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ABSTRACT
Drawing on a 3-year ethnographic study in 2 urban high schools serving majority low-income students of color, we reveal how the meaning and authoring of self in mathematics and science are produced among high-achieving students in contexts profoundly influenced by neoliberal policies. We highlight the institutional practices and cultural imaginaries that students responded to as they developed identities in math and science at the schools. These processes ”hollowed out” the identity of “being good” at mathematics and science while conferring status and good moral character on those who could author themselves in these shallow terms.
Acknowledgments
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors. We are also most grateful for the insights offered by Lois Weis and her colleagues at the University of Buffalo who collaborated with us on the larger project on which this article is based and by other members of our team at the University of Colorado Boulder, especially Sarah Leibrandt and Terri Wilson.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the National Science Foundation.
Notes
1 It should be noted that this agenda is also central to equity goals, such as broadening participation in STEM. However, see Gershon (Citation2011) for the argument that broadening participation is in fact fully consistent with and easily encompassed by neoliberal doctrine.
2 Carlone, Kimmel, and Tschida (Citation2010) described the “dual promotion” of science and character education at a rural elementary school. Although their points differ from ours, they offer another example of a close link between science and morality.
3 This meaning of “hollowed out” differs from its use in much of the literature on neoliberalism; it more commonly refers to the dismantling of state services (e.g., Hursh, Citation2014).