Identity Traps or How Black Students Fail.the Interactions between Biographical, Sub-Cultural, and Learner IdentitiesAuthor(s):

Identity Traps or How Black Students Fail.the Interactions between Biographical, Sub-Cultural, and Learner IdentitiesAuthor(s):

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Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: The Interactions between Biographical, Sub-Cultural, and Learner IdentitiesAuthor(s): Deborah YoudellSource: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 3-20Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3593301Accessed: 13-02-2020 10:53 UTCJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a widerange of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity andfacilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available athttps://about.jstor.org/termsTaylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toBritish Journal of Sociology of EducationThis content downloaded from 45.141.153.226 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 10:53:07 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2003 *P s Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: the interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities DEBORAH YOUDELL, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identfed as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered by earlier school ethnographies while deploying and developing a new theoretical framework. This framework suggests that the discursive practices of students and teachers contribute to the performative constitution of intelligible selves and others. Drawing on this framework, the paper demonstrates how African-Caribbean race and sub-cultural identities, and further intersecting biographical identities including gender and sexuality, are deployed within organisational discourse as evidence of these students’ undesirable learner identities. Introduction This paper is concerned with understanding the continued inequities of school experi- ences and outcome experienced by African-Caribbean students. In developing this understanding, the paper explores the performative constitution of identity constellations inside schools, showing the complex interactions between multiple identities within shifting discursive frames. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates how the privilege associated with African-Caribbean identities within student subcultures is recouped and deployed within organisational discourse as ‘evidence’ of these students’ undesirable, or even intolerable, identities as learners. As such, the analysis adds to understandings of the processes of institutional racism inside schools. The experiences of African-Caribbean students in UK schools have been the subject of research for some years. Recent reviews of research undertaken in the UK in the last two decades showed that African-Caribbean students attain persistently lower outcomes at age 16 than their White classmates; that the gaps between African-Caribbean and White students have grown; and that African-Caribbean students are significantly more ISSN 0142-5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/03/010003-18 ? 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0142569032000043579This content downloaded from 45.141.153.226 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 10:53:07 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

4 D. Youdell likely to be excluded (suspended or expelled) from school than White students (Gillborn & Gipps, 1996; Gillborn & Mirza, 2000). During the period covered by these reviews, scholars have been concerned to better understand the processes involved in producing these outcomes. Such research has sought to resist prevailing ‘deficit’ notions of African-Caribbean students, their families and communities. Instead, attempts have been made to understand experiences of schooling from the perspective of African-Caribbean students and develop new explanations for African-Caribbean students’ disproportion- ately low educational outcomes. Additive understandings of the subordination of particular social groups were a key feature of this research during the 1980s. For instance, Fuller’s (1984) research was predicated on the understanding that African-Caribbean girls would be ‘doubly subordi- nated’ along axes of gender and ethnicity. Similarly, Mac an Ghaill (1988) used an additive notion of ‘triple subordination’-along axes of race, class and gender. At the time of Fuller’s (1984) and Mac an Ghaill’s (1988) research, as now, African-Caribbean girls tended to fare better in school than African-Caribbean boys- outcomes which are contrary to the notion of double or triple subordination. While at the time neither Fuller (1984) nor Mac an Ghaill (1988) fundamentally questioned the additive model itself, both offered partial explanations for this apparent lack of fit. In trying to make sense of this apparent contradiction, Fuller (1984) made an important contribution to understandings of African-Caribbean students’ school experiences. She suggested that African-Caribbean girls were simultaneously pro-education and anti- school, a position that she saw as being ‘intimately connected with their positive identity as black and female’ (Fuller, 1984, p. 84). Mac an Ghaill (1988) developed this notion to explain why triple subordination could be ‘only partially successful’ (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 19) and show how African-Caribbean girls’ ‘strategies of institutional survival’ (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 11) could be understood as ‘resistance within accommodation’ (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 9). While African-Caribbean girls’ resistances were seen to be located within an accom- modation of schooling, African-Caribbean boys were seen to resist ‘institutional incorpo- ration’ (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 110) and create ‘anti-school male sub-cultures’ (1988, p. 9). These subcultures rejected ‘Englishness’ and foregrounded African-Caribbean identities, thereby offering ‘collective protection and survival’ (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 102). While early research identified the significance of teachers’ practices (Driver, 1977), more recently theorisations of institutional racism have been crucial to advancing understandings of African-Caribbean students’ school experiences. Mac an Ghaill’s (1988) study was framed by the understanding that: racism operates both through the existing institutional framework that discrim- inates against all working class youth and through ‘race’-specific mechanisms, such as the system of racist stereotyping, which are also gender-specific. There may be no conscious attempt to treat black youth in a different way to white youth, but the unintended teacher effects result in differential responses, which work against black youth. (Mac an Ghaill, 1988, p. 34). Gillborn’s (1990) study was underpinned by such an understanding of institutional racism. Gillborn argued that the school context was framed by teachers’ formal and informal constructions of an ‘”ideal client”‘ (Gillborn, 1990, p. 26 after Becker, 1970), incorporating classed, gendered, and raced notions of ‘appropriate pupil behaviour’This content downloaded from 45.141.153.226 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 10:53:07 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Identif, Traps or How Black Students Fail 5 (Gillborn, 1990, p. 25). This ideal client of schooling was seen to have particular implications for African-Caribbean boys. Gillborn (1990) argued that teachers’ interpretations of and responses to the behaviours of African-Caribbean boys sustained a ‘myth of an Afro-Caribbean challenge to authority’ (Gillborn, 1990, p. 19, emphasis in original as title). This could be seen in relation to culturally specific behaviours as well as those that were common across student groups. For instance, Gillborn suggested that a particular way of walking common amongst African-Caribbean boys in the school was a cultural practice interpreted by the school as a challenge to authority. As such, it became a racialised site for institutional disciplinary practices and African-Caribbean boys’ contestation of this. Gillborn asserted that: in the day-to-day life of the school almost any display of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity was deemed inappropriate and was controlled, either officially (in the case of non-uniform dress) or informally (in the case of speech or the style of walking noted above). (Gillborn, 1990, p. 29) This is not to suggest that African-Caribbean boys’ contestations were unmediated. Gillborn (1990) stressed that African-Caribbean boys’ adaptations to schooling included a multitude of practices of resistance and accommodation which had varied and shifting meanings and functions. Nor is this to suggest intentional racism on the part of teachers. Gillborn (1995) described institutional racism inside schools as ‘a dynamic and complex facet of school life … in which routine institutional procedures and teachers’ expectations may be deeply implicated’ (Gillborn, 1995, p. 36). Nevertheless, Gillborn’s understanding of racism as institutional does not render teachers inactive in its continuation. Rather, Gillborn argued that ‘teachers play an active (although usually unintentional) role in the processes that structure the educational opportunities of minority students’ (Gillborn, 1995, p. 42). Research by Gillborn and Youdell (2000) reiterated the importance of understandings of institutional racism in analyses of African-Caribbean students’ school experiences and outcomes. This study showed how institutional discourses of ability and race coalesced to exclude African-Caribbean students from educational opportunities rationed through practices of ‘educational triage’ (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000, p. 133). The notion of institutional racism, then, offers important insights into how African- Caribbean students can attend schools which appear to have developed and be implementing equal opportunities policies and still be significantly more likely to be excluded (suspended or expelled) and less likely to attain benchmark educational outcomes than their counterparts from other racial or ethnic groups. This paper takes up the notion of institutional racism, understood to be cited and inscribed through multiple discursive frames, and deploys this alongside particular post-structural understandings of the discursive constitution of identities. The possibilities offered to understandings of race and ethnic identity by post-structural theories have begun to be developed and some significant insights have been offered (see Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Zack, 1997; Jacobson, 1998; Miron, 1999). Nevertheless, these more nuanced understandings of the constitution of race and ethnic identities have not been taken up broadly in educational research. This paper aims to make a further contribution to understandings of how the minutia of everyday life in schools constitutes African- Caribbean students as undesirable learners. The evidence presented in the remainder of this paper offers a detailed account of the ‘identity traps’ which go some way to explaining ‘how Black students fail’.This content downloaded from 45.141.153.226 on Thu, 13 Feb 2020 10:53:07 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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