The Postsecondary Future Selves of Black and Latino Boys: Broadening What College-Going Schools Can Do

• In Event: Confronting Injustices in an Era of Adapted Racism to Construct College Choice and Transitions for Black and Latina/o/x Students

Abstract

Objectives
In response to AERA President Tyrone Howard’s call for researchers to simultaneously dismantle “racial injustice” and construct “educational possibilities across P-20 systems”, needed are more concerted efforts by educational practitioners at widening postsecondary educational pathways for racially and ethnically marginalized youth. Few groups face more pervasive societal inequities than Black and Latino adolescent boys, leaving them deserving of more precise school supports to determine and actualize postsecondary pathways. To gain insights into how such students conceptualize their futures, and their school’s role in facilitating this process, this presentation features findings from an ethnographic study of an urban school’s college-going culture and its impact on shaping what the author calls participants’ “postsecondary future selves.” Implications suggest that college-going school practitioners widen supports so students can imagine and envision how college ambitions align with career and condition goals.
Perspectives or theoretical framework
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). Mindful of adolescents’ need for “aligned ambitions” and the racial realities shaping Black and Latino boys’ social and school lives, I advance and utilize a theoretical framework I built from developmental psychology, called “postsecondary future selves,” which draws from “future orientation” (Nurmi 1991, 2005) and “possible selves” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). This theoretical approach encompasses three of domains of Black and Latino/x youths’ aspirations: “college” (i.e., postsecondary education); “career” (i.e., post-college employment trajectory); and “condition” (i.e., expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy).
Data Sources/Methods
I draw from ethnographic case study data captured during nearly an entire school year (eight months) at one U.S. college-preparatory public charter school in an urban Mid-Atlantic context. I investigated how this school’s college-going culture influenced the postsecondary futures selves of five adolescent, 11th grade Black (three) and Latino (two) boys. This paper features participants’ voices collected after IRB approval, during semi-structured interviews (4 interviews each), one focus group, and participant observations. Deductive and inductive coding occurred to determine where participants’ elements of participants’ postsecondary future selves overlapped with school-based influences.
Findings
Three themes emerged, underscored by a critique of the school’s myopic “college-going” foci that failed to help youth align college-going with other life ambitions. Participants interpreted the school’s “college over everything” belief system positively, but also negatively. By narrowly focusing on college, educators forfeited their ability to provide equitable supports so that students envisioned postsecondary future selves on their own terms. Secondly, while college was the focal point, participants were mostly unclear on how college aligned with other areas of their lives (e.g., college for what?) Lastly, Metro missed key opportunities to help participants crystalize their envisioned condition goals.
Significance
This work seeks to expand college-going discourses, common in urban schools, by urging stakeholders must help build racially marginalized students’ efficacy in threading the linkages between college, career, and condition. Doing so will ensure youth develop more accurate conceptualizations of postsecondary future selves that are more developmentally attuned.

Author

• Roderick L. Carey, University of Delaware