"In a Position I See Myself In:" Young Men of Color (Re)Negotiating Educational Identities
Item
-
Title
-
"In a Position I See Myself In:" Young Men of Color (Re)Negotiating Educational Identities
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:c6807d68e482:12017
-
identifier
-
12721
-
Creator
-
Golden, Noah Asher,
-
Contributor
-
Wendy Luttrell
-
Date
-
2013
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Ethnic studies | Secondary education | Social research | critical socio-cultural literacy | culture and learning | literacy and identity | literacy as social practice | young men of color
-
Abstract
-
Challenging deficit framings of young men of color in educational research, this dissertation seeks to build knowledge on how a group of young men of color in a second-chance secondary level program understand the ways in which they are positioned in and out of spaces of formal education. Specifically, this work seeks to answer the following questions: How do young men of color understand the ways in which they are represented in educational and life-outcome disparity discourse? How do these young men renegotiate and resist these namings? In exploring these questions, this dissertation offers analysis of both the young men's understandings of how they are positioned and documents strategies and cultural tools that the young men draw on when working to reposition themselves. These strategies and cultural tools have implications for a learning process dedicated to educational and life-outcome equity.;The ways in which the `crisis' of young men of color in formal education and life-outcomes is framed is both a consequence of and has consequence for understandings of learning, particularly within the field of literacy. Exploring the ways in which framings of the `crisis' enable and engender both conceptions of literacy and a range of potential solutions, this work argues for a critical socio-cultural approach to literacy education that begins with a radical listening-with. A literacy education that begins with a radical listening-with has the potential to support sites of solidarity for learners who have historically been minoritized, and to make identity-negotiations central to understandings of what it means to be literate.;The young men in this study are learners in the GED Connect program, a secondary-level educational alternative run by the New York City Department of Education, one of the centers of large-scale neoliberal education reform. These young men participated in an after-school Men's Group of which the primary functions were to create a network of support and engage in a concurrent [alongside the dissertation research project] Youth Participatory Action Research project. Data consist of the young men's narratives that were collected during select Men's Group sessions, and narrative analysis was employed to analyze the structures, themes, and positioning/repositioning practices present in the young men's narratives. Findings suggest that the young men are very much aware of the ways in which they are negatively positioned in discourses in and out of school, and that group identity has been tarnished in ways that diminish space for solidarity and encourage understandings of life-outcomes based on individual merit. In attempting to refuse undesirable positions, the young men draw on a variety of cultural tools and resources to reposition themselves when confronted with prevalent negative discourses on what it means to be a young man of color.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Urban Education
