A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING MULTICULTURAL IDENTITIES: An Investigation of a Middle Level Student's French-Canadian Honduran-American (Mestizo) Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates 1 middle level student of mixed heritage and his siblings as they assimilated and achieved within a small urban community. The main case focuses on 1 adolescent's experiences both in and out of schools. How this middle grade student identified and was treated had vast effects on his educational performance, adding insights to the racial and cultural identity complexities of adolescents of mixed heritage. The ethnographic case study draws on interpretivist methodology, joining writing as inquiry and analysis through a poststructuralist perspective. A multicultural framework emerges by which the identity of the student can be better understood. The use of this framework, with reconstructions of identity toward social justice, also elucidates the student's identity experiences and may do so for other adolescents of mixed background. Inasmuch, it further demonstrates the strong yet contradictory relationship between assimilation and achievement to that of multicultural identity constructs.Investigating how and why adolescents of mixed heritage construct their personal identities is important. Gollnick and Chinn (2009) report that more than 4 of 10 students in prekindergarten-12 schools currently are students of color; by 2020 it is anticipated they will comprise nearly 50% of all elementary and secondary students, with 40% of the U.S. projected to be non-White (i.e., African American, Latino, Asian American, and/or American Indian). However, the race and sex of their teachers match neither the student nor the general population (p. 2). Therefore, it empowers researchers, educators, and even adolescents to critically understand what factors historically influenced (and con* tinue to affect) mixed identities and why educators might perceive minority adolescents in certain ways. These factors are both ethnographical and phenomenological, equally impacting identity (Amundsen-Meyer, 2011; Probert, 2006).This study investigates the particular identity construct of one adolescent's experience, and considers the similar experiences of his two siblings. Two interrelated research questions guide this investigation: (1) In what ways has the perspective changed for understanding the mixed identity journeys of adolescents? (2) Does this perspective elucidate the racial and cultural identity complexities of other adolescents with mixed identity? What naturally emerges is a multicultural framework by which the journeys of these siblings can be understood; it offers other adolescents of mixed heritage a voice as they continue assimilating and achieving within dominant American schools. This framework is the dichotomous discourse of pain and privilege which elucidates the indigenous voice.To explain the development, this paper will open with a theoretical framework over minority populations, with a brief history on factors of Mestizo influence. Details of the resulting minor caste system provide a context for how minorities are seen and how their assimilation and achievement are then strongly influenced by their identity construct. Educators' perceptions and attitudes toward cultural affiliation are also described. The case of one adolescent's mixed identity journey is then explored, suggesting how other minority adolescents might navigate their mixed identity constructs.THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKOgbu (1991) explained how people of minority status operate from imposed identities, or certain identities forced upon them during their transitions from school to school. Some minorities actually create for themselves what Ogbu (1992) called cultural inversion. Such minority group behaviors and collective identities (Ogbu, 2004) run against or deny academic norms when minorities wish to misidentify with or resist against the dominant academic culture. In this sense, the mixed identities that adolescents choose may not be the same ones they believed they had (Ogbu, 1991).In modem society, many adolescents of mixed identity/heritage may consider themselves to be of a minority population. …
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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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".