AN EXAMINATION OF COMMUNITY CULTURAL WEALTH IN THE SUCCESS OF BLACK HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

Dominant education ideology focuses on the numerous challenges encountered by low-income Black youth in urban education settings. Although much of the research seeks to highlight structural challenges faced by these students, the general interpretation of these studies may reinforce the popular belief that academic underperformance by low-income Black students is the result of family structure and maladaptive familial behaviors. The implications of this ideology is that these family characteristics foster low achievement because students enter schools without normative skills and knowledge, in addition to adhering to beliefs that do not value education (Ogbu & Simmons, 1998). Some research argues that low-income Black students that demonstrate success in schools do so because they have adopted White middle-class normative capital (Hubbard, 1999). Yosso (2005) argues that the analysis of student narratives of success through the lens of Critical Race Theory offers a critique of deficit theorizing and shifts the perspective away from White middle-class culture to the cultural capital of minority communities. Yosso posits that low-income minority communities have cultural capital that is not widely recognized in research that she describes as community cultural wealth. This qualitative study explored if community-derived “capital” is utilized by high-achieving, low-income Black high school students in order to succeed academically in educational institutions. This inquiry privileged the narratives of high-achieving Black students from disadvantaged communities in order to understand the factors that contribute to their academic success, from their perspectives. Seven high achieving Black high school students from Philadelphia who were enrolled in a college access mentoring program were chosen for this study. Interviews and observations were conducted to allow the researcher to examine the experiences of study participants in a naturalistic setting while engaging with their life histories through narrative. Participants were selected and observed once a week at their mentor site, in addition to participating in three rounds of interviews during spring/summer 2015. Two of the seven participants were also observed in their high schools. Student-participants engaged in three rounds of interviews that focused on family background and dynamics, educational experiences, and aspirations. Additionally, one mentor for each student-participant was interviewed. This examination of community cultural wealth found that aspirational, familial, and navigational capital are vital in the academic success of the participants in this study. Linguistic capital and social capital only moderately apply to rationalizations for their high academic achievement, and resistant capital does not apply in the explication of their success.