Living The Dream: How Enrichment Program Minority Students Negotiate Ethnicity and Conceptualize Class at Elite Educational Institutions

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: This study examines how minority students from an enrichment program based in New York City negotiate race and conceptualize social class at elite private schools. Eleven students who have graduated from the program were extensively interviewed about their experiences in high school and college. The major finding of this study is that students who appear to be assimilated into white mainstream middle class culture tended to emphasize the “social construction” and cultural constituents of class more than students who straddled both white and minority cultures, as they emphasized the income element in class. Their interviews reveal that the “mainstreamers” tended to describe the development of their individuality at school, whereas the straddlers were more prone to focus on social structures of inequality, especially in relation to interpersonal racial conflicts at their elite school. This trend was not apparent in the two mainstreamers who expressed socialist or socialist-leaning viewpoints, as they focused on social structures of inequality, much like the straddlers. The single student in this study who chooses not to embrace or perform white mainstream culture in virtually any setting expressed a strongly developed race consciousness while reflecting little or no class consciousness.

Type of resource	text
Date created	2012-05

Related Publication	Carter, P. L. (2005). Keepin' it real : school success beyond black and white. New York: Oxford University Press.
Related Publication	MacLeod, J. (2009). Ain't no makin' it : aspirations & attainment in a low-income neighborhood. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Related Publication	Willis, P. E. (1981). Learning to labor : how working class kids get working class jobs. Morningside ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/mk370ks6536

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Preferred Citation: Kossally, Najja (2012). Living The Dream: How Enrichment Program Minority Students Negotiate Ethnicity and Conceptualize Class at Elite Educational Institutions. Stanford University, Stanford CA.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education

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