Addressing African American Youth Resistance and Resilience Through a Culturally Focused School Environment

• In Event: 14.023 - Cultural and Ecological Approaches to Understanding and Designing for Resilience, Motivation, and Engagement

Abstract

This paper focuses on a culturally rooted all school intervention integrating supports for deep discipline-specific literacy learning in literature and history along with holistic supports across the school to expand students’ conceptions of horizons of possibility for them and developing repertoires for resilience in the face of challenge. The intervention takes place in an African-centered urban high school serving African-American youth from low-income communities. It is a longitudinal 3-year intervention based on the hypothesis that combining culturally rooted scaffolds for literacy in literature and history along with a joint focus on building a strong sense of identity through school wide supports would yield positive growth in both academic outcomes as well as broader positive social functioning. Literature and history were chosen as literacy domains because they offer opportunities to wrestle with the conundrums of identity and power around issues of race, gender and class, both through examining exemplars of literary characters and historical figures and movements who exemplify powerful principles of resilience in the face of adversity and interrogating the meanings of these exemplars for the challenges of our time and the lives of these youth.

Scaffolds for comprehension and argumentation in literature and history are based on principles of the Cultural Modeling Framework (Lee 2007), using cultural data sets from youth’s everyday practices to scaffold interpretive heuristics and strategies and gateway activities of relevant scenarios of everyday experience to generate criteria upon which to draw when making judgments about characters and themes in literature, or judgments about political principles or processes in history. Tasks in intervention units in both disciplines engage students in close reading, but also constructing arguments about consequential questions drawing on evidence from across multiple texts. Participation structures in class discussion and group work draw on African-American cultural norms for talk and interaction (Smitherman 1977, Boykin 1982). School wide supports include mentoring and advising, establishing strong personal relationship building, enrichment activities expanding students’ experiences in the world.

Data collection included surveys on racial identity, efficacy, perceptions of threat, of classroom culture, on experiences of threat, epistemologies, and reading habits – to examine how these psycho-social factors impacted literacy outcomes and academic achievement. Data collection of instruction included videos of instruction during scaffolding and at mid and end points of units; student work samples; interviews with students, and pre-post assessments of comprehension and argumentation in each discipline. Data also included ethnographic fieldnotes documenting school wide supports for identity building and resilience.

Findings document that positive racial identity, sense of efficacy, and beliefs about using literature for personal meaning making are positively correlated with growth in literacy outcomes (pre-post assessments & PSAE) and academic achievement (grades).

Significance: This study demonstrates that identity, efficacy and beliefs about academic tasks matter for student learning (Boykin and Bailey 2000, Nasir, Rosebery et al. 2006); that culturally rooted scaffolds for literacy enable learning (Lee 1995) ; and that a holistic, school-wide focus on both academic learning and socio-emotional learning contribute (Graham and Hudley 2005).

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University