Paper abstract:

This study explores the Azerbaijani immigrant parents’ school involvement in USA schools and their children’s academic achievement. Literature supports that Azerbaijani parents are much involved in school activities as 6 in 10 parents discussed their child’s progress on their initiative, and 55% discussed their child’s progress on the initiative of one of their child’s teachers (OECD, 2019).

A survey adapted from Epstein’s “Six Types of Parent Involvement” and items adjusted from Dr. Gehlbach’s Family-School Relationship Survey (2015) was used to collect the data. The survey comprised four parts (Parenting, Communication, Volunteering, and Collaboration), followed by questions about the children’s academic achievement and demographic questions about parents. The primary research question: “Is there an association between Azerbaijani children’s academic achievement and Azerbaijani parenting support in the U.S.?”

I collected the sample from Azerbaijani-born/ naturalized citizens of Azerbaijani descent. The sample consisted of 55 parents whose children had studied at American schools, K-12, for at least one year. Parents were recruited to participate through a personal acquaintance from multiple states in the U.S. Participants received a WhatsApp invitation to meet a Qualtrics survey link after agreeing. Parents were encouraged to forward the survey link to other parents. Therefore, this study implemented convenience and snowball sampling (Goodman, 1961).

I conducted a Chi-square test of association for the statistical analysis with ordinal independent and dependent variables. Based on the Chi-square test of association, there is no unique effect of type of parental involvement (p > .05) on the academic achievement of Azerbaijani children. This suggests that the mean academic achievement does not differ by type of parental involvement. Therefore, I failed to reject the null hypothesis (no effect or relationship between the variables). I can conclude that Azerbaijani parents’ American school involvement can not affect their children’s academic achievement. These findings align with many of the perspectives that hold immigrant parents incapable of or indifferent to playing a central role in their children’s education as one of the benchmarks for multicultural literacy.

Paper abstract:

The Post-Soviet Era marked the emergence of new Republics in Central Asia. In this context - taking advantage of the social, political, and economic turmoil resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union - Islamic religious orders such as the Gülen community created a sphere of influence in most of the new-born Central Asian States by offering free education to the less advantaged members of the society, through the establishment of colleges and boarding schools. As analysed by the scholar Bayram Balcı - who focused on the cooperation between Islamic orders and the Turkish government in Central Asia - Turkey supported the presence of Sufi brotherhood (such as the Gülen community) in post-Soviet Central Asian Republics.

In partial contrast with the current narrative on this subject, we argue that the Turkish support to the Sufi communities’ schools was motivated by the opportunity to teach and spread a new narration of the historical and cultural relationships between Turkey and the emerging post-Soviet Central Asian Republics. As this paper aims to show, this narration emphasised shared history and Turkic roots, as well as similarities in terms of language and religious practices. Moreover, through an analysis of these institutes’ educational and cultural policies, this research aims also to show how their creation represented the cornerstone of the Turkish strategy to acquire some influence among the new-born Central Asian republics.

Paper abstract:

The aim of this article is to analyse the processes of what many educational reformists in Central Eurasia term “academic corruption”, based on ethnographic data gathered in and around the classroom while teaching English Composition in an American-funded school (Rus. kolledzh) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, during the 2021-2022 academic year. The article consists of four main sections, each of which decompose one ethnographic aspect in the light of the region’s history, and more contemporary sociological and anthropological theories. The first section focuses on the discrepancy between the expectations of the school’s academic Liberal Arts programme and those of some of the students and their parents. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of French academia, a second section peers into how the influential economic capital of students’ parents, rapidly acquired during the post-independence years in the early 1990s and 2000s, can clash with the cultural capital the school curriculum tries to cultivate in their children. Based on the emerging anthropological literature of affect and emotions, a third section examines the phenomenon of nationally-driven, affect-based academic solidarity and Central Eurasian hospitality between some students and their teachers in the geopolitical frame of a common Central Eurasian agency of developmental urgency. A fourth section explores how the abovementioned elements lead some students toward barely covered up acts of plagiarism and a general disregard for the promises of a Liberal Arts scholarly culture. By way of conclusion, a final section attempts to build the case to call for more ground-level academic interest in the Central Eurasian educational and pedagogical spheres, to ensure its integral and perennial survival more convincingly among the region’s still strenuously emerging educational and scholarly initiatives.