Experts and Learners: Small-Group Instruction and Academic Ability in a Diversifying Middle School

• In Event: Racialized and Gendered Constructions of Ability and Behavior

Abstract

Objectives

Examinations of racially diverse schools frequently highlight the ways in which tracking can contribute to, or detracking reforms can mitigate, the reproduction of racialized disparities in academic outcomes (Lewis & Diamond, 2015b; Oakes, 2005; Rubin, 2010; Rubin & Noguera, 2004; Tyson, 2011). However, this research often leaves unexamined the organizing role that notions of academic ability – or “smartness” – play, even in untracked schools. In fact, instructional practices designed for heterogeneous classrooms frequently reinforce the assumption that students can be sorted into high, middle, or low learners (Abu El-Haj, 2006; Abu El-Haj & Rubin, 2009). In this study, I examine student interactions during small group instruction at an untracked, diversifying middle school in New York City. I explore how students position themselves and their peers as “smart” or “not smart” during cooperative, small-group instruction.

Theoretical Framework

Like race, ability is a relational system; both whiteness and smartness rely upon the “denigrated other” in order to award value, merit, and capital to a privileged group at the “normative center of schools” (Broderick & Leonardo, 2011, p. 2208). Educators’ understandings of academic ability are frequently grounded in racialized assumptions about the “culture of poverty” (Artiles & Kozleski, 2010; Lipman, 2009). However, students also play active roles in constructions of academic ability. During their everyday experiences with their teachers and peers in classrooms, kids perform (or attempt to perform) their academic abilities (Goffman, 1959; Youdell, 2006). Over the course of the school year, these interactive performances solidify academic reputations, teaching students where they and their peers belong within the relational and racialized world of the classroom (Rubin, 2003; Wortham, 2004).

Data and Methods

I use a situated perspective on learning (Lave, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991) to explore how students utilize the construct of academic ability to make sense of their places within the school and classroom social order. I draw on a year of participant-observation and interviews with one focal sixth-grade cohort at a diversifying middle school with a social justice mission.

Findings

Sixth-graders positioned themselves and their peers both socially and academically in cooperative learning activities. In small-group interactions, kids played the role of either experts or learners, leaders or followers, assets or liabilities, haves or have nots. As they negotiated their roles, tasks, and relationships, kids simultaneously leveraged and generated the symbolic capital of smartness (Lewis, Diamond, & Forman, 2015b; O’Connor, Lewis, & Mueller, 2007). While the resulting moments of inclusion and exclusion may have appeared to be race-neutral, this was rarely the case. In the context of other racialized school practices, small group interactions constituted a key component of a hidden curriculum about academic ability (Hatt, 2016; Jackson, 1968; Khan, 2011).

Significance

These findings raise important questions for both practitioners and researchers seeking to interrogate and disrupt racialized disparities in educational outcomes. Even in untracked classrooms, widespread associations between whiteness and smartness persisted. Despite changes to the grammar of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994), students continued to situate themselves and their peers within academic and racial hierarchies.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut