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179 “Let me know when you figure everyone around here out, because I’ve lived here my whole life and I still can’t explain it!” said Mr. Kerr as he spotted me in the hallway at Clayton. Such playful chiding became a running joke between Mr. Kerr and me throughout my fieldwork. Other teachers and students were less vocal but still showed awareness of (and some trepidation about) my presence at the school as a researcher. At Woodrow Wilson, the same sentiment emerged: students and teachers assumed I had selected the school because something was wrong with them. For instance, one day when I sat in a math class, Javon asked me what I was doing there. I answered with my standard line: “Writing a book about what life is like for high school kids.” Javon immediately said, without sarcasm, “Oh, like how bad a school this is—like how we’re all ghetto and stuff.” Such assumptions paralleled students’ dour perceptions of their schools’ reputations (see chapter 2). Despite my insistence that I was not there to recycle negative images of the schools, such views affected my access to participants and raised issues of representation in my research. The Research Process As a white, middle-class academic in his mid-thirties, I couldn’t have been more different from most of my participants. On a number of occasions, this became palpably and painfully clear. For example, one day at Woodrow Wilson, I was talking to Ms. Williams while she let the students have some free time on the computers. Wesley and some of his friends started watching an Internet video that another student had posted of himself rapping. The boys laughed hysterically at the student’s song. “He’s tryin’ to act like he all hard!” Wesley exclaimed. Then, to emphasize how little credibility the rapper Appendix Research Methods Process and Representation 180 Appendix had, Wesley pointed to me and said, “That’s like him tryin’ to rap!” The incident vividly underlined the way in which my whiteness, my age, and perhaps my general geekiness was creating social distance between myself and my participants at the school. Although my Clayton participants were white, other issues of distance emerged, especially age and occupational background (as well as geekiness). Although I attempted to narrow the distance, I do not believe I could have ever completely closed those gaps. Because such differences had the potential to affect my access to research participants, I waited until the end of my fieldwork to recruit students for interviews. At that point, I had followed the students through ninth grade into the better part of tenth grade, so I had gotten to know them and they were familiar with me. Our interviews, which appeared to go very well, took place in a private location within each school and were digitally recorded. The shortest were forty-five minutes long; the longest lasted an hour and thirty minutes. Students opened up to me during these dialogues, sometimes in very personal ways. I often found their views and stories interesting, touching, and insightful. This approach highlights a key strength of ethnography: because I had multiple points of contact with my participants over time, my awareness of their worlds grew, as did our familiarity with each other, which allowed me to achieve a deeper view of their social reality. Unfortunately, I had difficulty actually getting students in for the interviews . Following the instructions of my university’s Institutional Review Board, I had to obtain written permission from parents before interviewing any students. I chose to solicit this permission by sending consent forms home with the students I had selected to interview, along with a letter to parents explaining the research and rationale for the interview. However, several students neglected to bring this form home. Only one student said that his parent had refused to sign; the others all lost the forms or just never followed through. In some instances, students may have not wanted to do the interview and were too timid to tell me. In many other cases, students openly asked if they could get out of class for an interview, but I had to explain that I could not do so without a signed parental consent form. My purposive sampling design (see Lofland, Snow, Anderson, and Lofland 2006) necessitated the inclusion of both high- and low-achieving students. Not surprisingly, the low-achieving students were more likely to neglect their forms. Thus, throughout the...

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