BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO. 1 | 15 82 No.1 CREATING ENVIRONMENTS THAT MATTER: THE ROLE OF CULTURAL CAPITAL AND SOCIAL SUPPORT IN DEVELOPING A POSITIVE ACADEMIC IDENTITY By Renique Kersh, Joseph Flynn, and Ashley Palmer Introduction African Americans have a rich tradition in education and academic success. Enslaved Africans learned to read at the risk of punishment and even death. Luminaries like Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and countless others were trailblazers in emphasizing the education of African Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conversely, the history of African Americans in education has been wrought with challenges. Despite the social significance of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, school desegregation had the unintended outcome of practically erasing the presence of African Americans, within administration as well as in the curriculum.1 Consequently, although African American educational achievements have been made, progress has been painfully slow.2 Historical Framework: Socio-Cultural Impacts of Schooling on African Americans In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,3 also known as The Moynihan Report. The report indicated that there was a growing gap in the quality of life for African Americanscomparedtootherracialgroups.Moynihanimplicatedracismasafactorinthewideninggapofpoorandworking class African American nuclear families and declared that a culture of poverty was cementing within this community. His hypothesis was met with criticism, most notably for its victim blaming.4 Despite valid critiques, The Moynihan Report has gone on to shape the way educators think about and engage African American students in the classroom. Cultural deprivation theorists believed, as James Banks wrote, “Schools must help low-income students to overcome the deficits that result from their early family and community experience.”5 Cultural deprivation gave way to the notion of cultural difference, a theory that low-income and African American students were not seeing academic success because their cultural experiences were neither recognized nor embraced in schools. Cultural difference theorists believed that pedagogies and practices ought to be reformed to embrace the cultural lenses of these students and their communities. Cultural deprivation made a resurgence in the 1990s through the “at-risk” paradigm, which, as it gained popularity, became a broad catch-all for state and federal agencies’ identification of African American students for special education, suspensions, and expulsions. Academic Identity Although education is presumed to level the playing field, the complicated, often deficit-centered experiences many students of color carry impact their perceptions of the educational system and how willing they are to engage in it.6 According to Harper,7 for many African American students, the K-12 journey leads to a constructed understanding and belief of inferiority within academic settings. Academic identity is formed through the internalization of messages and the external engagement and interactions in social and cultural settings that reinforce or negate messages of inferiority and feelings of being an imposter. These socialized beliefs create patterns that can impact students’ academic identities as they enter colleges and universities. 16 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 1 82 No.1 Academic identity relates to a student’s perception of themselves as academically capable. It is associated with a degreeofconfidenceinone’sabilitytoengageinchallenging scholarly pursuits.8 For African American students, managing constant cycles of negative social messages in school, including messages of failure and deficit, can lead to an inferiority complex that spurs underperformance, lowlevel tracking, and aversion to taking risks in the classroom or throughout their educational experiences.9 Colleges and universities often reinforce these deficit concepts by ignoring issues related to campus climates that leave students feeling like they don’t belong.10 Imposter Syndrome The imposter phenomenon often impacts high-achieving students, women, and underrepresented students, and results in a student’s perception that they don’t belong in an academic setting.11 College students who experience this phenomenon are subject to anxiety and an increased sense of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and fear of failure.12 For African American students, these sociopsychological factors may impact their willingness to fully engage in educationally purposeful activities, which involve highly intellectual discourse and may be a relevant deterrent to gaps in achievement.13 Social Support Initiativesthatprovidesocialsupportstounderrepresented students as they enter college have proven...
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Oct 25, 2024
Yihan Zhang + 2
Open Access
