Culture, Identity, Resilience Through Literacy, and Wraparound Identity-Focused Supports in an Urban High School

• In Event: Eco-Cultural Frames: Examining Challenges of Race, Ethnicity, and Class for Youth Learning, Development, and Resilience

Abstract

This study follows a group of African-American students over a period of 3 years in a low-income urban African-centered high school to examine the impact of a culturally and ecologically focused intervention aimed at influencing academic engagement and literacy outcomes and examining how students’ perceptions of themselves in terms of race, ability, and sources of vulnerability and supports impact engagement and literacy outcomes.

The rationale for the intervention design is that learning must be understood from a cultural and ecological framework that takes into account a holistic understanding of youth’s lives in and outside of school, and that schools must be organized as learning communities that can be responsive to these multiple needs.

The literacy intervention takes place in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Seminar classes where students examine text sets that address issues of identity and resilience. ELA instruction employs the Cultural Modeling Framework connecting students’ everyday knowledge with the demands of literary reasoning.

Social supports beyond the classroom include personal advisors for each student, an Enrichment Period with mentoring and student centered clubs, and an Ujima Council that addresses needs of students most at risk. Coordination across these components of the interventions focus on “Who am I?”, “Who and what can I become?”, and “What is available to help me?”

The school as a learning community was fostered through collective study in and across departments around disciplinary literacies, adolescent development and the role of culture and identity processes in learning as well as ongoing monitoring of data on all aspects of the intervention by the school community.

Data on a cohort of 150 9th and 10th graders over 2 academic terms include measures of identity and resilience, perceptions of sources of vulnerability and supports and school climate, and neighborhood environmental data. Classroom process data from video address how instruction across classes creates opportunity to learn. Outcome data include pre-post assessments of literary analysis and argumentation, comprehension of historical texts, and trends regarding attendance and discipline referrals.

Findings show despite data showing most students experienced significant traumas outside of school, adaptive coping and positive racial identity as well as comfort with others, a belief that ability is malleable and reading with a social justice and personal meaning making orientation were positively correlated with gains in reading.


Significance:

Efforts to address the challenges of low-performing urban high schools typically focus on organizational accountability via test scores through efforts aimed solely at curriculum and/or professional development interventions. This study, grounded in understanding learning as entailed in identity processes that are sensitive to life course development, offers a holistic model of school transformation that integrates a focus on deep disciplinary knowledge with regard to content area literacies and attention to the social and emotional demands of rigorous learning as these are complicated by positioning in non-dominant communities plagued with poverty. The significance is both conceptual as well as methodological as exemplified in the multi-dimensional design of the intervention and the layers of data collection and analyses employed.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University