Amy E. Stich

In the Guise of STEM Education Reform Opportunity Structures and Outcomes in Inclusive STEM-Focused High Schools

In this article, we present findings from a three-year comparative longitudinal and ethnographic study of how schools in two cities, Buffalo and Denver, have taken up STEM education reform, including the idea of “inclusive STEM-focused schools,” to address weaknesses in urban high schools with majority low-income and minority students. Although introduced with great fanfare, the data indicate that well-meaning efforts toward expanding opportunities in STEM-focused schools for low-income underrepresented minorities quickly dissolved. We focus on mechanisms that seem to underlie this dissolution and consider its contributions to short- and long-term inequalities.

Diminishing the Divisions Among Us: Reading and Writing Across Difference in Theory and Method in the Sociology of Education

Evidenced in several now classic reviews of the field, much has been made of theoretical and methodological “difference” with regard to research in the sociology of education. Although such renditions often constitute important intellectual contributions, the authors suggest that it is increasingly important to read across theoretical and methodological divisions that are now widely understood to characterize the field. The authors fear, in fact, that the seemingly taken-for-granted assumption of staked-out theoretical and methodological “camps” (with which scholars and doctoral students are inevitably allied) implies a misunderstanding or misreading of how scholars came to be where they are today while simultaneously stunting scholarship related to the production of social inequalities both in and outside of schools. The authors intentionally traverse select taken-for-granted boundaries as they work toward productive scholarly “trespassing” that encourages the kind of theoretical and methodological struggle, debate, and difference that characterized an earlier period.

Discourses of Remediation: Low-Income Students and Academic Identities

This article draws on the framework of new literacy studies (Gee, 1996, 2005) to explore remedial students’ academic identities. The authors use discourse analysis to examine students’ written assignments from one remedial summer bridge course. Student-written assignments include themes and rhetorical devices that suggest the complexities of negotiating academic identities. In particular, low-income student participants express uncertainty about their academic selves. The authors offer this framework as one means of further exploring remedial student experiences.

Walking the Methodological Tightrope Researcher Dilemmas Inside an Urban School District in Times of Public Disinvestment

Though researcher dilemmas are not new to the pages of Qualitative Inquiry, we argue that the current contemporary context has both altered and intensified issues associated with conducting qualitative research within sites most affected by more recent social, political, and economic shift. Navigating such sites as researchers poses new questions and new “speed bumps,” going well beyond those highlighted by Weis and Fine more than ten years ago. In this article, the authors revisit and extend the work by Weis and Fine using a set of informed reflections on engaging ethnographic research inside an iconic and beleaguered, large Northeastern, urban school district, a context that, we argue, establishes an increased range of new and largely unanticipated “speed bumps.”

Thinking relationally about studying ‘up’

In this paper, the authors argue that despite a resurgence of elite studies, the majority of existing scholarship works to reify and legitimize social inequality through its language and method. In particular, the authors utilize Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of relational thinking to review and critique contemporary research on elite education and the ways in which such scholarship relies on a stratificationist approach to class analysis. Ultimately, this paper argues that future research on social class, and elite studies in particular, could benefit from using Bourdieu’s relational approach as a means to better address the challenges of social inequality.

The Color of the Ethno/Graphic

Anthropologist Michael Taussig calls it a “polymorphous magical substance.” This is how he “prefers to think of color, something more than a spot of red or blue on a page. It affects all the senses, not just sight. It moves. It has depth and motion, and it connects such that it changes whatever it comes into contact with.” Color is elusive. The ethno/graphic then must reflect the elusive as it falls into the unavoidable trappings of social research. Color may not be route out of a long series of inescapable research traps, but this ‘polymorphous magical substance’ brings us into the montage of the everyday to reveal meanings otherwise left concealed. The purpose of this reflective essay is to demonstrate color’s necessity within the trappings of social research that often remove color, and, as a result remove the soul, substance, and meaning, from the ethnographic.

Shrinking Budgets, Growing Demands: Neoliberalism and Academic Identity Tension at Regional Public Universities:

Faculty (N = 156) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States were surveyed for self-reports of their primary academic identity (teacher, researcher) along with alignment of that identity with perceived departmental expectations and how their time is spent. Well-being and job satisfaction were examined as outcome measures of identity and alignment. The results are examined in the context of international concerns about neoliberalism in higher education, particularly with respect to academic identity. Participants were employed by RPUs in Illinois, a state with severe budget challenges, to assess the combined impact of neoliberalism and financial pressures on academic identity at traditionally teaching-focused institutions. Results of MANCOVA and MANOVA analyses suggested that participants who identify as teachers had greater overall well-being and job satisfaction than those who identified as researchers. Greater satisfaction was associated with alignment between identity and how time is spent. Implications and challenges to faculty work and strains on academic identity at RPUs are discussed.

Shadow Capital: The Democratization of College Preparatory Education:

In this article, we examine the manifestation and consequences of shadow capital within two public, urban, nonselective, college preparatory–designated high schools serving exclusively nondominant students. Informed by three years of ethnographic data, we argue that the transference of a historically elite college preparatory education from dominant institutions to nondominant schools results in fundamental changes to the dominant capital it is expected to yield. Rather than generating highly valued capital within the field of education, it produces what we call “shadow capital.” As a distinct form of cultural capital, shadow capital outwardly resembles yet contains only traces of dominant cultural capital, thus failing to yield the same kind of exchange value in the postsecondary marketplace. Shadow capital offers explanatory power for the many unmet promises of educational reform and further challenges the often well-intended democratizing forces that paradoxically reinforce inequality in education.

‘I’m being pulled in too many different directions’: academic identity tensions at regional public universities in challenging economic times

ABSTRACT Faculty (N = 205) at regional public universities (RPUs) in the United States were surveyed for self-reports of their primary academic identity (teacher, researcher) and qualitative descriptions of struggles related to their academic identity. Well-being and job satisfaction were examined as outcome measures of identity struggles. Participants were selected from RPUs in Illinois, a state with severe budget challenges, to assess the impact of financial pressures on academic identity at traditionally teaching-focused institutions. Responses were not uniform across faculty, with some reporting few identity struggles and others reporting difficulty managing, lack of institutional support, and feeling that something would need to ‘give’ eventually. Faculty who identified as researchers and who spent most of their time doing research reported the fewest struggles, while researchers who were not able to devote time to research most frequently reported distress. Implications and challenges to faculty work and strains on academic identity at RPUs are discussed.

In and Through the Urban Educational “Reform Churn”: The Illustrative Power of Qualitative Longitudinal Research

The purpose of this article is to bring attention to the illustrative power and capacity of qualitative longitudinal research within the context of the urban educational “reform churn.” In this art...