The creation and maintenance of a ‘learning‐loving minority’ in conventional high schools: a research‐based response to John Ogbu

Abstract

This research focuses on the adaptation strategies of students from an innovative elementary school run as a community of learners who have been involuntarily ‘thrown into’ competitive, credentialism‐based high schools. We apply the anthropologist John Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological framework of ‘minority’ to the innovative school graduates in their new school contexts. The students in our study, whom we refer to as a ‘learning‐loving minority’, were generally academically successful in their new conventional schools, yet expressed distinctly ambivalent attitudes toward conventional schooling practices. Discourse analysis revealed distinct response patterns, some paralleling those of (unsuccessful) involuntary minority students and others paralleling those of (successful) immigrant minority students described by Ogbu. We suggest that Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological approach can be useful for education research but should be modified to take into account the effect of the institution of conventional schooling itself—its competitive, credentialistic and meritocratic nature—which has to date been under‐analysed within Ogbu’s theoretical perspective.

Notes

1. K‐8 covers the age group 5–14 in the USA.

2. The school is named in our research reports, a decision taken by the NCCL community. Newark is a university town in Delaware, USA. However, all the names of the participants mentioned in the paper are pseudonyms.

3. A detailed discussion of the methodology of the study and its participants, including discussion of the study’s limitations, can be found elsewhere (DePalma et al., 2009).

4. A more detailed discussion of the ‘boot camp’ can be found elsewhere (DePalma et al., 2009).