Shout out!

I have submitted my Intent and had my meeting with the Dean. My committee is awaiting their official invitations to participante. Phew!
I want to give a shout out to the principals of the nine schools where I will be collecting my data. They all approved my proposal and gave me permission within a week of receiving my letter!! Thank you so much for your support. I am looking forward to working wiht you on this project.
On another note, the paper I co-authored with Dr. John Maddaus of the University of Maine at Farmington has been submitted to the Journal of Research on Rural Education. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Identity

The discussant in our paper session at AERA mentioned that she found it interesting that when one is looking at rural poverty, the participants are lacking a distinct identity because they don’t have the added identity of a minority race or ethnicity. I disagree. I think they do have a distinct identity and it may be their ruralness, but it may also be other things that define them. It could also be a white identity. My participants showed that they were defined by their rural location. I don’t think they are lacking an identity.

Success

I listened to a presentation at AERA by Michael Corbett, a sociologist from Acadia Univeristy in Nova Scotia. He has looked at rurality as a sense of place. He talked about changes and the changes that rural youth must anticipate and adapt to during emerging adulthood. He made a point that really made me think. He said that most recently he is wondering if it isn’t that working class families aren’t serious about higher education, but that in fact they might be more serious and see higher education as a way to get a better career and make more money. They may put pressure on their children to know what it is they want to do and then pursue that career path through education. When the children can’t live up to those expectations, they may not follow through at all. In contrast, the more well off parents may be encouraging the period of emerging adulthood and may push their kids to go to college to explore and find themselves, versus knowing from the start.

Generational Poverty

I find myself getting worried about our students, about their success and whether or not they will make it. There are some participants from my original study whose aspirations were high and who wanted to achieve very high goals. Several of them did not achieve those goals and it isn’t because they didn’t try, but because there were other things. This is a complex issue that is so frustrating for practitioners. What I am wondering is if this is because we are trying to change generational poverty. We are trying to interrupt something that is entrenched in a family and it embedded in an individual’s history, context, and biography. So, my questions is. . .does it take more than a generation to break the cycle? Upward Bound is only 40 years old, so it is really too soon to tell if the children of our alumni will all go to college and if what Upward Bound did for them was to change the culture of their families, but they could not benefit from the program in the way that we had intend for them to.

The Intent

I finished my first draft of my intent. It feels like things are much clearer. I have felt unsettled about going with the hope theme because that was my word, not theirs. Now I am much more comfortable with the decisions I made to really just look at resilence and how my participants define it. It is usually the dominant society (middle to upper class) which defines what success is and it is quite possible that an adolescent growing up in rural poverty could in fact have a different definition of what it means to be successful and resilient within this context. The implications for gaining a better understanding of how this population defines success and resilience are numerous for practicioners. I think I will also be able to try to get at why many of them are not successful (by the dominant culture's standards). I have also worked out the details of my methods. I have decided to conduct my interpretive focus groups at 7 schools with approximately 50 kids. I am then going to do 5 nested case studies where I interview the parents and a teacher that is connected to five of my participants. The nested case studies will help me to triangulate my data and add rigor to my study.

My next issue is funding. I have applied for a research assistant through UMF, so if I am able to get one to help with the transcribing, then that will be a huge asset. I am also looking for other funding options so that I can compensate my participants and their families.