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L108 Kroesen, K., Reese, L.J., & Gallimore, R.(1998). Navigating Multiple Worlds: Latino Children Becoming Adolescents in Los Angeles. Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Volume VI. Washington, D.C.; American Anthropological Association.
The "cultural discontinuity" or "cultural mismatch" model has been used frequently to look at the language, culture and experiences that children bring with them to school. Recently, some have suggested that discontinuities play themselves out not only between home and school but also in the relationships among the "worlds" of home, school, and peers, and in the ability of the student to successfully manage the discontinuities among the worlds of his or her everyday life. In this paper we set out to examine how young adolescents, ages 11 to 13, experience and navigate the multiple worlds of their daily lives in urban settings. We retained the etic "worlds" of home, peers, and school as one analytic framework in order to compare our results with those of researchers who had focused primarily on older adolescents in high school. In addition to the "worlds" perspective, however, we also used data collection methods that would allow us to construct an emic framework of how students themselves perceived their environment. B Our study was driven by the following questions: How do early-adolescent Latinos describe the worlds they inhabit? Are middle school students different from high school students regarding the discontinuities they experience and their ability to navigate across worlds? How serious are the incongruities between their worlds? What are the ecological and cultural factors that shape the construction of children's worlds and the way they perceive them? And finally, is there a relationship between the structure of children's worlds, as they see them, and their performance in middle school?
For the most part, adolescents' descriptions of their daily routines confirmed information provided by parents. Students typically described going to school and coming home--often accompanied by parents or older siblings--and then doing homework, chores and playing with friends, siblings and/or cousins. As part of these routines children had made many adaptations to the character of their neighborhoods and schools. Their world view was influenced by their own observations of their environment as well as their parents' consejos. They did not see their environment as neutral, but instead charged with good and bad. The bad element was most clearly embodied in the gang members, and cholos, which almost all of them had encountered at one time or another. Not only school success, but all future success was also firmly rooted in the good side of these adolescents' moral universe. Following up on conversations with parents about the "path of life," we showed students a simple line drawing of a forking path. We asked them, "If this the path of life, what does it represent?" Most spontaneously understood the two forking paths to represent the good way and the bad way. When asked to describe these two paths, kids often included schooling and career in their description of the good path, and gang behavior or failures in school as characterizing the bad path. m them just like the boys at school.
Free lists of important people: One of the first tasks children did for investigators was to write down or recite a list of the "most important people" in their lives. Photos: The students were given disposable cameras and asked to take photos of the things or people or places most important in their lives. Children had the cameras several weeks. Although a few of the students were conservative in their photography and did not finish the role of film, most finished their film (24 prints) within a few weeks. Duplicate prints of the photos were made for the children and the second set was numbered by the interviewer. In a subsequent interview target children were asked to describe each photo including where it was taken, who was in the photo, and what was happening. Photo "Pile Sorts": We had students sort photos they judged to be similar into separate piles. "Worlds" page: To try to tap into children's worlds that they might not have spoken about much or photographed, we asked them to select from a given list of "worlds" those that pertained to them. Although the worlds of family, school, and friends were pitted against a array of other possible worlds, they remained the ones that children selected most often. Family was the only one of the words that was chosen by all 21 students.
Our middle school-aged students described worlds in which their activities and friendships were sharply restricted and monitored by parents as they sought to protect children from the dangers of gang- and drug-infested neighborhoods and to keep them on the "good path" in life. The students themselves described strategies with which they separated themselves from the cholo elements in their school and neighborhood environments which they saw as bad and potentially harmful influences. How serious are the incongruities between students' worlds? We did find boundaries in the lives of Latino middle school students similar to those reported by Azmitia, et al. (1996). The worlds of home and school were not always fully compatible because parents were often not able to give context-specific instrumental help to their children with schoolwork and with navigating the school system. We found school performance in our sample to be associated with the way children and parents were agents in the production of children's activities--activities that both parents and children were invested in. Parents of children who were performing well in school, although they might work long hours, worked with students in their free time constructing activities in which both parents and children might participate. We identified two other groups of students who were not performing as well. Parents of these children less often co-constructed activities with their children. |
