Shifting Identities in Private Education: Reconstructing Race at/in the Cultural Center

Abstract

To date, research on racial identity formation among youth in school context has neglected discussion and analysis of whiteness as a racialized identity production. Through qualitative, ethnographic methods of data collection, this discussion directs attention to the social construction of white racial identity among a group of adolescent girls attending a largely white, historically elite, private, independent, single-sex high school. Their voices provide insight into the ways in which liberal discourses work to position youth, and how white youth, in turn, actively remake themselves in relation to prevailing meanings and practices institutionalized in a largely white, upper-middle-class school setting. The study examines the intersections of race and class discourses in private school culture as they combine to create the conditions for meaning-making.

Peddling Poverty for Profit: Elements of Oppression in Ruby Payne's Framework

“…Scholars have bemoaned the motivations for and effects of paternalistic approaches for addressing a host of social ills, from poverty among people with disabilities (Stapleton, O'Day, Livermore, & Imparato, 2006) to racism (Proweller, 1999) and sexism (Rainford, 2004) to disparities in educational access (Epstein, 1987). In the case of class and poverty, such approaches flow from two interlocking, and often conflictual, attitudes among the socioeconomically privileged.…”

Negotiating Identity in a Bubble: A Critical Race Analysis of African American High School Students' Experiences in an Elite, Independent School

“…Although independent schools are a viable choice for African American students, such school contexts often provide challenges for the racial identity development of African American students. Studies have found that African American students at predominately white, independent schools often experience marginalization, feel unrepresented in NEGOTIATING IDENTITY 27 the school culture, including the curriculum, and feel alienated from their African American peers outside of the independent school context (Ascher, 1986;Cookson & Persell, 1991;Cooper & Datnow, 2000;Datnow & Cooper, 1998;Herr, 1999;Horvat & Antonio, 1999;Proweller, 1999). African American students endure such experiences because they differ from the students that traditionally attend independent schools-middle to higher class white students.…”

Making social justice within educational psychology relevant to preservice teachers

“…Our discussion also leads us to the shifting nature of identity, often dependent upon social contexts (Proweller, 1999). For example, students may see themselves as privileged in one set of contexts, oppressed in another set, and both privileged and oppressed in yet a third set of contexts.…”