Teachers of Immigrant Origin: Contextual Factors and Resource Mobilization in Professional Life

Abstract

This chapter analyses the professional choices, access to the professional field and professional experiences of tertiary-educated descendants of labour immigrants who have embraced the teaching profession. While a number of studies of socially mobile immigrant-origin adults concentrate on the resources mobilized to override the laws of social reproduction, this chapter embeds its analysis in the theoretical frame of integration context theory, which postulates that meso and macro contextual factors are of crucial importance for mobility. These factors range from general, historically evolved country-specific institutional arrangements, such as the civil service system, to targeted migrant integration policies, such as measures to recruit teachers. These dimensions are combined and synthesized in a typology of contexts. A typology of institutional opportunity structure based on these dimensions allowed us to build a comparative grid for the analysis of the rich qualitative interviews of 46 teachers of immigrant origin (TIOs) in five countries. The study emphasizes how institutional opportunity structures do or do not allow resources such as professional and ethnic networks to be relevant. By defining which attributes can be effectively mobilized by educationally successful descendants of immigrants, institutional opportunity structures shape their professional trajectory and delineate leeway for the interpretation of the professional role of TIOs.