Making and Molding Identity in Schools: Student Narratives on Race, Gender, and Academic Engagement

Delves into the lives and words of adolescents to examine how they assert their ethnic and racial identities within school settings.

Making and Molding Identity in Schools delves into the lives of adolescents to examine how youths assert ethnic and racial identities in the face of policies, discourses, and practices that work both to reproduce and challenge social categories. Detailed case studies illuminate adolescent voices and perspectives, revealing that identity and academic engagement emanate not just from societal and cultural forces, but also from ordinary, day to day interactions and experiences within school settings. Drawing on contemporary social theory, the author emphasizes the political and relational nature of race and ethnicity, and illustrates the potential for identities and ideologies to vary over time and across school settings. The book provides a needed expansion of theories that link youth identities and ideologies solely to cultural, economic and political forces, and provides insight into settings that allow students to engage without discarding their ethnic and racial selves.

Ann Locke Davidson is Research Associate at the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh. She is coeditor, with Patricia Phelan, of Renegotiating Cultural Diversity in American Schools.