Lessons from Against the Odds

Abstract

Editor's Note: These three articles draw from Jeremy Price's Against Odds: The Meaning of School and Relationships in Lives of Six Young African-American Men, Vivian G. Morris and Curtis L. Morris's Creating Caring and Nurturing Educational Environments for African American Children, and June Gordon's The Color of Teaching. These books were among finalists for AACTE 2001 Outstanding Writing Award and were particularly relevant to issues of demography and democracy in teacher education, theme of this issue of journal. Education is a right, not a privilege. This stance is increasingly important as we witness an expansion and transformation of social groups within United States. Almost 25% of America's children live below poverty level, and population projections over next century indicate White students will no longer be dominant within public schools. With research suggesting that those who are poor or belong to marginalized ethnic-racial communities oftentimes experience an inferior education compared to many White and middle-class students, challenge of creating a rich and empowering education for all is heightened. The demographic shifts noted above have enormous implications for theory and practice of teaching and teacher education. Developing teacher education programs that foster students' capacities to understand and act in their world and beyond becomes one of central challenges for teacher educators. Part of this challenge requires educators to move beyond universal constructs of various social and cultural groups while recognizing significance of relationships of race, class, and gender to power and privilege in lives and experiences of all students. The challenge is not only one of recognizing experiences of various disenfranchised groups but also recognizing differences in experiences within groups. My book Against Odds: The Meaning of School and Relationships in Lives of Six Young African-American Men (2000) takes up an exploration of such challenge. The book attempts to understand experiences of six African American young men from different social class backgrounds attending four different schools. Rather than trying to universalize their experiences of school, this study provides an opportunity to understand threads that bind and separate their lives through exploring meanings of school experiences, different relationships they forged in and out of school, and their hopes and dreams for life beyond school. My quest to understand lives and experiences of a range of young African American men was, in part, spurred by pervasive and narrow images of the African American man that have been portrayed in media and much research. Such representations have tended to ignore array of African American masculinities that are lived out within and among a variety of sociocultural and geographic contexts. I used ethnographic interview to learn about young men's lives over course of a year. Because of my own social location as a White, middle-class man, I decided to interview young men outside context of school and in contexts of their own choosing. Interviewing them outside of school and having open-ended interviews, however, did not lessen unequal power relations that lay between me and study participants. Our differences in race, class, gender, and age all were at play in research relationships we developed. It is important, then, to note that my interpretations and representations are partial and in no way can be seen as only account of young men's lives. In book, I unravel how six young men developed different meanings of high school diploma, their experiences in classrooms, and their relationships with family members and peers. I argue that these meanings of school and relationships, in large measure, can be explained by examining their differential access to power and privilege, their encounters with inequality, and their interactions with school culture and structures. …