‘A space for you to be who you are’: an ethnographic portrait of reterritorializing Indigenous student identities

2020 ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Vanessa Anthony-Stevens ◽  
Philip Stevens
Author(s):  
Beth Hatt

The legacy of the social construction of race, class, and gender within the social construction of smartness and identity in US schools are synthesized utilizing meta-ethnography. The study examines ethnographies of smartness and identity while also exploring what meta-ethnography has to offer for qualitative research. The analyses demonstrate that race, class, and gender are key factors in how student identities of ability or smartness are constructed within schools. The meta-ethnography reveals a better understanding of the daily, sociocultural processes in schools that contribute to the denial of competence to students across race, class, and gender. Major themes include epistemologies of schooling, learning as the production of identity, and teacher power in shaping student identities. The results are significant in that new insights are revealed into how gender, class, and racial identities develop within the daily practices of classrooms about notions of ability.


2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhonda Oliver ◽  
Ellen Grote ◽  
Judith Rochecouste ◽  
Tomzarni Dann

Aboriginal Australians are entering university in greater numbers than in past decades, yet many struggle to complete their degrees. This paper reports on the qualitative component of a research project aimed at enhancing understandings about this issue by investigating student perspectives about those structures that facilitate or impede their retention. Interview and survey data were gathered from 57 participants at one university and analysed for emerging themes. The findings demonstrate a diverse Indigenous student population in terms of age; comprised personal, professional and university networks; institutional services and resources; and the students’ personal qualities and study practices. Factors perceived to obstruct retention included: a lack of support from some teaching staff, schools and faculties; financial insecurity; and often interrelated issues surrounding university workload, jobs, health, as well as family and community responsibilities. These findings are discussed in the light of relevant literature and recommendations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ena Lee

While the commodification of English as a global language may give rise to varying degrees of political and economic benefits for language learners, a simultaneous “cost” of this return may be a continued perpetuation of various forms of hegemony. In this vein, this one-year case study investigated a Canadian post-secondary English as a Second Language (ESL) program that analyzed the interconnections between language and culture through a critical dialogic approach. Classroom observations, however, revealed that disjunctions existed between the pedagogy as it was conceptualized and the practices of the instructors teaching there and suggested that the “critical” discourses mediated within the language classrooms essentialized culture and, subsequently, the identities of the students. This paper presents the voices of students from Mainland China as they attempted to negotiate their local and global identities within the larger sociopolitical contexts of the English language, generally, and English language education, in particular. I argue that classroom discourses can (re)create subordinate student identities, thereby limiting their access not only to language-learning opportunities, but to other more powerful identities. This paper thus highlights how ESL pedagogies and practices might address and contest hegemonic discourses and concomitantly reimagine student identities in more emancipatory ways.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Faishal Zakaria

This brief article discusses the notion of Identity Construction through everyday talk among interlocutors. In particular, this article discusses how I construct and co-construct my identities as a graduate student as I communicate with others. The re-search data used in this article was analysed through the framework of expert-novice constitution, co-construction, and legitimate peripheral participation. The data show their relevance to the notions of expert-novice, co-construction, and legitimate peripheral participation where the interlocutors are actively negotiating their identities as they try to claim their right to speak.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Khalifa

AbstractLadson-Billings, Gay and among others have demonstrated the strong need for educational curriculum and practice to respond to the specific academic, cultural, and social needs of culturally unique, minoritized students. This article focuses on culturally responsive leadership practices for students with Hip-Hop identity performatives. This research uses theoretical frameworks from culturally relevant pedagogies and the scholarship that addresses how young students negotiate, perform, and reinvent and reestablish themselves through Hip-Hop culture, literacy, and identity. Such scholarship situates Hip-Hop pedagogies and student identity. This 2-year ethnographic study of an alternative school reports on how a culturally responsive school leader recognized and validated Hip-Hop student identities. Though he was somewhat removed from the Hip-Hop performative himself, the principal was able to create a safe space in which these student identities were able to exist, and in doing so, prevent the visceral impulse toward marginalization and exclusionary practice of Black and Latino Hip-Hop students that so many of his teachers possessed. Thus, the study discusses leadership theory, as it answers the following research question: How can urban school leaders play a role in forging a space for Hip-Hop identity development in the schools they lead? Secondarily it asks – given the tensions and contestations in representations of Hip-Hop music – if they should actually do this, and if so, what are the characteristics of such leadership?


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