The multiple worlds of successful Cambodian American students

Educational policy usually overlooks Cambodian American students as a unique ethnic group, attending instead to the positive statistics that aggregate Asian American students into a single group of successful students. Through ethnographic interviews, this article examines how successful Cambodian American students interpreted values from their multiple worlds in relation to their paths into the university and provides insight into the academically supportive features of their different worlds. Family obligation emerged as a coherent theme that figured prominently in their school experiences. This study complicates the simplistic view of how traditional cultural values influence immigrant ethnic minority school achievement.