Los Olvidados: Literacy, ethnography, and the forgotten students of Addison High.

The result of approximately three years of ethnographic study, Los Olvidados (the forgotten ones) describes the educational experiences of a group of Spanish-speaking Latino students attending a predominantly Anglo rural high school (which I call "Addison High") in Southeast Michigan. Participant-observation accounts and interview transcripts are used to illustrate and analyze the dialectical interaction between the social structures that constrain what goes on at Addison High and the agency effected by individual teachers and students. Drawing upon the work of Paul Willis and Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that the structure of Addison High includes classroom instruction and social practices that perpetuate existing power relations and class control through the reproduction of an arbitrary dominant culture. In Addison, this "cultural reproduction" tends to ensure continuity of the ideological privilege that places Latino students in the margins of their school and community. I argue, further, that such structures pose epistemological and ethical challenges for researchers who presume to construct the "other" based on their own culturally-biased rhetorical frameworks. Nonetheless, because social structures are not static, whatever control they mediate is always in flux, and Los Olvidados also demonstrates that, at Addison High, individuals sometimes work to revise the ways in which poor and/or minority students usually act and are acted upon. In writing of such agency, I pay particular attention to the Tesoros (treasures) literacy project: a ten-week program I initiated in which Spanish-speaking members of an English as a Second Language class read and wrote collaboratively with a group of poor Anglo students from a section of eleventh-grade American Literature. Situated within the school but maneuvering outside the parameters normally established by Addison High's curriculum, the Tesoros project is presented as a modest example of how literacy practices might encourage the empathetic and mutually-responsive relationships that writers like John Dewey and Maxine Greene hope will lead to communities defined by positive social action.Ph.D.English and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105085/1/9635505.pdfDescription of 9635505.pdf : Restricted to UM users only