"In School I Really Feel American": Complicating "American" Identity-in-Practice in a Rural Southern Elementary School

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-1 - "Othered" Identities in and out of Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper is a study of how 5th grade students come to experience, construct, and understand ‘American’ identity in the context of one rural North Carolina school. North Carolina schools, like many emerging gateway states is experiencing new and changing diversities. The ways in which students across this spectrum of diversity experience, construct and understand ‘American’ identity, their sameness and difference in school significantly influences how students orient their identities in relation to others and institutions. Two main research questions of this paper are: (1) How is a figured world of ‘American’ played out in one classroom’s practices? (2) Overall, What is ‘American’ identity and their relationship to it?

Author

• Matthew Green, University of Louisiana at Lafayette