“Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep”: Studying How People Live Culturally

Abstract

We call for the integration of cultural socialization and identity processes in learning as a goal of educational research. Our aim is to improve educational outcomes for racial and ethnic minority youth and for youth facing persistent intergenerational poverty. This requires that educational researchers understand the cultural niches in which young people develop. We illustrate this claim through the lenses of the Cultural Modeling Framework and the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory, using African-American youth as our case model. We demonstrate both the application of the framework and the theory in an educational intervention and posit implications for requirements to carry out such research.