British Indian Model Minority Pupils’ Schooling Experiences

Book excerpt: Exploring the British Indian model minority discourse, this book is the first empirical and theoretical examination of high achieving British Indian students’ lived experiences of schooling, education, teaching, and learning. Drawing from narratively styled qualitative interviews with Indian students, the chapters explore Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the concepts of capital, symbolic violence, and habitus to analyse what the contextual and empirical data reveals about the role of class background in the production or reproduction of social class. Providing thought-provoking insights into the role the English secondary education system plays in exacerbating the label of the Indian model student, the book critically examines how this label seems to at once praise, patronise, and homogenise a heterogeneous group of people who share a particular heritage. Ultimately, the book contextualises Western education and the ways in which minority ethnic students and various groups defined as ‘Other’ relate to, and connect with, education. The book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of the sociology of race and ethnicity in education, the sociology of higher education, and the marketisation of education.