Being “Loud”: Identities-in-Practice in a Figured World of Achievement

Identities and Achievement Among Students of Color

For several decades, scholars have sought to explain the “achievement gaps” and differences in academic identity formation between students of color and their White peers, using a variety of sociocultural models that have contributed significantly to educators’ understanding of the influence of social interactions and peer groups on students’ identity construction (e.g., Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Stets & Burke, 2000). However, there are important limitations to these approaches because they generally explain identity formation in aggregate terms by generalizing results to apply to most students from a particular ethnic or racial background.

Other studies show how Black students construct multiple and overlapping identities as situated in and fostered by their school context (e.g., Harper, 2015; Nasir, McLaughlin, & Jones, 2009), and discrepancies in the performance of students in similar educational settings suggest that some students of color do identify with the project of schooling while others become increasingly disaffected (Murrell, 2007). For example, among several other studies that examine the interactions between students’ academic and racial/ethnic identities, Hemmings’s (1996) ethnographic study of six high-achieving African American students at two different urban schools examined the interplay between the students’ academic and ethnic/racial identities based on how they positioned themselves in various peer groups. Hemmings reports that the students were able to perform well in school as well as maintain close ties to their racial heritage, school peers, and community, although the balancing of academic and other social identities did strain some of their relationships with students in peer groups with different attitudes about school.

Beyond students’ positioning in various peer groups, research also indicates that students’ positionality in the academic context has significant impact on their identity construction (Harper, 2014; Hungerford-Kresser, 2008). Based on her participants’ reflections of their high school experiences, Hungerford-Kresser determined that “an [academic] identity has to be achieved” via many experiences, including being positioned as “a kid who is going to college” rather than “a high school graduate” (p. 200). In the same vein, O’Connor, Mueller, Lewis, Rivas-Drake, and Rosenberg (2011) demonstrate that the demographics and organization of schools play a significant role in the relationship between Black identity achievement. Their study in a racially stratified high school documents how three students constructed Black identities. These high-achieving young women strategized for excellence in very different ways, depending on whether they “defined blackness as a structured (marked by distinct or shared forms of oppression) or a cultural (marked by inclinations, style, and performance) phenomenon” (O’Connor et al., 2011, p. 1233).

Furthermore, several qualitative studies also suggest that constructing academic identities is mediated by students’ experience of the curriculum as it is enacted in the classroom (Nasir et al., 2009; Stinson, 2008; Tan & Barton, 2008). For example, Nasir et al. (2009) use a practice approach to examine the range of identities constructed by African American high school students at extreme ends of the achievement spectrum. Their analysis indicates that while all of the students in the study constructed African American identities, the “school-oriented” and “socially conscious” students who were part of the relatively small college-bound academic track had access to resources for college and scholarship applications and were enrolled in classes that encouraged students “to tie their developing academic knowledge to a cultural history of African Americans,” while those who constructed “gangsta” identities were disconnected from the academic life of the school and did not have access to the same resources.

Beyond addressing interactions between students’ identity negotiations and their experiences of curriculum and academic achievement, as in Nasir et al.’s (2009) and Carter Andrews’s (2012) work, this study addresses the impact of discourses of achievement (i.e., the impact of normalized expectations about how to “be” a high-achieving student) on students of color. As McCarthy (2013) theorizes, “without denying that certain stabilities are associated with race . . . racial identities are profoundly social, historical, and variable categories . . . and groups and individuals always have competing interests, needs, and desires wrestling to the surface” (p. 123). It is therefore crucial to examine how students negotiate their identities and curricular experiences in the context of the cultural and discursive figured worlds of their own classrooms and schools.

Identities, Curriculum, and Achievement in Classroom Contexts

As Woodson (1933/2006) argued several decades ago in The Miseducation of the Negro, the academic curriculum in the United States is Eurocentric and predicated on Black inferiority, promoting a particular identity associated with Anglo Protestant norms that colonizes and corrupts the minds of African American children and erases their heritage. Indeed, because European American epistemological traditions are inseparable from the story of schooling, past and present, curriculum is a “racial text” that marginalizes and oppresses those cultures, literacies, and identities are outside the mainstream (Kharem, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 2000). This marginalization is perpetuated by uninterrogated norms about curriculum and achievement, in which mainstream norms and academic conventions about culture, language, and literacy are framed as “neutral” and “standard” and their raced, classed, and gendered nature is masked. Furthermore, an achievement/failure binary conceals expressions of racism by legitimizing, validating, and rewarding what has been associated with middle-class Whiteness and “othering” that which is not. For example, English language arts classrooms are sites of struggle in light of ongoing debates about language for many students of color in U.S. schools. Specifically, conceptualizations of bilingual education solely as a means to master the dominant English language, and the framing of “standard” versus “nonstandard” English in debates about African American Vernacular English, are indicative of political and theoretical tensions in classrooms (Kinloch, 2005; Sealey-Ruiz, 2005; Tellez & Waxman, 2005). It is well documented that there is a connection between students’ use of home languages, dialects, or idioms, and perceptions of success or failure by school personnel and society at large (Fordham, 1999; Lee, 2007; Pollock, 2004). In addition, the prominent role of language in students’ negotiations of academic, racial, and ethnic identities is one indicator of how students position themselves within the discourses of schooling and/or their home communities and to what effects (Delpit, 2006; Gay, 2000; Lee, 2007). These negotiations, in turn, inform students’ construction of academic identities.

Academic identities, particularly student’s identities as readers and writers, factor significantly into students’ construction and negotiation of multiple identities in classroom contexts. According to Markus (2008), constructing academic identities is a critical factor in students’ learning and achievement because such identities function as an interpretive framework that fosters students’ motivation and buffers threats to their view of themselves as achievers. Similarly, in an essay that addresses the connection between identity and literacy, McCarthey and Moje (2002) conclude that “identity changes and challenges are, in fact, what literacy learning are all about” (p. 237). In their dialogic approach to this topic, they consider both the possibility that identities shape people’s textual and literate practices, as well as its converse—“that literate practices play a role in identifications and positionings” (McCarthey & Moje, 2002, p. 229). As an example, they note that mainstream readers discount graffiti as a textual form, even though it involves letters and related symbol systems, because of its association with deviant behaviors. Similarly, educators make instructional decisions about what texts (and even how much reading to assign) based on their beliefs about their students, identities as readers, and their future roles in higher education and the workforce (Anyon, 1980; Apple, 1990; McCarthey & Moje, 2002). These instructional decisions, in turn, have a significant impact on the figured worlds in which students construct their identities as readers and writers. As Freire and Macedo (1987) succinctly stated, literacy is that which pertains to students’ readings of the “word” and the “world”—students’ responses to texts and the texts that they create offer insights into their identities and positionalities in situated contexts.

Context and Positionality

The research site, Northeastern Urban Academy (NUA), was a selective public middle school in a major metropolitan city, whose population of about 100 students per grade was gender-balanced as well as ethnically and racially diverse. ⁴ Students from three school districts encompassing a wide range of socioeconomic family backgrounds were eligible to apply if they had scores of 3 or 4 (proficient or excellent) in both their Math and English language arts (ELA) state assessments and a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. Nonetheless, meeting the school’s academic goals was challenging for some students: in spring 2008, assessment data indicated a wide distribution of student performance in ELA. At the end of the second semester, 24 out of 94 (26%) sixth-grade students had semester grades below passing in ELA (less than 70% average); of these 24 students with grades below passing, 20 (83%) were Black or Latinx, and 4 (17%) were White.

As a curriculum consultant at the school from 2007 to 2011, I was struck by this racial and ethnic divide. Having worked closely with the teachers and administrators, all of whom had high expectations of the very diverse student population and professed their commitment to educational justice by offering a rigorous academic program to all, I sought to better understand students’ experiences of the curriculum and the school. Also, having personally experienced varying degrees of tension as a woman of color in my own education, my work is driven by a desire to better understand the nuances of educating students from diverse backgrounds to thrive in school and in society and negotiate the power structures that shape our diverse and often polarized society. Therefore, I recognize that I am/have been part of the pathologized “other” and yet have also participated and succeeded in the educational system that underserves many students of color. These contradictions are tied to the assumptions that undergird my work—that our many subjectivities, the identities that we construct and negotiate, mediate our research as well as students’ achievement in school.

Furthermore, although I did not initiate the conversation regarding being loud, the students’ frequent references to this notion resonated with me greatly. As a first-generation Cuban American, in my adolescence (and beyond) I have negotiated being positioned as “loud” simply due to my cultural and ethnic background, regardless of whether or not I identified as a “loud girl.” As a woman, and as a Latina, hearing the participants’ narratives about being loud stood out to me in a very significant way, and offered me some initial insight into the scope and depth of its role in positioning students. These multiple subject positions, among others, informed my work in analyzing and assembling the narratives of individual students as they constructed and negotiated their own multiple identities. I have worked toward managing these subjectivities and positionalities throughout the data collection and analysis phases of the study by writing about them in my research journal as well as engaging in thoughtful reflection and storying with trusted colleagues throughout the research process (Kinloch & Pedro, 2014; Peshkin, 1988).

Methods and Analysis

Drawing on an identities-in-practice lens as a way to examine the identities constructed in the figured world of NUA, I focused on the following research questions: How do students construct multiple identities, including academic identities, in this academic context? How are students’ academic experiences mediated by the construction and negotiation of their multiple identities?

Data Collection

To address these research questions, the data for this article are drawn from an iterative, long-term case study of a cohort of 30 students and their ELA teacher (Ms. Brian) that included various data collection methods (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Stake, 2005): 18 semistructured interviews with the focal students and their teacher, as well as one student focus group, 33 class observations, all ELA curriculum materials and students’ written assignments and projects, school assessment policies, and quantitative ELA assessment data (from that ELA course, as well as the standardized state ELA assessment scores for all of the students in sixth-eighth grades). For the individual semistructured interviews (two per student, during the semester in which I was conducting classroom observations) and the student focus group, I selected a purposive sample of eight students who reflected the class’s self-identified ethnic/racial backgrounds (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007), and achievement range (see Table 1 for a brief “pen portrait” of the six student participants included in this analysis). The interviews and focus group protocols were designed to elicit students’ thick descriptions of their experiences of curriculum, their ideas about how identities are constructed, and their self-identification.

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Table 1

Pen Portraits of Student Participants

Jason	Gregarious and personable, Jason had close ties to his extended family in the city where he was born and lived at the time, as well as in Nicaragua (where his parents were born and he visited his relatives once a year). He demonstrated pride in being Nicaraguan and was adamant in his interviews about not pretending to be “someone [he is] not.” Regarding his schoolwork, Jason expressed some frustration with his grades in ELA; he reflected that he started his 7th-grade year off with a high “B” and then “tanked” because “the essays in the second half of the year killed [his] grade.”
Jonah	New to NUA in 7th grade, Jonah identified as Dominican, and could often be spotted doodling in Spanish in his notebook. He was very proud of his paternal grandfather, who was an engineer in the Dominican Republic and had 35 full and half brothers and sisters (his great-grandfather had 12 children with each of his three wives). At NUA, Jonah was considered part of el grupito (the little group) who had a reputation for “fooling around”—one of the “jackasses”—as described by himself and the other participants.
Karina	Karina framed success as connected to her family’s expectations for her and for her African American community. She participated in cocurricular activities like student government in school, as well as an afterschool support program that provided opportunities for tutoring, travel, and other enrichments. She expressed pride in her father’s role as a staff member in another city high school. Her motivation for doing well in school was both personal as well as connected to challenging narratives about African American success: “there’s a lot of us in poverty, and things like that, but I wanna go above that and, you know, be like my brother and graduate from college and do all these great things.”
Laura	Self-identified as a “loud” girl, Laura had been labeled as such by an adult at NUA. She was very social and very loyal to her friends, always “stand[ing] up for my friends even if it puts me at risk.” Although she was not explicit about what kinds of risks she might have needed to face for the sake of her friends, at another time she expressed feeling constrained by the rules and expectations at NUA: “being a student in NUA has its times when you can be free and others where your trapped in a box.” She resisted being positioned by her grades, claiming that being “smart” had little to do with grades, yet she expressed frustration at having to negotiate “conflicting” positionalities as an achiever, Latina, and “loud” girl.
Lina	Born in the United States to Dominican and Panamanian parents, Lina was living with her grandmother. She seemed to conform to the societal stereotype of “good girl”—sweet, compliant, polite, minding her mother’s rules even when she was with her friends. She reported that she worked hard to complete assignments and commented favorably about classes in which she felt she learned “new” things. Like Laura, she was a self-proclaimed “loud” girl, and also labeled as such by some school personnel. In elementary school, she had been bullied for being a good student. Depending on context and association, and in order to fit in with peers at NUA, Lina had interchangeably positioned herself as “smart girl” or an “average girl.”
Manuel	The only student participant born outside the United States, in the Dominican Republic, he shared that because his parents did not speak English it was more difficult for him to get help with his homework. Although two of his ELA teachers at NUA had suspected that Manuel had a learning disability due to his difficulty with comprehension and written work, he self-identified as a writer and was particularly insightful in the interviews and focus group regarding cultural and socioeconomic issues. For example, he believed that financial restrictions had an impact on the support that students could get with schoolwork by pointing out the advantages of families who could afford to hire tutors.

Note. ELA = English language arts; NUA = Northeastern Urban Academy. These “Pen Portraits” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000) are composed out of the data collected from each student to draw some points of connection between and among multiplicities of selves, rather than as attempts to “make sense” or “reconcile” students’ demographic or personal backgrounds with their academic identities and experiences (Ochs & Capp, 1996).

Because constructing “selves” has been associated with narrative making by scholars in various fields of research and scholarship (McCarthey & Moje, 2002; Ochs & Capps, 1996; Smith & Watson, 2000), this analysis is focused on qualitative data in which students’ narratives of self are emergent. According to Holland et al. (1998), persons look at the world and themselves from the positions in which they are persistently cast as well as draw from an existing lexicon of culturally produced types (such as, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and other axes of differentiation). These “narrativized identities are shaped within figured worlds” (pp. 43–44). In other words, students construct themselves by building on the “narratives” that are available to them in the figured world of the classroom. For the narrative analysis presented in this article (Wertz et al., 2011), I focused on the tellings, writings, or depictions in which individuals articulate, in a variety of modes, the ways in which they make sense of ideas, experiences, and identities, conveying “versions of reality” and/or “embodiments” of points of view (Ochs & Capps, 1996, p. 20). I conceptualized participants’ narratives, as well as my own research narratives, as holistic units of analysis in which participants’ identities and experiences are situated in the context of a figured world of achievement.

Data Analysis

Because narratives of self are inherently embedded in an examination of identities-in-practice, my narrative approach in this study is, therefore, simultaneously “a way of reflecting during the entire inquiry process, a research method, and a mode for representing the research study” (Moen, 2006, p. 2). The first phase of analysis involved reading across all data sources via a grounded open coding process to generate a preliminary set of codes ⁵ as well as a series of analytical memos on themes emergent in the data (Richardson, 2000; Wertz et al., 2011). As ELA curricula often provide students with opportunities to express their thoughts in various oral and written modes (Ball, 2002), this first level of analysis allowed me to juxtapose curricular texts that may be illustrative of students’ interpretations and readings of themselves and the curriculum along with the narratives from their interviews and our focus group discussion (Bartlett & Holland, 2002; McCarthey & Moje, 2002). In this phase, being loud was a prominent code in data organized by individual student as well as memos by theme.

In the second phase of this iterative analytical process, I organized the data and memos by student to read across all the narratives, then repeated the process with the data and memos organized by research question and then by theme. The notion of being “loud” came up in identity questionnaires, interviews, and focus group in the narratives of 7 out of the 8 participants in the study as interconnected with notions about identity and achievement, even though there were no references to being loud in any of the data collection protocols.

In the third phase of analysis, I assembled data and memos associated with being loud into composite narratives according to identities-in-practice that emerged from the first two phases of analysis (see Table 2). While the student participants in the study constructed a number of identities-in-practice, including being an “athlete” or being “crazy” (Focus Group), I focus on their self-reported “loud” identities-in-practice because they illustrate an intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and gender in the figured world of NUA. ⁶ I draw on Walkerdine’s (2007) conceptualization of rhizomatic assemblages as a useful model to analyze as well as present data from a multiplicity of narratives. In the next sections, I present the study’s findings as a metanarrative inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the social world as made up of multiple voices and perspectives, assembled here by interweaving the participants’ narratives of identities along with my own analysis of what they described as “loud” in the figured world of achievement at NUA.

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Table 2

Data Collection Methods and Analysis

Methods and Analysis	Data Sources/Process of Analysis
Interviews and focus group	18 semistructured student interviews (2 per student in purposive sample)
	1 focus group discussion with all students interviewed
	2 semistructured interviews with the ELA teacher
Class observations	33 eighth-grade ELA class observations, 50-90 minutes, biweekly
Document analysis	curriculum materials and student work; identities questionnaire administered in advising annually (sixth to eighth grades); ELA seventh grade portfolios; photos of classroom layout; school policies and rubrics
Quantitative data	GPA and previous ELA grades; assignment scores; NYS-ELA and NYC assessments
Narrative approach to data analysis	Phase 1: Read and code all data sources and write analytical memos by focal student, by theme, and by research question
	Phase 2: Read across all memos, examine recurring themes
	Phase 3: Create composite narratives of identities-in-practice based on emergent themes about identities, curriculum, and achievement

Note. ELA = English language arts; GPA = grade point average; NYC = New York City; NYS = New York State.

“Loud People Yelling”: Implicit Raced and Classed Messages

Although students did not make explicit connections between socioeconomic class and the notion of being loud in their narratives, they characterized “loudness” by drawing on examples regarding particular neighborhoods (the Valley, a lower-income neighborhood), occupations (street vendors), social manners, and personal style, all of which are frequently associated with race and socioeconomic class. In the figured world of NUA, students’ perceptions about being loud as less desirable are evident in their descriptions and references to particular elements, neighborhoods, and activities in society. For example, Lina characterizes her neighborhood as loud:

I live in the Valley . . . and that’s like all Hispanic community down there; all of it. You hear, like I live near a club . . . and you hear all those loud people yelling and stuff like that. It’s like my neighborhood is very, very noisy. (Interview)

While her tone in describing her neighborhood and the “loud people yelling” was warm, and she did not try to distance herself from it, Lina makes a clear distinction between her neighborhood and the “quiet” school community that she entered as a sixth grader when she first came to NUA:

In 6th grade I didn’t know much about like what I know now past 7th grade and 8th grade. . . . To me when you [someone] called me [loud] I found that offensive . . . because it’s like: “Oh, she’s loud, you know, she doesn’t belong in this kind of space cause she’s loud” or whatever. All these other kids are quiet, you know, “they have to disturb our community” or whatever. Like that, I didn’t know before about diversity until I got to this school. (Interview)

Even though she was referring to her classmates, fellow sixth graders who were also new to the school, the “quiet” kids, presumably White and middle-class, are perceived by Lina to be the standard of the school community, a community from which she was set apart from the beginning and eventually was able to “join” once she learned about “diversity at this school.”

In Lina’s “old school, if you were Hispanic, you had to hang out with those people and if you weren’t then you’re just weird if you hang out with different people” (Interview). Although NUA is unlike her “old school,” and all students are encouraged to “hang out” with each other regardless of their backgrounds, students of color must work through and against racialized and classed discourses that regulate what students recognize to be “appropriate” academic identities and what they go through in order to claim spaces for themselves in these academic figured worlds.

In our focus group discussion, students made connections between race and class or socioeconomic status that crystallized, if only momentarily, how intersections between/among the identities are continuously at play at school and at home. The excerpt that follows illustrates some of these negotiations and intersections:

This excerpt illustrates the intertwining of several narratives. A key narrative that runs through the excerpt is the framing of we, presumably “Hispanics” and “African American” as part of a group that is separate and different from the expectations, values, and experiences of “White people.” Inherent in this framing is an understanding of White people as being of a certain socioeconomic class, given the “fact” that they have tutors, which students support by naming White students whom they know rely on the assistance of tutors: “they have tutors—Cassandra and Olga have tutors” (Focus Group).

While students had a sophisticated awareness of the inequity of resources that may be ascribed to race and class membership, they indicated problematic perspectives regarding what Hatt (2007) describes as a figured world of “smartness.” John, the African American student that stands out because his parents help him with his homework, is an exception because he is intelligent, and his mother is able to help him because she is “really smart.” What students do not mention, however, is that John’s mother is a professor at a local university. In this narrative, Jonah, Karina, Laura, and Manuel claim John as one of their “own,” obscuring important differences in class status, and demonstrating the ways in which certain social identities are privileged over others in different contexts (Foster, 1995; Moonwomon, 1995). Also significant is their understanding of intellectual achievement or ability based on content “knowledge” such as that which may be acquired by being disciplined about watching the Discovery Channel (Howard, 1991). These generalizations are shaped by the discourses of achievement that inform the context in which they are constructed. In this case, discourses of effort and hard work as the great equalizer in education affect the selves that students might author in this figured world.

However, as Jones (2006) eloquently describes, class stratification in schools exists at a discursive level, where the acquisition of material goods does not at all make up for the social and cultural capital that comes with membership in middle-class society:

. . . no matter how many times your parents tell you to “do good” in school, you’re not quite equipped to do so: Money can’t buy a new Discourse . . . material goods alone don’t significantly change language, relations, beliefs, or identities. This fact is quickly realized when students and families interface with teachers and administrators in schools. . . . A lesson that is implicitly absorbed is that social class difference is typically accompanied by judgment and relentless comparison with the standards of the people whom children and families find working in schools. (p. 29)

The “lesson” that Jones describes also conveys the propriety of the middle-class norms and values of “schoolpeople” and the academic community and the impropriety of the loud neighborhood or surrounding community (Lareau, 2003).

“Las Dos Pasteleras”: Negotiating Gendered Discourses of Race and Class

Despite Lina’s perception regarding the openness for students to befriend peers from backgrounds different from their own, it is important to consider that these relationships are constructed in the midst of implicit discourses of race, class, and gender. While students embraced the school’s professed commitment to diversity and multiculturalism and felt encouraged to become friends with students from different “groups” and “races,” the Latinx student participants ⁹ spoke emphatically in our focus group about how peers, teachers, and administrators seemed to think less of them, they thought, because of their Hispanic “race.” ¹⁰

Although Jason makes it a point to clarify that administrators never explicitly said that students failed because they are Hispanics, ¹¹ Lina and Laura argue that Jonah and the “little group” are singled out as “troublemakers” (Caraballo, 2012b). The students’ retelling of what they describe as a typical interaction with administration demonstrates how they feel they are characterized according to their ethnic identities. The identities-in-practice that they construct as a group of “Hispanic” students alludes to the friction between racial/ethnic and academic identities in the figured world of achievement.

For example, Lina shared an incident during her interview about her and Laura being called “pasteleras” that conveys some of the implicit narratives of race, class, as well as gender that inform academic identities at NUA. An administrator called them “‘Las Dos Pasteleras’. . . because we’re really loud. We sound like those people in the streets . . . selling stuff” (Interview). ¹² Lina and Laura resented being compared to the women who call out their wares in the street markets in order to sell pastries and other treats for a living. Although Laura and Lina understood the pastelera comment as a criticism of their tone of voice and volume in an academic setting, the image of the loud pasteleras stands in stark contrast to the social and institutional norms and the “versions” of selves-in-practice that are highly regarded in the figured world of achievement at NUA.

The same anecdote was shared by other participants in other interviews and in the focus group discussion with all of the participants, indicating that students considered the attribution jarring and significant because it was associated with a marginalized segment of the population in Caribbean and Latin American countries. ¹³ In a focus group discussion with all participants, students highlighted some of the tensions implicit in being loud—it was both a “true” characterization and an offensive way to be positioned in the school context:

For Jonah and the other Dominicans in the group, being loud is part of being Dominican, as well as a cultural expectation in the Dominican Republic. Students’ overlapping cultural understandings are inherent in each of the figured identities that they take up or resist as they position themselves as learners (Holland et al., 1998; Vetter et al., 2011).

The discursive power of this term is particularly significant when used by a fellow Latino, middle-class male authority figure, invoking the compounded impact of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in positioning the young women as nonacademic “others.” It is important to note, however, that this school administrator was committed to establishing NUA as a school in which students from underrepresented backgrounds would achieve as mathematicians and scientists of a caliber akin to those in well-established academically tracked schools in the same city. As noted in field notes from informal conversations and correspondence, he addressed students’ behavior in an effort to ensure their success in what he believed to be an unforgiving world (field notes). Despite this equity-driven mission, because students and faculty were not interrogating prevailing norms in a “neutral” White, middle-class, and masculinized figured world of achievement, such norms reified a derogatory framing of what is culturally significant to students, which inadvertently marginalized students of color.

“Being Loud/Ghetto” Versus “Polite”: Code-Switching Between Peer Groups and Beyond

Associations between being loud and socioeconomic class also affect students’ behavior in academic contexts. Lina and Karina emphasize their ability to determine when it is appropriate to be loud among school friends (and when it is not):

My friends that don’t speak Spanish, they just see me as the one Hispanic girl that isn’t as loud as everybody else thinks that most Hispanics are . . . I mean I can be loud in both groups . . . but I’m more, I’m more polite to the . . . like my other friends that are not Hispanic. (Interview)

Like many high-achieving students from nondominant backgrounds (Hemmings, 1996; Noguera, 2008), Lina alludes to what may be termed “code-switching” (Delpit, 2006; Martinez, 2010) between behaviors and ways of speaking/acting that enables students like her to move between home groups (whether those be signified by race, culture, or socioeconomic status) and peer groups in school. Yet there is also a discursive “othering” taking place in this situated negotiation. By constructing herself as less loud and, therefore, more “polite” among non-Latinx peers, Lina inadvertently frames herself and other Latinx students as inherently less polite than her “friends that don’t speak Spanish” (at NUA, a veiled reference to her White middle-class peers).

Karina, who self-identifies as loud in only some contexts and among certain friends, relates being loud with being “ghetto.” In an effort to define what being “ghetto” signifies, she draws on offensive stereotypes about African American girls and women:

Like you’re loud, you have, your name, like your name, like if you have a name like Shanaynay or Shaniqua. . . . Or the way you like dress is considered to be ghetto, like, like different labels are considered to be ghetto because of typical, just typical stereotypes that are out there. (Interview)

Although Karina then proceeded to disclaim the use of the word ghetto by pointing out that it is really inappropriate due to its origins in the World War II era, ¹⁴ she recognizes that the term conveys a series of stereotypes that she and her Black friends must constantly negotiate, particularly in a multiracial academic context. In the following passage, Karina is talking about how she and her African American friends make fun of stereotypes about being “ghetto” when joking with their White friends:

So there’s like one video called, “My push-up bra will help me get my man,” and some African-American woman in a car doing all this crazy stuff. . . . So always, so me and my . . . other friend, we’re always trying to re-act that out . . . so it’s really fun. . . . We’re always joking about that video and they know about it because we let them watch it and stuff. (Interview)

Karina talks about how she and her “other friend”—another African American student at NUA—let “them,” her White friends, watch this “ghetto” video. Although she self-identifies as loud and uses humor to work through some of the stereotypes that she must negotiate in school and in society, her humor may arguably (albeit inadvertently) contribute to what Weekes (2004) describes as further objectification of her African American peers. In sharing the video with her White friends, then distancing herself from it, Karina aligns herself with the mainstream, “a strategy for positioning [herself] as ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’” (Charlton, 2007, p. 126) in this particular figured world of achievement.

Therefore, like Lina, Karina is careful to monitor her behavior her multiple “identities” or “personalities,” as she calls them, in order to fit in and be successful in different contexts.

I have many identities. I can sometimes have different personalities at times. . . . Like at home I’m more of a crazy person, I start dancing around, but at school I’m more conservative. . . . [I’m considered] like the loud African American. . . . You know how the word ghetto has come up? . . . There’s typical stereotypes that come up . . . and I try to be funny and try to like bring those out. (Interview)

Karina was aware of various authored selves, all of which she had to negotiate as a high-achieving African American girl in a selective academic environment. Co-constructed by discourses of race and class as well as her experiences among peers in this figured world, these authored selves illustrated the complex and often contradictory process of negotiating raced and classed identities that stereotypically cast her as “loud” and “ghetto”:

I feel like it’s not anything meant to be harmful or I mean, I wouldn’t care if someone called me ghetto but I mean it’s kind of hurtful because like where, cause I always think in my head where did the word ghetto come from. (Interview)

For Karina, it mattered that her peers are not intentionally “mean,” yet she admitted that it was “kind of hurtful” to be called “ghetto” when that frames her, and other African American girls, as hypersexual (“my push-up bra will help me get my man”) and inappropriate (“some African American woman in a car doing all this crazy stuff”). As suggested by Rolón-Dow (2004) in her work with Puerto Rican girls whose schooling experiences are affected by their being stereotyped as hypersexual and provocative, Karina strategically negotiates her identities as a “loud African American” by playing into the stereotype and making fun of it in front of her White friends, as described above. Karina uses humor to distance herself from the stereotypes about being “loud” and “ghetto” by fragmenting and hybridizing the identities she constructs and those that may be ascribed to her. She describes how she navigates these discourses and figured worlds by switching “identities”: “It’s just like I’m over here and I have one identity, I’m over here and I have another. So I just listen to both sides and I just go with it” (Caraballo, 2014, p. 116).

As her narrative suggests, and as the daughter of an educational professional, Karina aligns herself with the middle-class values considered appropriate at school, yet engages in complex negotiations between her “model student” identity (Hemmings, 1996) and “typical stereotypes” about loud African Americans. By writing “themselves into the world in individual ways” students construct hybrid identities-in-practice that allow them to “negotiate the discourses of schooling” (Vetter et al., 2011, p. 189) as well as social discourses. In order to negotiate stereotypes about African American girls and also meet school expectations and fit in with her peers at school, she accepts her friends’ use of the term “ghetto” as par for the course, and uses humor to downplay its significance. She relies on the fragmentation of her multiple selves, negotiating the identities with which she “fundamentally identif[ies] in particular ways and in particular contexts” (Hird, 1998, p. 546) in order to be successful and pursue her academic goals.

Although all of the participants seemed to understand the value of acquiring the social and cultural capital as well as the academic and professional skills that will lead to opportunities of leadership and advancement in society, the naturalization of White middle-class values and norms and the uncritical adoption of “appropriate” academic identities complicates the experiences of students of color in academic contexts. Normative whiteness propagates the uninterrogated standards and commonly accepted conventions about learning and behavior that prevent so many students from nondominant backgrounds from feeling valued and respected by, and perhaps not succeeding in, the public school system (Lipman, 2004).

“Being Loud” and “Smart”? Negotiating “Incompatible” Identities

What does it mean, then, when students construct intersectional identities in their context of practice as loud achievers? What are the costs and benefits of these hybrid identities? How do students who “own” being loud negotiate multiple identities in their figured world of achievement? While students at NUA expressed cultural pride in being “loud,” there were also many aspects of it that were problematic for them. Lina recognized that there are shifting meanings to “being loud” in different contexts, and described being characterized this way in middle school:

It’s like: “Oh, she’s loud, you know, she doesn’t belong in this kind of space cause she’s loud . . .” All these other kids are quiet . . . (Interview)

Although she then seems to deemphasize her concerns about being loud and appropriate, due to the colorblind diversity discourse of the school as a place where everyone is friends with everyone else, other narratives to do not support such a neat resolution. In contrast to tracked schools where there are structural and cultural boundaries between the norms and expectations among student groups according to race or ethnicity (Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; O’Connor et al., 2011), NUA was a racially and ethnically diverse school in which all admitted students were framed as high achievers and took the same courses. In this structurally integrated context, the students’ identities-in-practice were shaped by discourses of achievement that produced implicit hierarchies along racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gendered lives. As discussed above, for the NUA focal students “quiet” is associated with White and academic, where as “loud” to them had taken on a connotation of being on the margins of their figured world. In addition to working against being framed as underachievers by society at large, these students negotiated conflicting identities within their own peer and academic contexts, a framing which was further obscured by the school’s mission to provide high-achieving students of color with the social and intellectual capital to succeed in academia. Similar to what Moya and Markus (2010) describe as the “I’m and I’m proud” conversation about race and ethnicity, the student participants proudly self-identified as (culturally) loud, an identification that bears the potential to “foster group solidarity and pride” (p. 81). But students were also aware of how this characterization marginalized them as students and positioned them unfavorably in the figured world of NUA.

The disjunction between the cultural worlds of minoritized groups and mainstream structures and norms has been addressed by scholars such as Fordham and Ogbu (1986), who argued that apparent disengagement and underachievement among African American students was actually due to persistent structural discrimination and the inability of schools to serve the needs of African American communities. More recent research documents how many students of color in the K–12 through postsecondary spectrum are able to cultivate racial and ethnic identities as well as identities as achievers (D. Carter, 2008; Murrell, 2007; Noguera, 2008; Stinson, 2008). Collectively, these studies document the added burden on these high-achieving students of color. For example, Fries-Britt and Griffin (2007) document two ways in which high-achieving Blacks resisted stereotypes about Black Americans in their college campuses. When these students felt that their peers and professors placed them in a “Black box,” they challenged stereotypes and myths about Blacks as well as worked hard to prove their own academic worth and ability.

In addition, the construction of achiever identities in these studies is predicated on students’ critical and deliberate engagement with the issues that Fordham and Ogbu (1986) discussed. Without the opportunity to engage critically in how academic identities are discursively produced by White and middle-class norms in society, Karina, Laura, and Lina’s raced, classed, and gendered identities lead to the fragmentation of their multiple selves—a fragmentation that becomes increasingly problematic when students internalize messages about the “inappropriateness” of self-identifications that connect them to their home communities.

Like Karina and other high-achieving students at NUA, many students “learn to succeed in both worlds by adopting multiple identities” (Noguera, 2008, p. 9). Nonetheless, the idea of adapting multiple identities in order to “succeed” in these very divergent contexts comes at a cost. As Winkle-Wagner’s (2009) discusses in her examination of Black women in college, the “two-ness” they experience between being “too Black” or “too White,” where racial categories and group belonging were bounded by factors such as speech patterns, is exhausting to negotiate as students struggle to achieve. In this study, Lina and Karina’s code-switching between loud and “academic” identities and ways of behaving in different peer groups (Delpit, 2006; Ewing, 1998; Hemmings, 1996), while deemed by them to be necessary in order to meet their school’s expectations, perpetuates a binary in which identities which are claimed as integral to Dominican, Hispanic, and African American cultures are impolite and inappropriate in school (Kinloch, 2005; Knight, 2003; Weekes, 2004). Binaries such as these, in which academic values and norms are naturalized and disassociated from raced and classed social discourses, serve to reinscribe the “otherness” of lower income minoritized students in this figured world.

The construct of “loudness” has been addressed in educational literature on African American and Black female students in particular, but historically has not included the perspectives of Latinx students (Cousins, 1999; Evans, 1988; Fordham, 1993). Unlike Evans’s “loud Black girls,” the students in my study were not refusing “to conform to standards of ‘good behavior,’ without actually entering the realm of ‘bad behavior,’” as Evans (1988) suggests that they were actively resisting the standards of behavior at their school (p. 183). Rather, because they self-identified as culturally loud, they negotiated intersections between their identities as good students and as Hispanics/Dominicans, relationships with peers from various backgrounds, and being positioned as less “academic” than their peers as a result of these identifications. Similar to Guerra’s (2004, 2015) notion of a nomadic consciousness, which reflects the simultaneous meta-awareness and uncertainty experienced by multilingual students as they navigate expectations in multiple academic and social contexts, identities-in-practice are shifting, contradictory, and multidirectional. Jason’s comment about Hispanics being “loud” and “always failing” marks one intersecting point between two axes; Laura’s self-identification as a loud Dominican and a Principal’s Scholar marks a very different one.

As such, students’ identities are shifting and multiple not only along various axes of differentiation, but also within them. For instance, as seen in Jason and Lina’s comments during their respective interviews, academic identities are variable, provisional, and contingent on myriad other factors. While their student identities do provide some buffer against stereotype threats (Markus, 2008) and seem to help them focus on their academic goals and aspirations (Horvat & Lewis, 2003), the discursive production of the high-achieving student in the figured world of the classroom and school leaves little room for variances. Focusing on an identities-in-practice, such as being loud, can render visible the frequently overlooked interactions and negotiations that significantly affect students’ experiences and identities in classroom contexts, and ultimately their achievement (see Figure 1). Although academic identities do seem to buffer stereotype threats for some students (Markus, 2008), the discursive production of the student in the figured world of achievement can marginalize minoritized students, even those framed as “high achievers.”

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Figure 1.

(In)visibility in academic contexts.

Reframing Narratives in Educational Policy and Reform

The highly contextualized framing of identities-in-practice in this study, grounded in critical, poststructural, and cultural studies scholarship, can be especially generative in addressing the demographic imperative of educators, researchers, and policy makers who seek to expand the opportunities of historically marginalized students. For example, this study renders visible how academic environments can be particularly misleading, as the high-achieving minoritized students who attend selective schools such as NUA are often categorically overlooked in the research literature. Because they score at the “Proficient” level in standardized assessments and are, therefore, considered to be “passing” (Knight, 2003), and because they attend schools that offer “all students” a series of “equal” opportunities, students like Jason, Jonah, Manuel, and to some extent Lina (whose raced, classed, and gendered identities often serve to “other” them in their academic context) run the risk of becoming increasingly disengaged in school during the transition between upper elementary and secondary schooling (Altschul, Oyserman, & Bybee, 2006; Lopez, 2003; Rólon-Dow, 2004).

While numerous reforms have sought to improve the academic success of underserved students, there are frequently gaps in the field’s understanding about what factors support or detract from these reform efforts and how they should be measured. As a case in point, the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI), the most comprehensive program under former president Obama’s nationwide My Brother’s Keeper campaign, sought to improve the academic attainment and college readiness of Black and Latino males in the city’s Department of Education (Villavicencio, Klevan, & Kemple, 2018). Grounded in culturally responsive approaches, ESI benefitted from expert faculty, buy-in from educators, and generous funding for the first two years. Culturally responsive professional development led to educators’ feeling better equipped with the tools to address issues of race that had previously been undiscussed. However, while educators and students reported meaningful changes to school culture and relationships as a result of the initiative, preliminary quantitative analyses determined that ESI had minimal impact on school suspensions, grades, and college readiness measures (Villavicencio et al., 2018). It is in situations like these that an identities-in-practice lens can build most productively on strength-based culturally responsive approaches, and, similar to Harper’s (2014, 2015) research on young Black men in the ESI, work toward reframing deficit narratives about students of color in urban schools to document their success instead. Along with school and student data, student narratives examined via an identities-in-practice lens can illuminate the ongoing negotiations between students’ identities and academic experiences, offering new possibilities to address persistent opportunity gaps.

Rethinking Discourses of Curriculum and Pedagogy

Within the broader discourses of equity and diversity, particular discourses of achievement regarding equity, effort, and colorblindness perpetuate deficit notions about the students of color who do not achieve in “socially just” academic contexts such as NUA. In this sense, multicultural and diverse educational environments committed to equity can also perpetuate restrictive and marginalizing learning environments for students of color—unless they actively and deliberately address the ways in which mainstream achievement discourses contribute to the marginalization of minoritized students (Nasir, 2011).

For instance, Jason, who had attended an elementary school with “mostly Hispanics,” had stood out among his peers in that school. However, in the socioeconomically, ethnically, and socially diverse context of NUA, academic normalization privileges identities that aligned with particular academic literacies and behavioral expectations. Thus, Jason’s gendered and classed realities cast him as less likely to succeed in this high-achieving academic community but also made him less likely to stand out as someone who needs immediate attention because he was not, technically, “at-risk” but also because he is not expected to be as mature and attentive as the girls:

I think that also just like, in general, the girls are so much more mature than the boys—that the boys spend way more time goofing off in class . . . and they just don’t care as much.

When I asked Ms. Brian about which students she thought were struggling, she mentioned two White boys from upper middle-class backgrounds who were phenomenal writers but acted out in class and refused to do the work. When I asked specifically about the cohort of students from which I selected my participants, she responded: “In [this cohort] I think some of the boys, some of the Hispanic boys aren’t like, awesome, but I don’t think any of them are failing” (Interview). Although it would be unfair to suggest that Ms. Brian was indifferent to their success, some of the boys’ underperformance did not seem to stand out to her, even though three of the “Hispanic boys” were participants in this study and all three had progress grades below passing, in the “D” range. The White boys who were positioned as brilliant but did not turn in their work seemed to draw the teacher’s attention, while the boys of color who were plodding along, perhaps embodying conflated positionalities often associated with race, class, and gender, did not cause as much alarm. In this sense, the “loud” identity in practice constructed by students extends the scope and reach of CSP; it illustrates the complexity of individual and classroom/school culture as experienced by students and offers a framework that deepens and enhances our understanding of this dynamic.

I argue that this identities-in-practice framework makes a case for how context matters and how the context of an academic space is shaped and regulated by visible and tangible things like course objectives and classroom rules, as well as intangibles like teachers’ expectations. As indicated by the identities-in-practice that students constructed as “being loud,” this study illuminates factors that remain beneath the surface, such as how the figured world of achievement, shaped by discourses and cultivated by the administration and faculty at the school, creates invisible barriers that (often inadvertently) alienate minoritized students or obscure their needs. In this figured world, discourses of achievement perpetuate a normalization of White middle-class norms that cast students’ loud identities-in-practice as disruptive and deficient. While students identify as loud in association with their cultural worlds outside the classroom, in their academic figured world, “loud” identities-in-practice render visible how restrictive academic discourses (and the conceptions of literacy that they engender) can be for students like Lina and Manuel who work to negotiate their identities as Dominicans, whom they self-identify as being loud, with an implicit sense that being loud is not “academic.” In this sense, it is not specifically the course texts or academic literacies that are restrictive or marginalizing, but the normalization of White middle-class norms, “other” and position the cultural literacies (e.g., bilingual practices, slang, African American Vernacular English) and identities (e.g., being “loud” or “ghetto”) associated with some minoritized students as incompatible with an academic context. This perceived incompatibility fuels misdirected reform efforts that seek to address a misunderstood “gap” in achievement between minoritized students and their White and middle-class peers (Kirkland, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2006). These efforts also ignore the changing demands of an increasingly globalized world, where linguistic and cultural dexterity are gaining political and intellectual relevance and status in mainstream society (e.g., Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014).

More broadly, we must engage the social imagination of scholars, researchers, and educators by promoting the development of situated, context-based curricula and fostering new understandings of curriculum and academic achievement that better serve all students in the interest of the public good. In the wake of the Common Core and college readiness (Common Core State Standards, 2013), amid reforms that seek to standardize what all students should know and be able to do, it is even more important to increase educators’ capacity to develop a more complex and contextual understanding of how students are experiencing increasingly restrictive academic spaces. For example, an identities-in-practice lens fosters discursive spaces and sites of possibility in which educators may, even while implementing state and district mandates, use critical texts and participatory pedagogies to actively challenge historically constructed and propagated power relations typically obscured in their own classrooms (Caraballo, 2014, 2016; Kinloch, 2010). For Laura, negotiating a self-proclaimed, as well as ascribed, identity-in-practice as a loud Dominican presented a layer of complexity with which White students in her class and grade need not contend. Being loud intersected with her academic identity, which in turn was linked to her desire to be named a Principal’s Scholar. Beyond focusing on her schoolwork and all of the other social dynamics encountered by her middle school peers, Laura’s desire to be recognized as an honors student was further complicated by her loud identity-in-practice. Thus, equipped with a more nuanced understanding of students’ identities-in-practice, educators can develop the capacity to support students’ critical meta-awareness and help assuage the compounded effect of marginalizing discourses on students of color. In this sense, a CSP extends well beyond the need to engage critically and respectfully with students’ home cultures and languages; in this case, the enactment of CSP would entail sustaining Laura’s identity as an “honors” student and helping her to contextualize her incisive interpretation of other students’ preconceived notions about her work.

Beyond access to high expectations and a culturally sustaining, innovative curriculum, rightfully promoted by reforms that seek equity of opportunity for underserved students, students like Laura and her peers in this study must therefore have the opportunity to recognize and interrogate the discourses that contribute to their academic and/or multiple identities and will ultimately affect their educational and professional trajectories. Furthermore, as seen in the racial and cultural tensions that are manifest in contemporary political and economic debates, it is also crucial for all students, including those from White and middle-class backgrounds, to develop the critical meta-awareness to engage in productive civil discourse (Justice & Stanley, 2016). Focusing on students’ negotiation of multiple identities in situated contexts, an identities-in-practice lens thus challenges educators, researchers, and policy makers to question normalized narratives of achievement and incites all education stakeholders to reimagine schools and classrooms as spaces of opportunity, dialogue, and critical self-awareness.