Educational aspirations, ethnicity and mobility in western Sydney high schools

Superdiversity provides a conceptual framework for thinking through contemporary sociolinguistic and cultural complexity in urban globally mobile communities. In this chapter, we put it to work in a project that explored aspirations for higher education within public schools in a highly diverse area in western Sydney, Australia. While superdiversity was not the initial focus of our study, it became useful alongside theoretical work on imagination and school choice within global education markets and movements. Superdiversity is now a “constant characteristic of contemporary schools” (Gogolin 2011, p. 241), and schools are thus ideal sites for examining how young people and their families constitute themselves, and are constituted by, global and local mobility and how this impacts on desires for particular careers and pathways into the future