“Why Do Students Fail? Maybe It’s Their Own Fault”: One Biracial Prospective Teacher’s Story

• In Event: Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Beliefs and Minority Youth

Abstract

Drawing on the thinking of Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain (1998), this paper explores the figured world of schools to explore how and why one biracial prospective teacher imagined her siblings and other students of color like them as responsible for their own school failure. Employing life history methods, I investigate how this undergraduate at a primarily White institution (PWI) considered reasons for students’ school failure. During this time, she was enrolled in a course asking her to consider intersecting notions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and language background and their impact on students’ achievement and general well being. Over time, she began to see flaws in her initial reasoning.

Author

• Mary Louise Gomez, University of Wisconsin - Madison