Identity Repertoires Within and Across Ecological Spaces as Resources for Interrogating Political Positioning

• In Event: 43.019 - Socializing Epistemologies That Consolidate Complexity, Weighing Evidence, and Interrogating Emotional Responses: The Role of Ecologies

Abstract

This paper articulates learning as multi-dimensional and unfolding inside dynamic complex systems situated in people’s participation in cultural practices within and across spaces, an ecological framing. This multi-dimensional conceptualization integrates thinking, perceptions, feelings, and relationships as filters through which effort, goals and motivation operate. This paper offers an integrative review of foundational research in cognition, human development, dynamic systems, ecological systems, cultural psychology to warrant this conceptualization of learning in complex ecologies. These foundations are then explored in terms of examining the epistemological and thinking processes recruited by a cohort of African-American adolescents from low-income communities as they interrogate persistent inter-generational political challenges they face emerging from the persistence of racism and the ideologies and institutional practices that sustain racism in the U.S.

In the current national political climate, understanding how youth, especially youth most negatively impacted by the dilemmas in this so-called “post-truth” period come to understand, critically examine and make decisions about what options are available to them in terms of civic action is important. And as a research community, understanding how the knowledge and epistemological dispositions of these youth around persistent conundrums of civic life develop and how such development is informed by core propositions around human learning and development are crucial to facilitating youth development. Viewing this problem space as situated within complex ecologies offers opportunities to inform policy and practice in both formal schooling as well as informal institutional configurations.

The empirical data presented comes from a 4-year longitudinal study in an African-centered urban charter high school serving a predominantly African-American populating living in poverty. The data include data on the communities in which these youth live to situate some of the challenges they face; surveys measuring their perceptions of their positioning with regard to race and their perceptions of their abilities to cope with challenge; micro-analyses of videos of instruction in literature, history, and a seminar focused on wrestling with the challenges of adolescence. The video analyses document the range of intellective, relational and epistemological resources that the youth recruited from across settings (family, peer social networks, community affiliations, and content knowledge from their classwork in literature and history classes). The intervention is driven by the Multi-Dimensional Cultural Modeling Framework that designs content area instruction, especially in disciplinary literacies, to recruit relevant everyday repertoires that youth construct from their experiences outside of school to support the examination of topics relevant to dilemmas with which these youth wrestle, by examining challenging text sets that offer crucial information for understanding these challenges and resources for resisting and productively wrestling with such challenges. The design framework aims to support a sense of self-efficacy and resilience in the face of challenge.

Findings demonstrate positive correlations between positive racial identity factors and beliefs in ability to cope; between epistemological beliefs about interrogating history and literature and literacy assessments and how such dispositions are socialized in these classes by recruiting ecologically rooted resources.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University