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.