The Discourse of Place: African American Male Youth and the Forging of a Literate Identity in Middle School

• In Event: Multiple Literacies, Multiple Contexts: Leveraging Urban Students’ Literacies in Schools and Beyond

Abstract

Social institutions, including schools, affirm the dominant culture while repudiating the cultures of others (Delpit, 1988). Literature related to the school-to-prison pipeline also suggests that schools are oppositional, even hostile, environments for African American male youth (Meiners, 2007). In other words, school language, including narrowed expectations for literacy participation, and everyday schooling practices (i.e., discipline practices) challenge African American male youth culture, calling into question their personal, literate, and academic identities.

While literacy classrooms are sites of opportunity to grapple with issues related to literate identities of African American male youth, many are dismissive of their literacies. Because literacy classrooms may not support the literate identities and practices of African American male youth (i.e., the way African American males express themselves in language), African American male students are not viewed, or may not view themselves as academic achievers or literate individuals.

            The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between school and non-school literacy participation of African American male youth and the construction/shaping/forging of complex, and oftentimes contradictory literate identities within an urban middle school setting. This study (1) examines the literacy artifacts, practices, and ideologies that make up the literate identities of African American male youth, and (2) explores the tensions that exist between the literate identities of African American male youth and the complex discourse of literacy classroom/spaces in order to inform teacher preparation and practice. This paper will focus on one research question from a larger study: What practices, ideologies, and texts, extend/complicate notions of literate identities for African American male youth in an urban middle school? For this research question, I draw from and extend Gee’s (2001) theory of Discourse. Gee refers to Discourse as an “identity kit” that includes language, behaviors, practices, and values within certain contexts (Florio-Ruane & Morrell, 2004). Gee’s theory provides an instrument for analyzing how participants discuss the literate identities of African American male youth in relation to the literacy practices and Discourses of school. As an extension of Gee’s theory, I consider the complex and oftentimes contradictory Discourse of place that “sustain” as well as interrupt the “sociocultural and sociohistorical constructed forms of social existence” (Stinson, 2006, p. 478). In other words, I want to explore how literacy artifacts produced and literacy practices engaged in by African American male youth represent and/or contradict their literate identities and how the narrative of negative social conditions and educational failure for African American male youth is sustained and/or interrupted by specific literacy practices and participation.

            This ethnographic case study was conducted for over 8 months in an urban middle school. Field notes, observations, photographs, lesson plans, meeting notes, test data, instructional materials, and interviews were collected in order to bring into focus the structural issues at work in the literacy identity formation for African American male youth. Findings suggest complex and contradictory relationships between participants’ literacy views, ideologies, and practices and the literacy participation required, invited, and expected in school.

Author

• Latrise Paulene Johnson, The University of Alabama