Holland’s identity and figured world lens, researchers have been able to unpack nuances of students’ learning while they are figuring the school practices, and the sociocultural interactions between students and teachers that are important in successful identification with the subject practices. For example, student autonomy that may be enabled either through the choice of learning materials (Glenn & Ginsberg, 2016) or with the use of technology (Brown, 2017; Quinlan & Curtin, 2017) have been proven effective in studies using this identity framework. Culturally responsive teaching has been understood as a useful tool in integrating students in the figured worlds of schools by Glenn and Ginsberg (2016), Ryu and Tuvilla (2018), and Tucker-Raymond and Rosario (2014). Students’ transitioning into college or the next level of education have also been studied through the figured worlds theory. The cultural aspect of identity helps researchers in appreciating the unique position it occupies as disadvantaged or minority students negotiate their way from stereotypical or expected identities to ones which they imagine for themselves. Chang et al. (2017) show the shaping of the identities of undocumented students’ as they tap into their cultural resources and find identity in higher education dreams in the United States. Roth and Erstad (2016) discuss the complexities in the positional identities of two adolescent girls from immigrant families who make different decisions about moving into the next school level. Using positional identities as the basis for understanding, Roth and Erstad (2016) conclude that, although both the girls were expected to be future breadwinners, each had different lives that had varying demands on their positions within the family and community. This significance of “non-academic cultural and social factors” (p.70) in the positional identities of the girls illustrates the need for the teacher to understand and direct students’ identity, interest, and learning. In the Roth and Erstad (2016) study, the influence of social and cultural factors in shaping students’ identities and their learning trajectories is not the same for all immigrant students. This finding challenges the idea of high achievement expected to be seen among children of Asian immigrant families (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Although the emphasis in their study is on how students’ interests might be supported or compromised by social and cultural factors, it seems that the positional identities are also undergirded not simply by certain values and morals embedded within cultures but also guided by social structures within cultures. Holland et al. (1998) theory has been extensively applied, even in conjunction with other theories of identity to study different aspects of students’ worlds. For example, “designated identity” (Sfard & Prusak, 2005, p. 18) and figured worlds theory applied in Solomon et al. (2011) study. Using Holland et al.’s (1998) framework, this paper proposes that viewing identity through figured worlds can provide another perspective for sociologists to understand how students make life choices and the significance such choices hold for them. With Vaisey’s (2009) suggestion of identities as cultural tools, and Dewey’s (1922, 1934) perspective that a view of the future can shape the present, Frye (2012) brought an understanding of Malawian girls’ ambitious “imagined futures” (Mische, 2009, as cited in Frye, 2012, p. 1566). Her grounding of the girls’ aspirations in moral values was further explored by Baker in his (2017) study of disadvantaged young students in East London. Baker introduced the social categorization and “boundary work” (Baker, 2017, p. 1206) that arose in his participants’ discussions of their choices within aspirations. Ljunggren and Orupabo (2020) lead this work further in identity formation and value-driven aspirations among students studying occupational courses. Through this study, I take the argument further for the figured worlds theory as a more comprehensive lens for viewing identities and how these identities are being shaped. The theory allows for significant exploration of forces in the identity formation and agency within sociocultural practices. Past studies with the disadvantaged groups in India have assumed a critical position. This study seeks to view identity as the space of claiming agency, and hence holds value for the seeker of the agency.
Methodology
This study is based on interviews with adolescent girls studying in Mumbai’s civic-run schools. Approval for the study had been granted by the Research and Recognition Committee of Mumbai University, institution the researcher was affiliated to at the time. The study drew on different methods, including observations of participants in their homes and school environments, and interviews. Some of the interviews were noted manually while some girls agreed to be recorded on tape. Interactions that went over a year forms the basis of the understanding on the lives, school, and problems of these girls. Memos and field notes created post interactions were also included in the data analysis process. The study progressed through snowball sampling approach. I had permission from the civic education office to visit schools. One of the intentions was to familiarize myself with the environment of these schools. The other intent was to seek out a girl student from grade 8 or 9 who would be willing to participate in the study. After finding one such student, I started visiting the neighborhoods, and this girl introduced me to another possible participant. I had to approach several girls and explain to them the purpose of my presence. Willing participants started referring me to others, and thus the sample grew. Since these girls were minors, I sought their parents’ consent to interview the girls, assuring them of confidentiality and their right to withdraw at any time of the study. The consent process and the girls’ willingness brought the number to seventeen participants. The girls belonged to different religious and state communities, with gender and poverty as more common factors among them. These girls were aged 13 to 14 years and studied in civic-run schools closest to their neighborhoods.
Keeping in mind the lens of identity through access to education, the questions I sought to ask were semi-structured and open-ended, beginning with their everyday home and school life, whether they liked going to school, etc. Some of the questions arose from interactions in the moment. Hence a strict list of questions was not followed but after a couple of visits, I maintained cues I had gathered from previous interviews to help me move forward, and to ask similar questions of all the girls. The process of data gathering or the interviews was thus an active process, co-led by the researcher and the participants. Daily transcription of the recorded interviews, re-writing the hand-written conversations, memoing, and planning for follow-up were part of the data gathering cycle. Data were analyzed using the six-step thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) approach, searching in the data for answers to the research questions. The approach was partly inductive, partly theory-driven constructionist as I tried to make meaning of the data. First level codes were semantic, and derived from the girls’ description of their behaviors at home and at school, with the contrast this seemed to provide as they described those who drop out early from school. These codes were segregated to form clusters showing how their identities were reflected. One of the clusters of codes showed their leaning toward what they wanted and what they did not wish to do, and this was put together under valence of identification. Thus, themes were created to answer research questions and make sense of the girls’ need to access higher education.
The Context of the Life of the Participants
Mumbai is located in the western region of India and is a crowded metropolis. It has also some of the largest slum areas with families living in a single-room, six to 10 members all living together. These families belong to different within-state and inter-state migrant 1 communities and follow different religious faiths. Some of these slum areas are internally segregated according to communities and even “class” (houses closer to the main roads, and cleaner surroundings cost more than shanties closer to the areas with very low sanitation). Most of the children who live in these slums attend the city’s civic-run schools that provide free education, mid-day meals, uniforms, and books. The income-level of these families vary, judging by the possessions of these families inside their homes. Some may not have a bed to lie on and very few utensils, while some of these houses have clean tile flooring, television with access to satellite services, etc. Girls often wake up early in the morning and participate in household chores like preparing tea or cleaning the floor. They go to school, return home, eat their meals quickly, and get down to housework. Houses in these slum areas do not have individual access to water supply and these girls often wait in queues at the community taps to fill water for the household needs. They participate in cleaning, cooking, and sharing the responsibility of looking after younger siblings. While the boys may step out to play in a common ground area where available, girls stay home and help with the work.
While culturally there may be differences in communities in these slums in India with other parts of the world, the existence of slums close to high-rises is common to many other metropolises elsewhere in the world. Most of the help and service to the people in high-rises are provided by the people living in these slums, and inadvertently, the individuals grow up seeing the two contrasting societies, co-existing and disparate. The interaction between those who live in either sections of the society are inevitable and shapes some of the mindsets as evidenced in this research too.
Community lines are very strongly drawn as far as interactions are concerned. Most of the families are migrants and hold their cultural values very closely, the discussion of which is outside the scope of this paper. This description is important in this context, since the attempt to understand identities is also the unfolding of the everyday lives of participants in the subsequent sections.
Findings
Good, School-Going Girls
In trying to figure out how the girls 2 viewed themselves, they were asked to describe themselves and their daily routines. Going to school emerged as the most significant part of the day by most of the girls. They liked going to school for varied reasons such as the relief that they experienced from the problems at home, the knowledge that they know they receive, and spending time with friends. The identity as school-going girls is primarily a negotiation that comes with being figured as good girls. These girls are expected to do housework and most of them do not have the time or space to attend to homework or conduct any extra reading. It appeared from the interviews that the support of the parents was most important in remaining in school, and the parents had to be convinced at all times that their daughters would not be doing anything bad while being allowed to go to school. Although parents of these girls were supportive, they seemed to have a realization that it is also important for parents to see them as good girls.
What enables you to keep going to school?
Some parents fear dishonor to the family and hence don’t send their daughter to school. They fear that their daughter might get into some problems with boys.
. . .parents think that their daughter should do something great in life. So, this is the time to grow faith in them. We must grow the trust of our mothers and fathers. (Q: So why will they stop you from going to school?) (Prafulla hesitates and I ask her what her parents would not like) If she thinks about boys.
Mummy-Papa should not let others tell them not to send me to school. They should allow girls to study. If someone says that he has seen the girl talking to someone on the street, parents should talk to the girl. . . (they should show) That they have faith in their daughter.
Although the girls seem to shift between first person and third person when discussing a potentially embarrassing topic like parents’ distrust of them, what emerges through the responses is the theme, that is, the common need to be figured as good girls.
Some of the girls are accompanied by a parent or an older sibling while going to school. Teasing and harassment are common in the streets (see Zietz & Das, 2018 for more on street harassment in Mumbai and perpetrators’ views). Girls do not seem to mind the watchful eye over them either—“That way, we feel safe”—Diya. So, the good girls go to school and do not hang out with anybody. They see themselves as good daughters who will abide by their parents’ wishes, and this includes confirming to rules that they understand will confirm their identity as good girls. The response, as indicative of unquestioning acceptance, as doxa (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 164) of the good girl or if the participant was beginning to realize how subjective the practice was and yet continued for the sake of being a good girl, was not always clear. The following response was analyzed in the context of the author’s observations and learning:
It is a way of living in our surroundings. Like in our community, we wear naqab, no? Some girls in college, they will only want to wear a nice dress. I will make friends but (not wear) their type of clothes. Or, if they are rude to teachers, talk badly, go here and there without permission, I will not join them, (not) learn their bad habits but learn good habits.
Fiza discusses here that she has a chance to go to college if she gets good marks and her teachers can convince her parents to send her to college. She is indicating the need to avoid the temptation to dress differently or think of boys, following the rules of being a good girl in order to remain in school. Her need to fulfill her aspirations makes her more assertive about her will to remain a good girl to her parents. She and the other participants believe that the parents of the girls who have bad habits (“. . .of being with boys and going here and there and being with the boys”—Pooja) will eventually pull them out of school, and those girls will have an early onset of a lifetime of just housework, with no chance of going back to college. The girls, thus, showed that they have figured the way of being in the present world to be able to continue going to school. The present identity of these school-going girls is figured within the idea of what is good in traditional societies (Holland et al., 1998, p. 53).
Imagined Identity: Being Educated
All the girls wanted to become was “educated.” While a few of them said that they wanted to become a teacher or a doctor, they said that their parents want them to study and “become something” (italics added for emphasis). They mentioned that it was their parents’ dream or wish (“My parents think that if I study, I can do something in life”—Priti).
The phrase, become something, or do something, appeared in almost all the conversations with the girls. None of the girls’ parents had graduated from high school. Most of the mothers are elementary school dropouts. The parents do not articulate what is something in become something but it seems enough for the girls. The girls in turn figure that when they are educated, they will have certain privileges and skills.
Why do you want to be an educated person?
If I am educated, I will be able to solve problems at home. . .If one is educated, one has fewer problems at home, at least it will be a little better.
If we are educated, no one can tell us what to do. We can fight if necessary. We can be what we want to be.
If you are uneducated, you will have a lot of problems later on in life. You will be under a lot of pressure when you get married. Whenever there is a fight, your family will call you “uneducated” (word in italics translated from Hindi).
Priti’s use of a common word used to ridicule someone may seem ironic often when coming from those who are likely illiterate, but using such words is a common way of expressing derision toward someone during an argument. Besides, education is also highly valued in Indian society, and the native language equivalents for uneducated are often used as epithets for all the negativity, foolishness or ignorance associated with lack of education, and the girls do not want this association inflicted on them. Other than positioning themselves as educated girls who are above being called such names, they also imagine that they will be more independent in their functioning and this adds value to their self-esteem:
We know (how to speak) well and they don’t. We go to the bank and speak (English) and they can’t. We will be able to fill forms. People are just standing with their forms, saying, “Please fill my form.” And people who are educated, they fill their form and submit fast and their work goes fast.
Such independence in functioning in the outside world is part of what the girls imagine themselves doing as educated persons. There is pride associated with being independent, and in being seen as someone who can function outside independently. They imagine that they will be seen differently, and their social circle will have more educated people like themselves (“Educated people will talk to us”). The educated people are the ones they encounter sometimes outside of their neighborhoods, such as the author herself, and this was pointed out by the girls.
Values and Social Categories as Valences of Identification
The girls’ worlds appear to be defined by good and desirable. Just as they defined their actions contrasting against what their parents framed as bad behavior, one can see their need to identify with the educated as driven by societal and familial understandings, and partly constructed form meanings that they have apprehended from the experience in the surroundings. These understandings and apprehension can be distinctly categorized as those related to opportunities available to, and behaviors of the educated people.
All the girls said that they are reminded by teachers in school that if you do not possess a college education, your opportunities will be restricted to manual labor, either working as domestic help or ancillary staff in organizations. They classified good jobs as those which allowed you to sit in an office and transact in English.
What do you mean by educated? Why do you want to become an educated person?
Educated people get good jobs. Educated ones can give interviews and get jobs faster. Those who are uneducated are not able to answer simple questions.
The one who is educated can do bigger jobs. An uneducated person will get small jobs. Like working on the road, cleaning, selling fruits. Those who are educated can read English. They can get better jobs. Uneducated people cannot read English; they won’t get jobs in offices. They are forced to do small jobs, like in others’ homes.
. . .Our teacher says that even those jobs require you to study up to (grade) 12.*
[* require a high school diploma]
The girls have understood from the school that the only opportunity available is in the various forms of manual labor if you do not go to college. Manual labor is not deemed desirable or dignified as there are social and communal histories influencing the perception of manual labor in India. Visible through the responses is the reinforcement of the difference in opportunities while still in school, that further leads the girls to build their identities in the socially narrativized account of what is good. We can see that being figured into the world of good girls/women has an influence in their conceptualizations into the imagined identity as well. The imagined identity and the lived world seem to both work in impacting their perception but the imagined identity is not too fantastical and removed from the lived world. One of the girls said that even the educated find it difficult to get a job, justifying the need for college-level education as basic entry into white-collar jobs and the lack of sufficient opportunities. The awareness of the opportunities available and the segregation of jobs as good or unfit seems to push the girls to create a self who is educated but is not averse to adjusting to home demands:
If we want to do graduation, (and) we cannot do more, our parents cannot pay more. So, we have a graduation, na? We have one degree. But if we are at home, we can do stitching, we can learn mehndi (henna art). And then at home also, we can do work and earn money. So, we’ll have both. Like we have both, graduation also, we have studied and we have a home also.
The discussions at school, making students aware of opportunities, and at home, with the notion of becoming something, construct the concepts of good, and bad or unwanted work opportunities. The flexible ambition that is somewhat shaped by circumstances further leads to an understanding that this identification with higher education has intrinsic value for the girls. Further, when probed why they choose to go to college and be an educated person, they pointed to the behavior of uneducated people and showed negative aspects of the uneducated:
When an educated person talks, he will make sense to people. An uneducated one can’t speak well because he knows nothing.
An educated person will talk nicely. Politely. An uneducated person will talk nonsense. We see uneducated boys moving their fingers through their hair, hanging around aimlessly.
. . .My parents love me and they don’t want me to be with people who are not educated and who are not nice.
. . .If we have education, we have to respect him only. People who don’t have education, let her go, let him go (ignore).
The girls classified the behavior of the uneducated and dropouts as not nice or to be ignored. This segregation, in terms of behavior, was referred to by some as “culture.” They want to go to college so that they will not learn this present culture that they see around them. Some of the girls spoke of the culture of the boys around them while others referred to the behaviors of the extended relatives and family members who are uneducated.
In our surrounding, everyone fights and don’t be together. But when we go to a different area, and different surroundings, we can learn about their culture, like how they live, how they live with friends, be together and help everyone.
In our community, our relatives live here and they all have a bad habit that if we have some good marks, excellent marks, they will compare with their children or other children. If we get bad marks, they will insult us. So, I hope that if I go to college, we should not get this culture of comparison. How much we will do hard work, that much we will get marks.
The perception that moves them against an idea of being uneducated also comes from observing those girls who have dropped out of school at grade 7 or 8. These girls discussed that they have seen how one has to do an endless run of chores at home, with no avenue of escape. Learning a skill, along with getting a college education, will provide them that world where they see themselves earning some money and having a modicum of freedom. This indicates a fear of missing out on opportunities if they do not go to college.
In this way, the girls show discrimination among opportunities, missed or available, and possible ways of acting in their worlds in imagining what they want to be and who they wish to mingle with. The “persuasion of a voice” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 251) is seen in deciding what they do not wish to be. The valence of identification comes through it as they imagine their future identities and agencies, developed through instilled ideas, values, and exposure. The present figured world of good girls then becomes a space for authoring as they carefully script their way to college education despite possible economic hurdles and no likelihood of engaging in gainful employment outside of home.
Discussion and Conclusion
In the findings, one can see the values in identities from the figured present to a future imagined. The participants described themselves as girls who like going to school and follow expected social-communal norms. The cultural worlds that they live in shape their identity as good school-going girls who help at home and go to school, staying away from unwanted behavior. There is very little agency in their lives except in going to school, which is granted to them as long as they are good girls. Such figuring of girls as good girls/women in traditional societies is not surprising as did the Naudadan women and girls follow the life path of a good woman in Skinner’s (1989, 1990) studies (as cited in Holland et al., 1998, p. 53). According to Shweder et al. (1998), community culture provides “for how to participate as a member in good standing in one’s cultural community” (p. 896), and here, the value of good behavior for school-going girls is scripted by what is valued in the community. Committing to this behavior shows that the rewards (of making an educated self) are intrinsic and the value invested by the girls in such an identity (McCall & Simmons, 1978).
They are authoring their future or imagined identities as educated women, capable of looking after themselves and appropriating some agency under their status as educated women. While they assess what opportunities are available to them, they are building expectations of their future identity. This identity is one that they imagine will earn them some respect just as they have seen educated people being respected by others. Within this imagined world, they position themselves as girls who will be capable of functioning outside because they can speak English and are educated, and possess some skills and qualifications. The girls are creating an imagined identity where they live lives acting as a “particular kind of character” (Holland, 2009, p. 273), an educated character. Possessing a certain level of educational qualification will enable them to socialize with other educated people, transcending class differences, and position them above ridicule within the existing community.
The valence of their identification with the world of the educated is cast in opposition to the ones who have dropped out of school. The segregation of opportunities and behavior of the educated and uneducated is informed by their socialization into present lived identity, the influence of the parents and teachers, and also what they have witnessed. All the girls referred to the uneducated boys and other people but did not refer to their own parents’ lack of education in any negative way. The perception of imagined identity is also informed by the job opportunities that teachers seem to be talking to students about in their attempt to motivate them to study. Manual labor does not command respect, although a large number of people in these urban slum areas may be working labor-intensive jobs as domestic help, sanitation staff, floor workers in automobile repair workshops, and autorickshaw drivers. Students seem to be naturally drawn toward “cleaner” jobs that are also seen as respectable (Baker, 2017). Moreover, some of the figuring of the educated identity is anchored in the communicative abilities of an educated person. This shows the habitus that they are constructing partly lies within the notion of “speaking, to encompass one’s sense of the value that is likely to be attributed to what one has to say in a particular situation” (Bourdieu, 1977, as cited in Holland et al., 1998, p. 128). The girls described verbal and non-verbal behaviors that differentiated educated from the drop-outs or uneducated. The figuring of non-verbal and verbal cues, by the girls, as indicators of social class helps us understand two aspects of the creation of their future identity. In creating a self even though in an imagined world, “the others are critical for social comparison and self-validation” (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 227), and second, the construction of their world in the making and sense of social class is related to the non-verbal and verbal social class signaling processes (Kraus et al., 2011, p. 247). In imagining themselves as educated in the future, the girls are interpreting culture not as a product of community or religion but an active form of interaction among humans based on common values and shared understanding of how to talk to each other. Linguistic choice, here in the form of speaking English and being able to communicate ideas, is “an indexical system to claim social relationships” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 127).
When asked what they meant by wanting to be an educated person, the girls described various behaviors of educated and uneducated as types of people. They also spoke of becoming something as the outcome of their journey to college, and as a manifestation of their parents’ wishes. The vagueness of the word, something, as used by the parents telling their young daughters, leaves room for interpretation and no commitment toward a certain kind of future. Yet, it seems sufficient for girls to imagine their future selves and the something of this future self is based on what is good and acceptable to the relational others, drawing from “the words of others to which she (they) has been exposed” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 170, word within parentheses added), and is therefore limited to choices offered only in their interpretation of known presumptions and principles. However, I would like to emphasize the intrinsic value all of them placed on college-going through their hopes of learning how to interact with others in more valued ways. Parental involvement, even though it is in the form of simply recruiting the girls into a normative world of good women, and the intrinsic benefits of education held in their self-figuring seem significant outcomes at this stage. The girls held expectations of going to college even within challenging circumstances as it is easier for girls, compared with boys, to have an educational expectation (Wells et al., 2011), and the intrinsic orientations may be still, one might argue, more a product of the gender role socialization of girls (Herzog, 1982; Lueptow, 1980; Marini et al., 1996).
Although the identity in the making is imagined in social contexts, it also signals a readiness to appropriate what is held as meaningful to the self in time. To the girls, communicating in English, making friends in college, being included in the social circle of the educated are “meaningful as acts” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 55) in the figured world of educated people. The dispositions and skills amassed by girls while authoring their identities have significance to their lived realities and are also determined in these realities. The girls value the ability to speak to others fluently, and in transacting in the outside world without any problems. Each interaction, I argue, builds their inner confidence. They discussed imagining a position in which they could set limits over their thoughts (“no one can tell us what to do”), building an identity that will offer some respect, and differentiating themselves as possessing an identity marker, a qualification that raises their relational position. From a standpoint of cultural psychology, these girls may be seen as agents initiating change in their relations with others and their cultural settings (Shweder et al., 1998) when they choose those with whom they want to interact. Going to school and transitioning to college then becomes an important space for authoring this new identity to reality.
To answer the question of how the identities and valences of identification affect the perspectives of the girls, this paper can only state that the girls who have expectations of going to college are appropriating small changes in their interactions with others around them. While the girls did elaborate on what they could achieve instrumentally, the focus here was to see if there is any unifying identity that can be observed among girls with different religious and communal backgrounds. One can see the desire to challenge and negotiate some space for freedom as they grow older and are educated. They are young and do not possess the instruments with which to critically examine the classification of good and desirable from bad and unwanted or to look at the forces that are responsible for the reproduction of uneducated-ness and the consequent reproduction of class differences. This partly reflects upon the existing school influence, implying a need for more engaged pedagogy to enable girls to create social categories with critical understanding of social and class differences. They are drawing upon parental support for being able to continue education, and this parental support comes with certain expectations of moral codes that are specified by family and society. The girls’ ideas of morality, however, seems to rest upon simple binaries of good and bad, such moral reasoning connected to social affiliations and identities (see Haidt, 2001). The cultural model of reasoning toward imagined identities provides the “emotional force” that can be “highly motivational” (D’Andrade, 1995, as cited in Frye, 2012, p. 1598). Although there may be the forces acting against the young girls’ aspirations, this study has reason to believe that these girls might not be setting themselves up for major disappointment. Just as there is ambiguity in “becoming something,” so do their ambitions also sound flexible. While changes are needed to support a different kind of aspirations, for these girls it is more important to focus on the persons they will become, and the people with whom they will be able to socialize. The moral boundaries that the girls drew while discussing the educated and uneducated also shows their conceptualizations of how they think the other “educated” world lives. Thus, the “moral boundary” (Baker, 2017; Ljunggren & Orupabo, 2020), I believe, seems to be occurring whenever disadvantaged students encounter either white educated classes (in Baker’s study, the educated and affluent London society, and in Ljunggren & Orupabo’s study, the native, more advantaged society) or western educated classes (in this study, urban India). This, Archer and Francis (2006) had reflected, was indicative of the normalization of the western or white middle-class life in contemporary society. In this study, the schools seem to be serving to this end in creating social categories. The girls were extending their understanding from school constructed categories to their conceptualization of good and bad. Since identity is an ongoing process and this study took place within a certain frame of time, this study cannot claim how deeply the categorization and moral-based perception of the educated were entrenched in the girls. However, the influence of classroom discourse in shaping ideas of social categories should not be ignored. Teachers must acquaint themselves more empathetically with the students’ lives, their relational positions in their society, and their future possibilities (Roth & Erstad, 2016). Girl students could also benefit from a more engaged pedagogy, discussed in hooks (1994), as one that enables reflective and critical thought on normative class and social structures, and gendered role expectations.
The girls’ desire to avoid manual labor and their description of working-class occupations points to how young students may be judging social classes. This might prevent them from bringing the value of manual work into the classroom unless the teacher has a sensitive and integrative approach when discussing the value of such work. One of the other concerns immanent in the girls’ discussions is the need for becoming and to be accepted by the other. Such issues may be of interest to sociologists of education investigating the divisions that access to education itself contributes to, and the constitution of students’ ideas of a good life, and the moral ideas they associate with being educated (Baker, 2017).
Although this paper presents identity through Holland et al.’s (1998) lens, the size of the cohort that the author was able to observe and interview places constraints to extensive interpretations. This study also does not claim to have explored all possible social forces that influence the valence of identification, and those explorations could offer further areas of research. Larger studies with young girls in different contexts might provide useful insights into how girls appropriate such motivational verbal and non-verbal cues to form their understanding of themselves. It might be useful for future research to investigate similar identity formation, cultures, and cultural influences among schoolboys within challenging landscapes. However, this study highlights the understanding of identity through the valences of identification. More significantly, this paper also demonstrates the analytical lens provided by Holland et al.’s framing of identity. For some students, educational choices are informed by values ascribed to higher education within the context of integration (as seen in Ljunggren & Orupabo, 2020), while this study demonstrates the choices made for the self in the process of transforming their sphere of influence, that is, their own self, with some need for expanding their social interactions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Beena Choksi and two other reviewers for their comments and support. I acknowledge the comments provided by the two anonymous reviewers that greatly helped in improving this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author acknowledges the support of the Govt. of India, Department of Atomic Energy, under the Vigyan Pratibha Project (No. R&D-TFR-0650) in completion and writing of this research article.
Data Disclosure
The data for this study was collected during an earlier research approved by the Research and Recognition Committee, University of Mumbai (approval # Th./ICD/2013-14/2846). Data for this article may be obtained from the author upon request.
