Self-Fashioning and Shape-Shifting

I found this chapter really interesting. The differences between working-class and upper-middle-class identities of teenagers are enlghtening, and the portions of transcripts Gee includes from his study support his conclusions. It made me wonder if one of the reasons why working-class teens focus more on interactions through narrations, rather than their futures, has to do with the levels of concerns. Many of the students I taught were in survival-mode, so the possibility of college was a concept of luxury rather than necessity. Gee describes working-class teens as "reacting intelligently to an 'on the ground' reality" rather than the hope for future success and achievement that the upper-middle-class kids express in their interviews (182). While I realize the roots of these differences are increasingly complex in terms of culture, class, racism, etc., I do feel our current school system perpetuates and socially reproduces ideas of which people are capable of what thinking, jobs, etc. This is obvious in Gee's description of the differences in schooling at the bottom of page 182. It is this deficit thinking personified in our schools that disturbs me. While Gee, on page 183, credits "families and the society at large" for these inequities, while later offering a simple solution of resourcing students in urban schools with modern technologies, I think we have to do much more to help working-class teens shift their thinking toward the possiblities that could await them in the future. Furthermore, we need to shift our own thinking of simply providing these teens with the opportunity for a job in the future to a liberating education of highly critical thinking.

bell hooks speaks of these differences as well in her own experiences as a teacher at both Yale with upper-middle-class students and a Harlem school with working class students. She describes the difference being that upper-middle-class students possess a sense of agency and entitlement while working class students seem to be missing this agency. You can view her 6-minute video about this here:



So, beyond providing working-class students with modern technologies, how can we encourage them to experience and embody their own agency and entitlement to a successful future?