This article examines African American, Latina/o, and White high school students' assertions of cultural and ethnic identities as they struggle for their educational rights in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In doing so, this study illustrates the ways in which alternative spaces outside the formal context of schools facilitate expressions,…

This article explores the figured world of learning at urban Oakcity High School, describing the learner identities that were available to students amid the practices, categories, discourses and interactions of this world. My aims are 2-fold and interconnected: (1) to reframe a taken-for-granted phenomenon--that students tend to do poorly at urban…