Reconceptualizing College Knowledge: Class, Race, and Black Students in a College-Counseling Field

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072110460
Author(s):  
Melanie Jones Gast

Past work and college–access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college–aspiring working- and middle–class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their post–high school updates. Respondents were exposed to college–going messages but faced racial constraints and unclear expectations for college preparation and help seeking. Working-class respondents drew on hopeful uncertainty—a repertoire of hope for college admissions but uncertainty in the specifics—and they waited for assistance. Twelfth-grade working–class respondents experienced the effects of counseling problems and frustrations near application time. Middle-class and some working–class respondents used a repertoire of competitive groundwork to improve their competitiveness for four–year admissions, targeting their help seeking to navigate impending deadlines and late–stage counseling problems. My findings point to the timing and process of activating repertoires of college knowledge within a high school counseling field, suggesting the need to reconceptualize college knowledge in research on racial and class inequality in college access.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 2156759X2092742
Author(s):  
Virginia Snodgrass Rangel ◽  
Tracy A. Ballysingh

This article contributes to our understanding of the gap in college access by examining (a) the extent to which and (b) how high school counseling focused on college broadens access. We extend Engberg and Gilbert’s typology of schools based on high school counseling norms and resources. Using recent data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we identified three types of schools: norm-driven, resource-rich, and divergent.


2011 ◽  
Vol 76 (6) ◽  
pp. 862-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McCrory Calarco

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.


2020 ◽  
pp. 004208592093485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian H. Huerta ◽  
Patricia M. McDonough ◽  
Kristan M. Venegas ◽  
Walter R. Allen

Research shows that gang-associated youth are less likely to complete high school and earn a postsecondary educational credential. However, scholars have not determined “why” gang youth do not persist into higher education. This ethnographic study aims to focus on the narratives of 13 Latino high school young men to understand what college knowledge they possess. We found the students have aspirations to pursue postsecondary education degrees or credentials; however, they receive minimal information and support from school personnel to build the needed college-going behaviors and information to plan and prepare for higher education.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-45
Author(s):  
Gorana Ilic ◽  
James E. Rosenbaum

While many high schools reproduce social inequalities in college access, little is known about the schools that successfully reduce them. To this end, Gorana Ilic and James E. Rosenbaum studied an urban high school that expressed a strong commitment to supporting all students’ college applications. In this article, they describe the organizational conditions and supports that enabled the school’s counselors to achieve ambitious college-enrollment rates, and they consider what sacrifices and challenges might have emerged in the process and ways to address these challenges.


2016 ◽  
pp. 004208591665217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Jones Gast

How do educators reconcile the growing college-for-all norm—the notion that all students should pursue college—with the diverse needs of students in urban settings? What is the impact on Black students across social-class background? Using interviews and fieldwork with teachers, counselors, and diverse Black students in a large Californian high school, I examine college-counseling norms under a social capital framework. With high caseloads, I find that educators support mass outreach and vague encouragements for 4-year colleges. Ultimately, my findings problematize one-size-fits-all counseling norms and highlight the need for more targeted counseling for urban and working-class Black students.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1_part_3) ◽  
pp. 2156759X2110118
Author(s):  
Timothy A. Poynton ◽  
Richard T. Lapan ◽  
Sophie W. Schuyler

This study examined inequalities in college knowledge across the high school years. Twelfth graders had significantly more college knowledge than ninth and 10th graders. Although college knowledge increased during high school among both first- and continuing-generation college-going students, we found significant between-group differences. Continuing-generation students had significantly more college knowledge than first-generation students, and the gap between groups widened across the high school years. School counselors are uniquely positioned within the K–12 education system to address inequalities such as the college knowledge gap through their roles as educators and leaders.


1971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary G. Green ◽  
Brian F. Blake ◽  
John J. Carboy ◽  
Robert J. Zenhausern

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.


2010 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-19
Author(s):  
Shelly Sheats Harkness ◽  
Iris DeLoach Johnson ◽  
Billy Hensley ◽  
James A. Stallworth

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