Conceptualizing Assets: Understanding How Students in High-Poverty Neighborhoods Use Locally Available Assets to Pursue Positive Outcomes

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Beyond the Gap: Generating Opportunity in High-Poverty Schools

Abstract

This paper presents a new conceptual framework for exploring how students in high-poverty neighborhoods use locally-available assets to pursue positive educational and wider outcomes. It applies this empirically, reporting how this framework informed research activities (photo-elicitation, a visual assets-mapping exercise, and group discussions) with 225 students attending a high school in a high-poverty neighborhood. Our analysis indicates that students typically value school as an asset in allowing access to qualifications, but often struggle to realize this fully. Outside school, however, they purposefully draw on a wide range of assets to curate alternative positive identities and trajectories. To challenge deficit narratives around students in high-poverty neighborhoods, the divides between their in-school experiences, and use of assets outside school, must be bridged.

Authors

• Claire Forbes, University of Manchester

• Kirstin Kerr, The University of Manchester