Search

We explore how Black and Latino/a students from economically marginalized communities drew upon dominant capitals accrued by virtue of attendance at elite secondary schools in conjunction with non-dominant family and community capitals to chart their postsecondary lives through college and beyond. In so doing, we point to affordances offered by the authors' longitudinal qualitative research investigation, as we work to understand individual and collective class and race positioning practices and outcomes post high school.

The purpose of this article is to bring attention to the illustrative power and capacity of qualitative longitudinal research within the context of the urban educational "reform churn." In this article, we draw upon longitudinal ethnographic data collected over 3 years in four low-performing, urban secondary schools in Buffalo, New York, to illuminate the power of the methodology behind our findings. Our research provides an example of the ways in which qualitative longitudinal research can reveal the temporal mechanisms of stabilization and destabilization that develop within urban schools and districts in and through time.

People who read become absorbed in a process of discovery about the world around them; books open doors to otherwise inaccessible places and introduce readers to profound new ideas. Approximately 15 seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade members of the StreetSquash Book Club in Harlem meet on Friday afternoons to read, write, and discuss topics inspired by their reading. The StreetSquash Book Club, which is described in this article, encourages young people to become active, engaged citizens by means of thematic units that use young adult novels as entry points for discussion, games, community interaction, and civil activism. The multifaceted and engaging approach of the StreetSquash Book Club not only instills a love of reading and writing in students but also pushes them to comprehend and employ the awesome powers they possess as citizens of a democracy. This article will explore two of the book club's thematic units: the civil rights movement and the presidential election of 2004. The club focused on the civil rights movement for five weeks during the spring of 2004, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of "Brown vs. the Board of Education". The club investigated the presidential election for six weeks during the campaign season of Fall 2004.

In this article, we examine the manifestation and consequences of shadow capital within two public, urban, nonselective, college preparatory-designated high schools serving exclusively nondominant students. Informed by three years of ethnographic data, we argue that the transference of a historically elite college preparatory education from dominant institutions to nondominant schools results in fundamental changes to the dominant capital it is expected to yield. Rather than generating highly valued capital within the field of education, it produces what we call "shadow capital." As a distinct form of cultural capital, shadow capital outwardly resembles yet contains only traces of dominant cultural capital, thus failing to yield the same kind of exchange value in the postsecondary marketplace. Shadow capital offers explanatory power for the many unmet promises of educational reform and further challenges the often well-intended democratizing forces that paradoxically reinforce inequality in education.

In this article, we present findings from a three-year comparative longitudinal and ethnographic study of how schools in two cities, Buffalo and Denver, have taken up STEM education reform, including the idea of "inclusive STEM-focused schools," to address weaknesses in urban high schools with majority low-income and minority students. Although introduced with great fanfare, the data indicate that well-meaning efforts toward expanding opportunities in STEM-focused schools for low-income underrepresented minorities quickly dissolved. We focus on mechanisms that seem to underlie this dissolution and consider its contributions to short- and long-term inequalities.

In response to numerous calls for more rigorous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to improve US competitiveness and the job prospects of next-generation workers, especially those from low-income and minority groups, a growing number of schools emphasizing STEM have been established in the US over the past decade. However, existing STEM schools vary substantially in the way they are organized, the students they attract, and the outcomes they advertise, and there have been few empirical studies of their effectiveness. This comparative case study examines the opportunity structures for STEM at eight public high schools, four in Denver, Colorado, and four in Buffalo, New York. All of the schools were "inclusive" (no admission requirements) and served predominantly low-income and majority minority students. All but one school had been designated "low-performing" for failure to meet federal accountability requirements. In each city, two of the study schools had recently been re-organized to be "STEM-focused" in some way, and two were traditional, comprehensive high schools. We found that the STEM-focused schools were launched with much enthusiasm and high expectations. In both cities, STEM-focused schools achieved some modest success initially but were unable to maintain their gains. Overall among the schools in this study, the STEM-focused high schools did little to improve STEM opportunities compared to the comprehensive high schools. We do not mean to suggest that STEM schools are a bad idea, but that claims and expectations for them must be examined in the context of their implementation, and STEM schools for low-income and minority students are unlikely to be successful without more attention to systemic issues in urban education.

Many scholars are enthusiastic about the potential learning opportunities present in the sandbox-style gaming environment, Minecraft. In the following case study, the authors explored the use of Minecraft in a high school literature class and the presentation of characterization and plot in three student-made machinima, or films made in the game world. The authors demonstrate that Minecraft offers a unique opportunity for students to display their creativity and understanding of concepts in ways that are more feasible than if they were attempted in the "real" world. It is also relevant to point out that the epistemology associated Minecraft is constructionist in its nature, which implicates a different style of instruction than is typically employed in the U.S. classroom. The authors pose some questions about the diffusion of games like Minecraft in the future, based on their discussion of similar technologies in the past.

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit "class work" of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the notion that class position must now be "won" at both the individual and collective level, rather than constituting the "manner to which one is born," the authors track and theorize intensified preparation for and application to particular kinds of post-secondary destinations in an increasingly segmented national and international marketplace for higher education. Although the US media have taken note of such "application frenzy," little scholarly work tracks and theorizes this "frenzy" as a distinctly "class process," one that represents intensified "class work" at one and the same time as class "winners" and "losers" become ever more apparent in the larger global arena.

Though researcher dilemmas are not new to the pages of "Qualitative Inquiry," we argue that the current contemporary context has both altered and intensified issues associated with conducting qualitative research within sites most affected by more recent social, political, and economic shift. Navigating such sites as researchers poses new questions and new "speed bumps," going well beyond those highlighted by Weis and Fine more than ten years ago. In this article, the authors revisit and extend the work by Weis and Fine using a set of informed reflections on engaging ethnographic research inside an iconic and beleaguered, large Northeastern, urban school district, a context that, we argue, establishes an increased range of new and largely unanticipated "speed bumps." (Contains 9 notes.)