Abstract

In this article I investigate how three ethnically diverse African refugee female adolescents navigated the intercultural complexity that contextualized their schooling in a small Northeast American city. Using ethnographically contextualized case study methodology, this article explores the participants’ perceptions of the African and American cultural milieus that they straddled as refugee adolescents. Additionally, the article examines the strategies these refugee youth had to develop in order to transcend intercultural complexity and remain academically engaged. The findings suggested that the refugee adolescents demonstrated agency and a considerable degree of intercultural competency, which I conceptually juxtaposed here as Agentic Intercultural Competency in Schooling (AGICS). The findings further suggested that the AGICS concept was critical for these socially disadvantaged female adolescents to maintain high levels of scholastic engagement in the face of intercultural complexity.

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