Failing to Learn: What Male Youth Labeled "At-Risk" Have to Teach Educators About Schooling

• In Event: A Nation at Promise: Challenging Deficit Constructions of Male Youth Labeled "At-Risk"

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: PURPOSE

In addition to challenging the normative, negative labels of “at-risk” and “failing” ascribed to a group of low-income young men, this paper makes visible learning practices and structures of participation that facilitate these young men’s success and engagement in their lives. Specifically, this paper explains the social arrangements that undergird and emerge from these young men’s involvement in skateboarding and related youth cultures, and examines how these arrangements create possibilities for their learning, literacy, identity formation, and sociopolitical engagement. Thus, this paper draws attention to normative features of (literacy) learning found in schools and offers suggestions for reform efforts, particularly those aimed at students labeled “failing.”

THEORETICAL FRAMING

This research is framed by sociocultural theories of learning (e.g., Lewis, Enciso, and Moje, 2007), which argue that all learning is inherently tied to identity, participation, context, and ideology. This research also draws upon scholarship and theoretical orientations pertaining to age as a social construct (e.g., Chudacoff, 1989), the role of conflict in learning (e.g., Rogers, R., & Fuller, C. (2007), and critical literacy (e.g., Morrell, 2009).

DATA SOURCES/METHOD

Data consist of descriptions of participants’ involvement in youth cultures based on participant observations, transcripts of semi-structured interviews, and cultural artifacts, including industry-produced (e.g., trade magazines and videos, clothing, skateboards), and participant-produced (e.g., tattoos, graffiti art, song lyrics). Two central units of analysis—participatory events and textual events—served as focal areas for data organization and analysis.

FINDINGS

The findings of this paper denaturalize many of the taken-for-granted assumptions, structures, and practices that govern (literacy) learning and teaching within schools. First, this paper details how learning within the central site of research (skateboard park) is rooted in “intent community participation” (Rogoff, et. al, 2003) as opposed to the “assembly-line instruction” (Rogoff, et. al, 2003) model of learning found within schools. Second, this paper explains two specific features of learning these young men engage that contrast with or are absent from how learning is structured in schooling: 1) the social arrangement of age heterogeneity, which opens up teaching and learning opportunities for participants that would be unavailable if learning was age segregated as it is in schools; 2) the expectation that participants be producers of and contributors to the community, which facilitate a range of literacy activities. These findings culminate in the development of a “re-positioning pedagogy” overtly positions youth as “capable” and places them in positions whereby they have opportunities for shaping the learning of others and the larger learning community.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE

Beyond re-framing youth typically labeled “at risk,” this paper helps to both illuminate structures of participation within schools that are failing youth and draw attention to social arrangements and learning practices that are better serving these same youth. In this way, this presentation opens up possibilities for schooling practices (including in teacher education) that would better serve students who are currently being marginalized by our current schooling system.

Author

• Robert Petrone, Montana State University