For much of the course thus far, students have been honing their critical reading skills by working with scholarly articles with a focus on "urban education" (this is my obligatory qualifier about using that contentious and ill-defined term). Many of these articles have overlapped between their classes and the graduate classes, so these are not easy texts for pre-freshman to work with, but the students have not only been parsing the content, but grounding it in their experience and making connections that make the text richer for the grad students in the room. Five years removed from high school, many of the ideas in these articles seem abstract or self-evident, but when recent grads tell you, "Yeah, that's exactly like [Mr./Ms. X]'s classroom. That made things [easier/more difficult] for me, because..." the abstract distinctions become very real.
These personal connections serve us well as outlets of enthusiasm as the students explore potential topics for their research projects. I'm pretty excited for these projects as an introduction to college-level academics; the project makes research an exploration of individual experience, rather than the kind of dry, abstract academia that it too often falls into. The most exciting part, though, is that in the end, these reports will be presented to their respective high schools as feedback to improve the school experience for future students. This is exactly what academia should be about: providing people with the means to look critically at their situations and empowering them to make changes (or at least advocate for changes).
Alright, digression over. Both sessions of YLP this week concluded with pre-freshman and grad students partnering up to develop a research topic the students could be enthusiastic about. One thing I noticed both in my participation and observation periods, was that several students in each section were concerned with the effect stereotypes had within the classroom environment. We discussed stereotypes at some length last week, working with Claude M. Steele's "A Threat in the Air" (1997), which described stereotype threat as a barrier of entry for groups of people (particularly people of color) within academia.
Steele describes how stereotypes make academic spaces less accessible to groups of people by "[making] it more difficult to identify with academic domains" (613). When groups are underrepresented within an academic field, members of that group are more likely to "disidentify" with that discipline (614). Basically, members of underrepresented groups are less likely to view these spaces as ones in which they could succeed. Further, group members are menaced by stereotype threat, which Steele describes as "the event of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs becoming self-relevant" (616). As I mentioned, this model was presented as a barrier to entry, but the students in YLP's experience with stereotypes were a bit different.
The YLP students were the "smart kids" of their high schools. They did well in their classes, they're all going to college, many of them were class officers or held other important positions in school, and they're all in YLP: an intensive summer college bridge program with a pretty competitive application process. These scholars all seem to identify with academic achievement and are pushing themselves toward excellence in school. Consequently, their experiences with stereotypes were a bit different from the stereotype threat barrier Steele describes.
Instead, they described the opposite position: several students expressed frustration at some high school classmates' disengagement with school. The YLP students felt as though many of their classmates who didn't take school as seriously were acting out stereotypes as an alternative path to achievement in school. Towards the end of high school, especially, students felt this tension between these two paths (two identities, really) that ultimately drove them apart from their peers.
This is a component of stereotype threat that never occurred to me. When identification with academic success is portrayed as mutually exclusive with identifying as a young person of color, stereotypes are driven between the students that identify one way or the other. Stereotype becomes a barrier within communities of students of color.
This places an even greater onus on us as educators to be very conscientious of stereotypes in our classrooms. Stereotypes as a barrier to entry into academia is only half the battle for our students: even for those who identify with and achieve academic success must continue to struggle with stereotypes as a perceived tension with their cultural identity. Critically challenging stereotypes in the classroom not only encourages more students to identify with academic success, but helps preserve a greater community within the classroom and school.
***Program name has been changed for privacy reasons.