OLPD was fortunate to have two students receive the prestigious University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2022-23: Zhuldyz Amankulova and Consuelo Sánchez-Bautista. Both are students in the Comparative and International Development Education program.
Zhuldyz’s dissertation research examines how prestigious university graduates from marginalized rural and/or low-income backgrounds in Kazakhstan use social capital in pursuing their education and career aspirations. Social capital critically shapes employment opportunities and social mobility of youth. Little is known, however, about how marginalized youth use social capital to pursue education and career aspirations, particularly in countries with developing higher education systems. Drawing on life history narratives of youth navigating pathways to university, university life itself, and trajectories beyond university, Zhuldyz’s dissertation offers insight into the nuanced ways inequities are reproduced or transformed. Her research will make significant theoretical contributions to higher education studies by challenging the centrality of western notions about social capital while highlighting circumstances that improve higher education retention, graduation, and employment of marginalized youth. Zhuldyz’s dissertation builds on her master’s research and serves as a reflection of her own experience as a student from a lower-income background. She has witnessed significant disparities in education and career opportunities through her experience attending both rural and urban schools, elite and non-elite universities.
Consuelo is conducting a qualitative comparative case study of flexible education policy at global and national and local scales in Colombia. Flexible education is a global policy aimed at broadening education opportunities for out-of-school and overaged youth living in poor and conflict-affected zones, by offering age-appropriate accelerated education alternatives to regular schooling. Although this approach to education has increased both access to education and learners’ academic performance, literature has reported that dropout rates from these programs remain high in places affected by conflict. Most of the research has attributed these dropout rates to individual and family characteristics. In contrast, Consuelo’s research explores how policy formation and appropriation practices influence and shape the opportunities for overaged youth on the move to (re)enroll in formal education and continue studying until they eventually graduate from high school. By bringing together two fields of study (education in conflict-affected zones and global education policy), her research will uniquely contribute to policy concerns at a global level regarding the importance of context-specific conditions for successful policy implementation and will attempt to disrupt deficit models related to dropping out by understanding systemic interventions that address the barriers that keep students out in conflict-affected contexts.
Zhuldyz’s primary faculty advisor is Christopher Johnstone; Consuelo’s advisor is Frances Vavrus. Congratulations!
