"Whatever You Become, Be Proud": Familial Influences on Black and Latino Boys' Postsecondary Future Selves

• In Event: Empowering and Supporting Young Men of Color Through the Pre-K–20 Pipeline

Abstract

In response to AERA President Vanessa Siddle Walker’s call for researchers to recommit to community engagement by drawing from multiple stakeholders, it is essential that we build upon the knowledge-bases of families of color to advance research, policy, and practice for ethnically and racially diverse college-bound learners. This paper’s objectives are to show how Black and Latino families influenced how adolescent boys conceptualized and enacted steps to achieve their post-high school aspirations. Sustaining effort, thwarting barriers to goal actualization, and maintaining resilience in the face of adversity depend on an adolescents’ goals being coherent and aligned (Schneider & Stevenson, 1999). Thus, this paper also urges stakeholders to build upon the often overlooked familial influences on how Black and Latino boys form not only college or career interests, but also other life-condition goals.

The author advances and utilizes a theoretical concept of “postsecondary future selves,” which draws from “future orientation” (Nurmi 1991, 2005) and “possible selves” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Postsecondary future selves reflects what youth conceptualize as possible, likely and expected for their immediate postsecondary school lives along three domains: “college” (i.e., postsecondary education through advanced vocational training, or 2- or 4-year colleges or universities), “career” (i.e., occupation, and post-college employment trajectory), and “condition” (i.e., expected economic security, life fulfilment, satisfaction).

The author draws from ethnographic data captured during nearly an entire school year (eight months), to investigate how families (e.g., nuclear, extended, and fictive kin) influenced the postsecondary futures selves of five adolescent, 11th grade Black (three) and Latino (two) boys at one U.S. public charter school in an urban Mid-Atlantic context. This paper features participants’ voices collected during interviews (4 interviews each), utilizing semi-structured interview questions. Deductive and inductive coding occurred to determine where participants’ future oriented and possible selves for college, career, and condition overlapped with familial influences. Where coded excerpts overlapped, codes were grouped into themes presented herein.

Findings show that by serving as protective factors, families built their boys’ capacities for imagining and taking steps to obtain their ideal futures. Although distinct domains – college, career, and condition – family members verbally encouraged one domain to emphasize another, or all at the same time in a sequential logic (e.g. go to college, to obtain a desirable career, to secure a fulfilling life condition). Also, while family members imagined certain aspirations for their boys, they more clearly motivated them toward more abstract notions for finding “success,” “having a future,” or “becoming somebody.” These encouragements, which the boys’ interpreted through the lenses of their own unique interests, fueled participants’ drive toward certain future outcomes.

This work’s significance is in its call to expand “readiness” discourses focusing on college and career as separate and the most salient future domains adolescents consider. Instead educational stakeholders must build students’ efficacy in threading the linkages between college, career, and also condition, in ways that complement familial-based supports. Doing so will ensure youth develop more accurate conceptualizations of postsecondary future selves that are responsive to familial influences.

Author

• Roderick L. Carey, University of Delaware