Lil' Momma "Gone Work It Out": Youth Problem Solving Through Cultural Ways of Knowing

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Identity, and Social Resiliency in the Context of Cultural Practice

Abstract

Objective
Employing in-depth qualitative methods, this paper focuses on complex reasoning processes employed among a group of African-American high school girls in an urban after-school literacy program. Because they lack reflections of young people’s histories and unique cultural niches, psychosocial-cognitive development and interventions research, fail to influence generative change. Thus, the design of any intervention whose goal is to increase life chances, particularly for those adolescents negatively impacted by their social and economic status, cannot ignore students’ perceptions of what is threatening and supportive to their own development.

Specifically, the author addresses how a deeper understanding of the processes involved in informal, community-based, out-of-school learning among African-American youth may inform academic and economic attainment and offer rich new insight into how adolescents acquire the critical reasoning skills useful in argumentation, communication, resilience, and out-of-school literacy practice.

Methodology
Data stem from a two-year study of an African-American community after-school program for girls in an urban mid-western district where eighty-three percent of racial minority students are in low-income families. In response to these trends, the district sponsored an all-African American, all-female community development high school class. Offered as electives during the regular part of the school day, and taught by instructors based in the African-American community, classes focused on identifying issues of race, culture, and identity that students perceived as existing within their community. The study examines students’ experiences in these classes, and the data corpus includes field-notes and video from 1 year of in-depth weekly observations in the fall semester classes, as well as student and instructor interviews.

Data Analysis
The author presents her findings from three analytical planes, apprenticeship, guided participation and participatory appropriation.1 Analyses focused on the role of discourse and text in the learning that evolved within the program. For each plane, the author identified supportive sources provided to students as they engaged in complex problem- solving around issues critical to their lives. Data were coded iteratively, with codes that categorized supportive sources along the three planes.

Findings
Findings showed that community discourse norms socialized youth to certain problem- solving strategies. As youth posed personal social dilemmas, emphasizing the potential consequences, peers within the group “re-directed” the initial dilemma in non-threatening ways that welcomed multiple perspectives toward that dilemma. Through the discourse, youth were able to consider alternative perspectives and digest multiple points of view— skills that mimic those required in language arts. Additionally, because talk in the program and the youth’s shared social histories influenced the young women’s coping responses, the author hypothesized that similar community discourse norms might advance the students’ interpretative skills, collaborative sense-making and problem- solving, and personal and collective empowerment.

Scholarly Significance
This research illuminates useful ways to leverage fundamental out-of-school practices of students of color—practices that mediate in-school knowledge production. It underscores and challenges dominant themes in education, which either 1) view students’ cultural practices (e.g., ways of speaking and listening) as deficits rather than resources or, 2) link cultural practices to classroom practices without specifying how and where such links occur.

Author

• Yolanda J. Majors, The University of Minnesota