Maryann Dickar, Corridor Cultures: Mapping Student Resistance at an Urban High School

Excerpt

In Corridor cultures: mapping student resistance at an urban high school, author Maryann Dickar offers a nuanced and astute study of the relationship between urban students of color and their schools that challenges and contributes to theories of domination and resistance, educational achievement, and student engagement and motivation. As a high school teacher and ethnographer, Dickar provides valuable insight into the ways that even progressive and culturally sensitive school reform can tokenize non-white culture and history and further marginalize students. Importantly, Dickar’s work reveals that urban students of color, often criminalized, coerced, and condescended to, exert agency in struggling over the meanings of the various spaces in which their relationship with school exists. The classrooms, halls, and entry checkpoints help produce student identities that are at times both accommodating of and resistant to their formal education. The quantified studies that show the “failure” of both urban students and urban schools through low test scores, low college admissions and high drop out rates miss the quotidian ways in which students and schools interact to produce and resist these outcomes. Through ethnographic observation, conversations with fellow teachers, and in depth interviews with 37 students, Corridor Cultures provides sophisticated analyzes of the white privilege inscribed in school geographies and pedagogies, the school’s implicit disparagement of black culture, and the tensions that students face in their negotiation of these realities. …