Codes and Contradictions
Race, Gender Identity, and Schooling
Publication Year: 2000
Published by: State University of New York Press
Series: SUNY series, Power, Social Identity, and Education
Cover
Frontmatter
Codes and Contradictions: Race, Gender Identity, and Schooling
Contents
Preface
In testimony to the success of Alternative High School (A.HS.) in New York City, Marlissa, once considered a student at risk of not completing high school, graduated in September 1992. Indeed, Alternative High School, a haven for students who have disengaged from traditional schooling, has many similar successes-85 percent of its students graduate ...
1. Introdcution
Above are the voices of young working-class women enrolled in an alternative high school in New York City. This book is about them and their female classmates who made up the entering ninth-grade class at Alternative High School (A.H.S.) in 1988. Since that time, all have entered adulthood, some bearing a high school diploma and entering higher education, ...
2. Social Class, Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Schooling: A Theoretical Overview
In the 1970s, Marxists and structuralist theoreticians began looking at the social and economic structures of society to explain the ways in which schools contributed to the unequal allocation of individuals in society. These theorists (sometimes known as reproduction theorists), examined the processes through which existing social structures maintain ...
3. The Social, Economic, and Educational Status of African American, Latina, and White Women in the United States
Since World War II, the U.S. economy has undergone a structural shift turning from a manufacturing economy to one based on services and technology (Bluestone and Harris, 1982). The impact of this economic transformation, however, is experienced differently throughout society. It had such dramatically adverse effects as structural unemployment, unsettling ...
4. Young White Working-Class Women: Envisioning Their Adult Lives
In this chapter , I examine the ways in which young white working-class women envision their future lives as adults. I particularly attend to the issues of employment, marriage and family as discussed by the girls1 during in-depth interviews. I also explore two areas of the girls' current livesâromance and their participation in domestic laborâand speculate ...
5. Young Women of African American and Puerto Rican Descent: Anticipating Lives as Adult Women
In the previous chapter, we saw how a particular group of young working-class white women largely adhere to a "traditional" working-class femininity emphasizing dependency on male wage earners and discouraging women's participation in the economy. In this chapter, I will recount how a group of seven U.S. Puerto Rican1 and three African ...
6. Young Women of Dominican and South American Descent: Constructing Possibilities for the Future
In this chapter, I will recount how several immigrant Latina girls1 hope to organize their lives as adult women. I focus first on their plans for education, paid work, and family. I then elicit some of the experiences that have shaped their hopes and survey some of the foundations they have established to support these hopes for the future: specifically, the ...
7. Redefining Relationships to Schooling
The purpose of this chapter is to analyze several features of this school's school-based factors that appear to impact on the formation of the girls' identities as outlined in chapters 4, 5, and 6. I examine three aspects of school culture and suggest possible effects on incipient female student identities. ...
8. The Formal Curriculum
In this chapter, I address the formal curriculum at A.H.S. Using Bernstein's (1975) framework of invisible pedagogy, I examine how both the pedagogical relationship, and the curriculum's form and content can produce changes in the way female student identities are constructed and shaped within school. ...
9. The Social Construction of Gender within the School
This chapter explores how the school informally contributes to the formation of gender identity, how its gender code communicates to students "appropriate" ways of being feminine or masculine. These messages of gender appropriateness are often contradictory, as well as unintentional. They are usually conveyed through complex processes in...
10. Conclusions
This book has examined the ways in which thirty young working-class women of African American, Dominican, South American, U.S. Puerto Rican, and white European backgrounds, enrolled in an alternative high school for "at-risk" students, anticipate their future lives as adult women and the role of the school's gender code in shaping those expectations. ...
Postscript
In 1994, I wrote to the principal at Alternative high School to follow up on the girls with whom I had not remained in contact to find out what had happened to them educationally. Of the thirty girls in the study, over one-half (sixteen) graduated from Alternative High School, all of them graduating in 1992. (One young woman of Colombian descent ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780791492871
E-ISBN-10: 0791492877
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791445198
Print-ISBN-10: 0791445194
Page Count: 264
Illustrations: 17 tables
Publication Year: 2000
Series Title: SUNY series, Power, Social Identity, and Education
Series Editor Byline: Lois Weis
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