Young Black and Latino men face profound academic obstacles in transitioning to college. Few studies have interrogated college readiness practices in urban schools through the lens of masculinity. Drawing on a yearlong ethnography, this study investigated how young men respond to college-readiness practices while enacting masculinity. Many young…

Young Black and Latino men transition from high school to 4-year universities at rates considerably lower than their peers. College-going disparities by gender are partly influenced by young men's constrained access to social capital in high school. This research explores how gendered inequalities in social capital arise for college-aspiring…

Purpose: Much scholarly hand-wringing has concerned the academic engagement of Black and Latino boys. At the center of these conversations are questions of culture. Cultural disconnects between home and school are profound for students from marginalized communities, particularly so for young men. Prudence Carter asserts that young men in urban…

Background/Context: Yoga, as a recent cultural phenomenon in the United States, is often marketed as a way to relieve stress and anxiety. This has led to yoga becoming widespread in schools, particularly schools that serve low income youth of color. While some advocates argue that yoga can help students navigate highly controlled, standards-based…

An analysis of praxis can inform how teachers treat lumpen masculinities performed by young Black men, who are some of the most socially defiant and alienated from US schooling and upward mobility, specifically, and other cisgender boys of color, generally. To make sense of heteropatriarchy, toxic masculinity, and urban misogyny in the classroom,…

National data trends underscore the "problem" of Black male achievement. Beneath the causes and consequences are the ideologies used to frame the problem and its solutions. The ideology of meritocracy is routinely employed to rationalize educational disparities. This article examined how White male teachers, in a charter school designed…

This paper examines the process by which stereotypical mainstream representations of black males (as hard, as anti-school, and as disconnected from the domestic sphere) were reimagined in all-black, all-male manhood development classes for 9th graders in urban public high schools. Findings show that instructors debunked stereotypes and created new…

Relational theories of gender conceptualize masculinity and femininity as mutually constitutive. Using a relational approach, I analyzed ethnographic and interview data from male and female black adolescents in Grades 8 through 10 enrolled in ''Diversify,'' an urban-to-suburban racial integration program ("n" = 38).…

The shift in attention to the "boy crisis" has been fuelled by a spate of popular trade books dealing with raising of boys and the alleged failures and deceptions of feminist educational reforms. This article argues that from a black feminist perspective the "boy crisis" depicted in these texts is a misnomer because no social…

What's it like for Black male students who are openly gay or "gender non-conforming" to navigate the social geography of urban schools? In the tradition of critical ethnographies of schooling, Lance T. McCready mobilizes feminist theories of intersectionality to explore the voices of Black gay male students and their teachers in a…

In this empirical study, the authors draw on classroom observations and interviews with twenty-three Black male ninth graders in an urban district to focus on the nature of disciplinary practices in an all-Black, all-male manhood development class. While scholars have identified the "discipline gap" as a salient aspect of the experience…

Background/Context: Over the past decade, a growing chorus of educational stakeholders has called for the recruitment of more Black men into the American teaching profession, casting these men as ideal surrogate father figures for Black youth who may lack adult male role models in their families or communities. Although a small body of scholarly…

Punking is a practice of verbal and physical violence, humiliation, and shaming usually done in public by males to other males. This definition is based on interviews and discussion groups with 32 adolescent boys and on media sources within which adolescent males are embedded. Discourse analysis findings reveal that punking terminology and…

The study on which this paper is based examined the experiences of students in order to develop a theoretical and empirically grounded account of the dynamic social forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced by youth in their unique contexts of North American urban schooling. The ethnographic scenes, organized into four "beats,"…

This article demonstrates how literacy practices in an 11th grade, urban, English classroom in the United States worked to delineate and patrol gender borders between acceptable masculine and feminine social practices. Drawing upon Blackburn's (2005) and Thorne's (1993) studies of the gendered boundaries that are created and questioned in literacy…