A New Approach to Understanding Aboriginal Educational Outcomes: The Role of Social Capital

Abstract

In recent years, social capital has received much attention and has been the subject of great debate in the social sciences and policy arenas. Whether social capital has the capacity and utility to produce meaningful change in achieving the goals of society, is one focus of that debate. This paper examines the impacts of social capital on Aboriginal educational attainment in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The focus for Canada is First Nations and in other countries it is a similar population. Our aim is to explore how social capital theory has been applied to Aboriginal contexts in each country, and we seek to determine if social capital plays, or can play, any role in improving educational attainment for Aboriginal populations. Does social capital figure in the formation of programs and policies? Should it be a consideration? What are the specific contexts in which social capital can have an effect on educational attainment? We approached these questions by creating as extensive an inventory of policies and programs as possible for each of the countries. Also, we supplemented our inventory with email, phone, and face-to-face interviews with experts, such as Robert Putnam in the US, David Robinson in New Zealand, Canadian Aboriginal students, and government policy officers in all three countries. We thank everyone who took time to work with us. We developed a synthesis looking for patterns and distilling the role of social capital. Our research looked at conscious applications of the concept, but also where we could discern its implicit part in educational attainment. In writing our results we chose programs and policies that illustrated our synthesis.

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