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Towards an Understanding of Race and Academic Achievement in the Lives of African American Students
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Grech, Mary E. |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude to the many individuals who have inspired and supported me throughout this research process and my time on campus. Thank you for shaping my reality and helping me grow. The purpose of this honors thesis was to explore the nature of African American student experiences with race and education. More specifically, I sought to explore the role of racial identity in these experiences, whether academic achievement was ever associated with being White or " acting White, " and if these potential associations affected student attitudes, decisions, or behaviors. To study this topic, I started by reviewing relevant literature, including public discourse related to Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu's notion of the " burden of 'acting White'. " Their theory posited that in some situations, Black students would avoid engaging in certain behaviors, often which were necessary for academic success, because they were labeled as " White. " Their work spurred much discussion about the role of race in African American students' experiences, especially in regards to influences from parents, peers, and teachers, in addition to debates about the most appropriate theories and methodologies to use when studying minority educational experiences. I chose to employ social constructivist theory, which approaches research by focusing on the process of creating and assigning meaning to one's subjective reality, and phenomenological research methods. These methods included interviewing fourteen undergraduates of African descent about their lived experience with the phenomenon of race in educational settings. Questions were designed to be semi-structured and open-ended to allow the participants' responses and my relevant inquiries to guide the conversation, rather than testing for a specific theory or pattern. As the primary researcher, I became interested in this topic as the result of my work as a tutor and mentor for low-income, predominantly African American students in a small, southern town where I attended college. Because of these experiences, I developed a passion for education inequality and my coursework steered increasingly towards related Anthropology, Community Studies, Sociology, Africana Studies, and Education classes. A concept that recurringly emerged from my service work and academic pursuits was the necessity and importance of cultural competence when working with other community members or students. I recognized that the extent of my interactions with African American students and peers and my understandings of their experiences with culture, education, and society were limited because of the predominantly White educational institutions I attended … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=honorstheses&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=honorstheses |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://publish.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=honorstheses |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
