Investigating the Role of Literature in the Academic Socialization of Youth Ex-Offenders

• In Event: Opportunities for Identity Work in the Face of Risk and Resilience Through Literature

Abstract

The major focus of this presentation is on the complex socialization processes among African American youth within a community based, literacy-learning classroom serving African American (AA) male youth ex-offenders. Guiding this presentation are two questions:

1. How can a deeper understanding of the processes involved in community-based, out-of-school learning among African American youth ex-offenders inform classroom instruction, particularly in the domain of response to literature?
2. How are classroom and community resources, teacher knowledge and curricular materials used effectively to improve learning outcomes?

The extant literature on problem-solving models of literacy instruction within corrections education highlights the effectiveness of such a model for ex-offenders as it allows them to grapple with “the choices they made or did not make, the consequences they face, their own internal world, and their social reality [that] all become part of a need for critical understanding” (Boudin, 1995, p. 141) as they face new problems, decisions, and choices upon reentry. Thus, there is a critical need to investigate the socializing structures and tools offered to African American youth within a community site outside of the correctional facility that foster interpretive skills, collaborative sense making, problem solving, and personal and collective empowerment (Majors, 2014, 2015).

This qualitative investigation employs instruments derived from ethnographic, anthropological (Erickson, 1986) and quantitative techniques (Creswell, 2003). In this presentation we report on the enactment and documentation of the processes through which youth participants were socialized into academic and cultural ways of reasoning about problems within literary texts; the pedagogical practices that structure opportunities for youth as learners to reason about problems within literary texts and the world; strategies used for interpreting these problems; and the ways in which youths negotiate problem solving strategies.

Activities for this objective included 1) the implementation of the intervention, in which our particular focus was on how alternative perspectives and strategies for skilled reasoning can be taught and developed using this model; 2) the assessment of outcomes on two levels: literacy learning and cultural socialization (coping, values, identities, resilience, perspective building, motivation using teacher-research and participant-observation, interviews, documents and artifacts; and 3) the identification of discourse structures, reasoning content, classroom pedagogy and levels of engagement through micro-analysis (Erickson, 1986) of videotapes and instruction. The purpose of the literacy-learning classroom was to document and analyze how learners (N=125), and instructors (N=2), while engaged in interpretive strategies used for understanding texts also take up opportunities to engage in cultural socialization strategies to solve everyday life problems.

We will report on outcomes of this project that include, but are not limited to, the transition of approximately half of the intervention classroom (N=63) to workplace skill development services at a partnered workforce development organization within the implementation year. This project is the first tier, focusing on disciplinary literacy learning and community/cultural socialization of a larger multi-site multi-tiered project that offers rich new insights into how African American youth acquire the critical reasoning skills useful in communication, conflict resolution, resilience, and disciplinary literacy practices.

Author

• Yolanda J. Majors, The University of Minnesota