Adapting, Disrupting, and Resisting: How Middle School Black Males Position Themselves in Response to Racialization in School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of Black students’ schooling experiences and educational outcomes have consistently shown that compared to their peers, they – especially males – tend to underperform academically, be more athletically engaged, and be streamed into non-academic educational programs. These studies tend to focus on high school students, but what of middle school students: is the situation any different? Using a combination of critical race theory and positioning theory, this article presents the results of a 2018 focus group of middle school male students residing in an outer suburb of the Greater Toronto Area. The findings reveal how the nine participants positioned themselves, and were positioned by their teachers, for an education that would enable them to enter high school and become academically successful. Some participants felt that teachers had constructs of them as underperformers, athletes, and troublemakers; others believed teachers saw them as ‘regular students’ and treated them accordingly by supporting their academic and extracurricular activities. How these students read educators’ perceptions of them informed their positioning responses: some adjusted and others resisted. Our findings highlight the urgent need to support Black students in culturally relevant ways during the transition schooling years so that they enter high school ready to meet the social, academic, and pedagogical challenges they will face, graduate, and realize their post high school ambitions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".