Voices of Reason: Adolescents Talk About Their Futures Over Time

Voices of Reason

Voices of Reason Adolescents Talk About Their Futures Over Time Steven B. Sachs

BERGIN & GARVEY Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sachs, Steven B., 1954Voices of reason : adolescents talk about their futures over time / Steven B. Sachs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89789-839-7 (alk. paper) 1. Teenagers—United States—Life skills guides. 2. Teenagers—United States—Vocational guidance. 3. Decision making in adolescence—United States. I. Title. HQ796.S2 2002 646.7′00835—dc21

2001037659

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Steven B. Sachs All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001037659 ISBN: 0-89789-839-7 First published in 2002 Bergin & Garvey, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my wife, Maryse, and our own adolescents Binford and Jen; And to my mother, Sally Binford Sachs

Contents

Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Contents

Part I Introduction 1 Introduction 2 Theoretical Orientation

1 3 13

Part II A Vivid Introduction to the H-Team Students 3 The Great Orator 4 Goes With the Wind 5 Pulling Teeth 6 A Balancing Act 7 Getting the Job Done 8 The (Com)passionate Communicator 9 Two Voices

35 37 65 79 93 123 141 171

Part III Discourse Analysis and Conclusion 10 Seeing Beyond the Talk 11 Conclusion: Implications for Research and Practice

185 187 239

Appendix 1 Selective Quantitative Findings from Early Questionnaire Appendix 2 General Coding Categories Appendix 3 Rules for Coding Future Talk Appendix 4 Coder Instructions: Coding Future Talk Appendix 5 Interviewer Discourse Codes: Examples

245 249 251 259 263

viii

Contents

Appendix 6 Discussion about Reliability and Validity in This Study

267

Bibliography

271

Index

277

Illustrations

Illustrations

FIGURES 10.1 G Rating Rank Order

210

10.2 Comparing Match between Intuitive and Actual G Rating Rank Orders

211

10.3 Comparing Rank Order of the Three Measures

212

10.4 Interview Success

212

10.5 Frequencies of Six Grounded Reference Types

219

10.6 Cumulative Summary of the Six Grounded Reference Types 220 10.7 Total Cumulative Count for Each of Six Grounded Reference Types 221 10.8 Features of Success

222

10.9 D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. Flow Chart

235

TABLES 1.1 Broad Features Differentiating Interview Talk

7

10.1 Demographics of the Students Participating in Study

189

10.2 Results of Inter-rater Reliability across All Students: Percent Agreement and Correlation Coefficient

199

x

Illustrations

10.3 Results of Inter-rater Reliability by Student: Categories 1, 2 and 3 Combined

200

10.4 Future Talk Intuitiveness Record

201

10.5 Intuitiveness Rating Results

202

10.6 Results of the Three Actual Measures and Actual G Rating

209

10.7 Comparing Ratings and Rank Orders of Intuitive and Actual G Ratings

210

10.8 Quantitative Results of Interviewer Discourse Codes

217

Preface

Preface

This book evolved from an academic and professional journey that began twenty-five years ago while I was a psychology major in college and while working on a Master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. Throughout that period I thought much about how people come to choose their personal and career paths and how education serves to help or hinder their decision-making processes. During the years immediately following receipt of my Master’s degree I went to work for a large private institute that served young adults with developmental and psychiatric conditions, as a counselor and diagnostic evaluator. I was asked to establish a testing center that would assist staff counselors with drafting career plans for these individuals. Many of the individuals served by the institute could only be employed in sheltered, workshop settings because of the severity of their disabilities. The few who could consider employment in the workforce faced daunting challenges in adjusting to life made very strange to them by having been previously institutionalized, sometimes for many years. After a time, I moved from Philadelphia to Boston and again established a testing center for a large agency with a similar population and for similar reasons. Soon thereafter I entered the private sector to begin a private practice serving the personal, social and educational/vocational needs of individuals who became disabled while working, or for those who have never worked. For the next ten years I provided extensive (and sometimes intensive) counseling and testing services to adults, ranging in age from eighteen to sixty-eight, for periods ranging from several months to several years depending on the severity of their disabilities

xii

Preface

or injuries. During that time it became increasingly evident to me that many of these adults had had inadequate educational and/or guidance experiences while completing their primary and secondary education. In fact, the recurring theme I heard from them, after they had completed testing and counseling with me, was, “If I had known then what I know now I would have taken a different path.” And, too often, I saw that they would have been much better served with respect to their career choices, had they indeed had the guidance services in their early education experience. I found that career choices that did not match interests, aptitude, and ability not only resulted in unfulfilling work but also impacted other facets of their lives. Too many became high school dropouts because school failed to show them what it could do for their futures as adults. In some cases I’ve been able to help them “correct” their earlier “mistakes” but in many cases it has been a difficult or even impossible task. These hundreds upon hundreds of anecdotes alarmed me enough to try to do something about it. I decided then that I would return to my own education and enter a doctoral program that would give me the training to research this concern. At Clark University, in the doctoral program in education, I quickly focused my studies around the issue of how children begin making connections between school and their futures as adults. Eventually I gained permission to design an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program that gave me the tools I would need to conduct my dissertation research. Sarah Michaels, who later became my dissertation chair, invited me to conduct a survey of a group of 82 middle school urban students who were participants in a controversial, experimental heterogeneous (i.e., untracked) program to see what they thought about it. I developed a questionnaire for the assignment and then completed a full quantitative/qualitative analysis. This gave me an extraordinary opportunity to design a study around my own interest in students’ decision-making processes and school-to-work connection. Juxtaposing my research work (with ten of the students over a period of five years, which would culminate in my dissertation) to my academic studies, I participated in a series of seminars in qualitative methods generally and discourse analysis specifically. That training, under the direction of James Paul Gee and Sarah Michaels, provided me with the skills I would need to complete the analysis of that very large project. To help explicate the results of the five-year study, I developed discourse analytic tools. Those tools helped to assess the degree of groundedness in adolescents’ decisions about their educational and vocational goals and the degree to which the interviews, as co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee, were successful. This book is based on that work.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Many have helped to make this book a reality. In the company of and with guidance from intellectual giants, I benefited enormously. Chief among them was Sarah Michaels, Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University, who insisted always that I’d have to push harder and farther if I wanted to step into the arena of education research using discourse analysis. I am most grateful to her for her guidance and for that I can never thank her enough. I had the good fortune to receive guidance also from James Paul Gee, sociocultural linguist, before he left Clark for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Gee, through both his direct advice and readings of his numerous published works, has had a profound effect on the way I conduct my own work. His brilliance and candor both helped enormously to shape my work. I want also to thank David Zern, Associate Professor of Education and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology, for his important guidance. His influence started many years earlier when I first informally inquired about doing doctoral work at Clark. He will always be in my memory as a source of inspiration. I am grateful to Fern Johnson, Chair of the English Department, Clark University. Just a few words from her e-mails went a long way to keeping up my spirit. And I would be remiss if I did not in passing mention Edwin Herr, Professor Emeritus, Education Department, Pennsylvania State University, who, through his teaching, guidance and enormous scholarly contribution to the field of career guidance and counseling has influenced my work.

xiv

Acknowledgments

To Kathy Goldstein, an extraordinary middle school teacher (now principal) whose passion for teaching was often mentioned by the students in our interviews, many thanks for helping me to get my research off the ground. And I am grateful to my colleagues at Clark for all the phone calls, the e-mails and the moments for quick comments in the hallways. And I would like to thank the school administrators who, in spite of their very busy lives, always found time to help me arrange the interviews. Five years is a long time to ask anyone to remain interested. I’ve grown fond and greatly appreciative of the Spencer Foundation for its help in funding my work—particularly Marty Rutherford for encouraging me to consider writing this book. But Spencer has given me much more; the conferences in Racine, Wisconsin (Wingspread), New Orleans and Seattle (in which I was invited to present my work) provided splendid opportunities to be with others who are passionate about their own work. Through their Practitioner Research Communication and Mentoring Program, Spencer has brought together educators and researchers from around the world to learn from one another. I want to thank my family for supporting me, for this has been as much an emotional journey as an intellectual one; to my wife, Maryse, who shared my many moments of frustration and elation as only a significant other could, and for all of the promises that had to be repeatedly pushed back; to my children, Binford and Jen, who had just barely begun their own primary school careers when I set out on my journey; to both my father and my brother who have left this earth much too early, and to my mother, whose unwavering belief in me has been a constant source of inspiration. Finally, without “my kids,” the ten students, this book could not have been written. Their willingness to meet with me for five years is a testament to their own recognition that education and careers are essential to all of our futures. In giving of themselves selflessly so that we can better understand what students think, they will help others achieve more fulfilling lives.

I

Introduction

1 Introduction

I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen. Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that. I (could) go to law school for that. Police academy. Stuff like that, but . . . . Angela: ninth grade—urban community high school Introduction

A full-view conference room, adjacent to administrative offices at a large urban community high school, is vacant except for the interviewer. School personnel and students peer in as they pass, some smiling but say nothing. A tape recorder and video camera are in plain view. On the table is a note pad. Angela’s name can be heard over the intercom, telling her to report to the main office. She arrives moments later and is greeted by the interviewer who is seeing her for the second time, the first a year before when she attended middle school, which is only a stone’s throw from where she now stands. She politely greets the interviewer with a handshake and is directed to sit in a designated chair that is positioned properly for video recording. The door is shut for privacy. But even with the door closed, voices can be heard outside and the intercom is busy sending messages, making requests or sounding the bell marking the end of classes. Angela knows why she is here; she will talk about her school experience this year, her life outside of school and her plans for the future. She also knows that her interview is being recorded so that it can be later transcribed for analysis and that the interviewer hopes to see her each year until she graduates from high school. And Angela knows she is one of ten students who have agreed to these interviews, each acquainted with the other from their membership in an experimental non-tracked program that began when they,

4

Voices of Reason

along with 72 other students from diverse ethnic and academic backgrounds, were in seventh grade. Angela is uncertain about what she’ll do when she completes high school; she has dreams about becoming a lawyer or a police officer. The year before Angela was on a different path in her thinking about her goals:

EXAMPLE OF “FUTURE TALK“ Interviewer: Do you know where you’re going to go after high school? Angela: Not really. I want to go to college. I: Okay, well— A: I want to take up like nursing. I: You want to go into nursing? A: Yeah. I: Okay. Where are you going to go to college? A: I want to go to, I don’t know—Amherst? I: Where is it? Do you remember where it is? A: We went there on a field trip. I think— I: Is it far away from here? A: Yeah. Am—? I: Amherst? A: Yeah, something like that. Amherst College. I don’t know. I: All right. Why do you think you might want to go there? Did you like it? A: Yeah, I liked it? We went there on a field trip and it was nice. I: What were you doing on the field trip? What was it for?

Introduction

5

A: I guess if you wanted to get in there or something like that. And they told us about the classes and if you wanted to take up all these things, what we’d have to do. I: Okay, so you’re thinking about going to college? A: Yes. I: Thinking about making a goal of going to college? A: Yes. I: Work hard in high school? A: Mm-hmm. I: So, what do you think will happen after college? Try to think about later on, down the road. A: I hope to become what I want to become. I: Nursing? A: Mm-hmm. I might become a nurse, but—. I: What’s holding you back? A: Well, if you can’t get a job or something. I: Well, they have a lot of jobs in nursing. Are you thinking about going to nursing school after college? A: Mm-hmm. I: Could be a nursing school at the college? A: Mm-hmm.

In contrast, John, in his eighth-grade interview, tightly weaves together school subjects, extracurricular activities with self-assessment of his abilities to suggest a goal but still, at this early stage, points out that his primary goal is to prepare for college: Interviewer: Do you have any sense of where you might take the interest you have now and get it worked into some kind of a career or a job that—.

6

Voices of Reason John: I’m going to say—my best two subjects are science and math—my highest grade averages. I am good at both of them. I just—my main goal right now is to go to college, you know? Once I get there, I can decide. But what I have to worry about now is going to college. I mean, I can do them really well. So I thought engineering would be a good field to go into. And I’m going to still play basketball, because that would enhance my chances of getting a scholarship. Besides my grades I have the athletics to go with it, too. So, I’ll keep working.

When Angela’s and John’s transcripts are compared, broad discourse features differentiate the co-constructed talk as shown in Table 1.1. Early in the interviews it was apparent to me that these ten students had different discourse styles, some vastly so, and it seemed to me that part of how and how effectively their stories would be told would have to do with how I was helpful or a hindrance to those encounters. Research questions formed from these early analyses became the basis for my doctoral dissertation on which, in large part, this book is based. I was also finding what I had all along theorized, that many students were not getting meaningful guidance services. In fact, in my 20-year counseling career I have come to know many individuals, of various ages and backgrounds, who have entered adulthood with little or no understanding about their educational and career options. Often, after they completed interest and ability testing with me, they learned, for the first time, things about themselves that at an earlier time might have led them in different, possibly more fulfilling, directions. “An earlier time” in this case refers to their middle and high school years when important decisions were being made about their educational and ultimately their vocational options. All of them had access to standard guidance counseling programs. From my own counseling experiences, and from the popular press, it appears that these standard approaches to helping students make career choices are not working. 1 This is especially true in the inner-city schools where students see their guidance counselors briefly several times each year to “sign off” on their choice of classes, or, in some cases, only if they have some particular academic or behavior problem. Particularly disadvantaged are the students who are struggling in their academic work or failing to find school interesting.

STUDIES FIND WEAK GUIDANCE SERVICES In fact, a review of studies conducted elsewhere (National Commission on Secondary Vocational Education, 1985; Prediger, Roth, and Noeth, 1973; Weissberg et al., 1982), point to evidence of a long-standing problem with students often not receiving guidance counseling that re-

Introduction

7

TABLE 1.1 Broad Features Differentiating Interview Talk John • Interviewee dominates quantity of talk • Interviewee “peak” turns represent the core of the discourse (peak turns are those that stand out as the longest in terms of number of words) • Active looking graphical representation of discourse with lots of turns exceeding 40 words (can see word count pattern in graphical form much like an EKG) • Vertical building of the “stories” with respect to the interviewee, requiring relatively little prompting by the interviewer to provide full answers.

• Some closed-ended questions by the interviewer, but interviewee continues discourse beyond. • Only one series of one-word turns by the interviewee. In the total discourse, nearly the same number of one-word turns as the interviewer (20 & 17 respectively, for a total of 37). • 12 judgment words (i.e., encourage interviewee to continue his talk with interviewer support).

Angela • Interviewer dominates quantity of talk • Interviewee “peak” turns do not provide enough substance to stand alone.

• Flat-looking graph with few turns that exceed 40 words.

• Horizontal building of the “stories” with respect to the interviewer required to frequently question the interviewee over numerous turns in an attempt to achieve full answers to questions. • Many closed-ended questions by the interviewer treated as such by the interviewee. • Six series of one-word turns by the interviewee. In the total interview, more than a 4 to 1 ratio between the interviewee’s use of one word turns and the interviewer’s use (37 & 8 respectively, for a total of 45). • 4 judgment words or phrases by the interviewer.

sult in realistic educational and vocational choices. This applies across the various academic preparation programs including college preparatory, general coursework, and vocational-technical areas where there is increasing concerns about the disparity between the level of skills young adults bring to the workforce and those needed by employers (Grubb, 1995). Of particular, urgent concern regarding the fundamental goal of school programs to prepare students for productive lives as

8

Voices of Reason

adults are the students who are at risk for not completing even their secondary education. In its most recent report (1998), the U.S. Department of Education reported dropout statistics for the United States of about 5 out of every 100 high school students. While this rate remained steady over the past ten years, and represents an improvement from the decade of the 1970s, the dropout rate for Hispanic students was nearly two and one-half times that of whites (9.4 vs. 3.9), and somewhat less than twice the rate of African-American students (9.4 vs. 5.2). Family economic status was also a significant indicator of student dropout potential. In 1998, young adults living in families with incomes at the lowest 20 percent of all family incomes were four times as likely as their peers from families in the top 20 percent to drop out of high school. In actual numbers, in October 1998, 3.9 million young adults did not complete high school. Of very significant concern are the Hispanic young adults who were born outside of the United States: Forty-four percent became high school dropouts (Kaufman, Kwon, and Chapman, 1999). In addition to the troubling dropout rate are concerns about the students who receive little or no or inappropriate guidance. Because guidance counselors traditionally serve as gatekeepers as they direct students’ futures (and in many cases give passage or denial to their educational wishes), it is crucial to examine their roles in conjunction with how students, especially at-risk2 adolescents, make their choices.

OBJECTIVES FOR THIS BOOK Given the complexities of the world today, particularly the rapidly changing global economy and the need for more highly trained people, it is all the more essential that students have the opportunity to match their abilities and interests with realistic goals and to understand how the educational or vocational training systems work so that they can have a realistic chance to reach those goals. By offering a rich presentation of adolescents’ struggles and achievements as they move through their important years toward adulthood, this book highlights their successes and shortcomings. It comprises their stories about their school experiences, home, and social lives, and their views on social issues. It is also about their decision-making capabilities, with regards to both communication competence and evidence for making connections between abilities, interests, and goals and how to achieve them. The reader will “hear” the students’ stories in their own words as they told them to me over five years, talking about their families, schools, friends, social issues, and the like, all of which impact quality and capacity to think critically about, and to articulate, their goals.

Introduction

9

This book is also about how to use tools of discourse analysis to make sense of co-constructed talk. While it is primarily about “future talk” here, these tools are applicable to any talk situation where assessing degree of success in the talk is desired. In the case here, my goal is to raise the readers’ consciousness about adolescents’ own concerns about their educational and vocational futures. In offering profiles of ten very different students (different with respect to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and academic standing), chances are good that the reader will see something of him/herself or someone he/she knows and cares about endeavoring to develop their own future plans. This is not a book by an expert telling the reader how to do better counseling, or how to be better counseled, but instead offers systematic ways to evaluate the significance of powerful stories by students, in their own words, struggling to make sense of their lives as they move through their middle and high school years and beyond. It is a book intended for parents, teachers, guidance counselors (all of whom are guidance sources for kids), education researchers, and for students themselves. The reader may ask how we can expect students in their middle school years to know what they wish to do for their careers. The answer simply is that they are not expected to know. What we should expect, and what is a focus of this book, is that they be able to develop decision-making skills of progressively more complexity as they move through their educational experiences, beginning in elementary school. Even in those early school grades, it is not too early to begin exploring interests, thinking about what they like and what they are good at, and begin making connections between them and education preparation. Empowering kids by giving them recognition for their own voices paves the way for them to become better decision-makers, and ultimately gives way to happier and more productive lives. In essence, others serve as influencers and gatekeepers—not just guidance counselors—including parents, teachers and peers. Students’ own capacity to think critically and to articulate their views ultimately determines their social and economic path(s). The book is organized to accommodate the interests of a wide spectrum of readers, from the casual reader who may find it enough to read only stretches of talk by the participants for self-reflection, to the serious educator-as-researcher who wants to develop discourse analytic skills to conduct his/her own inquiries, to graduate students taking an introductory qualitative methods course. The book is divided into three parts. Part I includes this chapter, which finishes out the introduction with a brief discussion about how the study came to be, and chapter 2, which provides a summary of research questions that guided my study, a brief

10

Voices of Reason

review of the literature that has informed it, followed by an overview of approaches to analysis of discourses as a prelude to tools of analysis that I developed to assist in analyzing this study. Part II includes chapters 3–9, which collectively present a comprehensive qualitative introduction to the ten students using excerpts from five years of interviews, along with my comments. Each of those chapters presents a different interview style and includes one or two of the ten students who represent those talk styles respectively. Part III includes chapter 10, which is the heart of the study’s methodology, results, and analysis of findings. The closing chapter, 11, offers conclusions and suggestions for using this book to improve guidance services and awareness among adolescents through class projects, and as a supplement to an introductory research methodology course.

THE H-TEAM A year prior to the start of the research for this study, I began working with a group of middle school teachers in an experimental, “untracked” academic program. This program, known as the “Heterogeneous Team,” was the first of its kind in a large urban center in the northeastern United States, a city in which all middle schools and high schools, up until that point, had been academically tracked. That program, referred to as the “H-Team,” sought to teach students from a full range of academic capabilities in untracked classes. A group of 82 students volunteered for the program and were assigned to work with four teachers (English, history, math, and science) and a reading specialist. This group of 82 was representative of the ethnic, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and academic abilities of the larger middle school (of nearly 1,000 seventh and eighth graders). Because of the experimental and quite controversial nature of the program, I was invited to find out from these students (who were then in the eighth grade) what they thought of their first-of-its-kind program. From a questionnaire that I developed for that purpose, I completed a quantitative analysis and report. 3 The results were interesting, but I wanted more in-depth, qualitative information from the students. I asked permission to return to the school the same year to talk to a subset of the H-Team students one on one, in videotaped interviews. The teachers selected 14 students whom they identified as representative of the larger group, with respect to ethnicity, SES, and likely academic track in a traditional program. I met individually with these 14 students, interviewed each for approximately 30–45 minutes, and transcribed our conversations. That was the start of my longitudinal study.

Introduction

11

So compelling to me were the differences in these initial interviews, with respect to what they were telling me and how and how effectively they were doing it, that I returned to interview 10 of the 14 students a year later, at the end of their ninth grade year5 when they were no longer in the H-Team program. Now, instead, the 10 were in four different high schools, ranging from an inner-city “comprehensive” high school, the city’s vocational technical high school, the high school in the wealthiest part of town (considered the most academically challenging high school in the city) and a parochial school. From that point on, I contacted the students near the end of each successive academic year, wherever they were in school, and interviewed them on videotape. My interviews thus captured these students from eighth grade until the end of their high school careers, with most ready to graduate and move on to college or work. This book will take the reader on a journey into the thoughts and actions of students much like those they know—or perhaps are or have been themselves.

NOTES 1. Herr (1992) cites a1989 Gallup Poll survey for the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee and the National Career Development Association that found nearly two-thirds of American adults would have wished for more guidance before making career choices, with minority adults (i.e., African-American 79 percent and Hispanics 75 percent) indicating the highest interest. 2. The term “at risk” refers here to the students who are at risk for dropping out of school, have behavioral problems that interfere with learning, are academically challenged or are disadvantaged in some other way(s) so that their academic performance and/or educational/vocational futures are in jeopardy (i.e., SES, single parent homes, minority status, etc.). 3. In Appendix 1 I provide some of the quantitative findings that relate, in part, to this study by topic (that is, career goals) and that help to characterize the H-Team as a group.

2 Theoretical Orientation

TheoreticalOrientation

This chapter will give the reader the research questions that emerged from the early analyses touched upon in chapter 1. Then a review of literature pertinent to my study will be offered, and finally an overview of discourse analysis will be presented as an introduction for readers not familiar with it.

THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS My study was guided by the following research questions: 1. How do interviews help us to see students’ stories, to understand more about them from their own perspective, and to understand more about how to help them make appropriate career-related decisions and choices? That is, what do the interviews reveal that a typical guidance counselor would not gain access to? 2. What can we see in the interviews about students’ understanding and ways of talking about their future? How do students differ from one another with respect to their “groundedness” in talking about future goals or work? In other words, to what extent is their future-related talk grounded in real experience or personal knowledge? How well does the groundedness or the lack of groundedness in the students’ “future talk” relate to their choices and success at the end of high school? 3. How much of a role does the interviewer play as co-constructor of these interviews? How can this kind of analysis influence the work of guidance counselors more broadly? How can the tools of dis-

14

Voices of Reason

course analysis that are used in this study be applied to guidance counselors’ own guidance as a tool for practitioner research and improving services to students?

GROWING PROMINENCE OF QUALITATIVE APPROACH TO STUDY OF CAREER DECISION-MAKING During the last two decades a significant shift to qualitative approaches to career theory has taken place. Earlier, vocational decision-making research had almost exclusively come from quantitative, positivist, and empirical traditions (Herr and Cramer, 1992). In that tradition, first brought to prominence by Frank Parsons (an engineer considered the founder of formalized vocational guidance in the United States), the focus of inquiry and analysis is predominantly in the form of norm-based standardized aptitude and achievement tests and interest inventories based on “traits and factors” approaches (e.g., abilities, work values, SES, personality factors, educational achievement). Today, career counseling is increasingly also about gaining understanding of what lies behind what students say beyond what standardized tests tell them (and us). For that reason, a range of more qualitative (e.g., ethnographic, interview-based, inductive) approaches have gained strong ground because they go further in capturing the richness and multidimensionality of the individual’s thinking and action (in some meaningful context) as he/she goes about the process of making decisions. It has been nearly a century since Parsons defined what he called “true reasoning” as it relates to the process of vocational guidance: First, a clear understanding of yourself, aptitudes, abilities, interests, resources, limitations, and other qualities. Second, a knowledge of the requirements and conditions of success, advantages, and disadvantages, compensation, opportunities, and prospects in different lines of work. Third, true reasoning on the relations of these two groups of facts. (1909: 5)

My study examines the third of these steps as it relates to how and how effectively students articulate their goals and the arguments (grounded references) for their goals, through discourse analysis of our co-constructed interviews. In general, those of us who subscribe to qualitative approaches to the study of career processes believe that understanding the complexities of individual and group decisionmaking processes is simply not possible using only traditional,

Theoretical Orientation

15

questionnaire-based, hypothesis-testing designs. Rubin and Rubin (1995) summarize the strength of qualitative interviewing: Qualitative interviewing is both an academic and a practical tool. It allows us to share the world of others to find out what is going on, why people do what they do, and how they understand their worlds. With such knowledge you can help solve a variety of problems. (p. 5)

Written questionnaires, for example, are of far more limited value; they do not allow for clarification, follow-up questions, or the situated moment-to-moment sense-making exchange between the interviewer and the interviewee which provide much deeper understanding about what really is being communicated, and reveals more of the actual social interplay(s) that influences decision-making behavior. Kvale (1996) points out that: The inter-view [sic] is an inter-subjective enterprise of two persons talking about common themes of interest. The interviewer does not merely collect statements like gathering small stones on a beach. His or her questions lead up to what aspects of a topic the subject will address, and the interviewer’s active listening and following up on the answers co-determines the course of the conversation. (p. 183)

However, in spite of increasing recognition of the co-constructed nature of the interview, there is little attention paid in the guidance research literature to the details of the talk itself. That is, conspicuously lacking is any kind of systematic, discourse-analytic approach to uncovering the way interviewees make meaning in these interviews, how students’ perceptions about their educational and vocational choices are communicated in talk, and the degree to which the interviewees explicate the groundedness of their decision in language, or how the “interviewer’s active listening and following up on the answers co-determines the course of the conversation” (Kvale, 1996: 183). For all the talk about the importance of co-constructed or inter-subjective meaning between counselor and counselee, there has been little systematic attention to or analysis of the talk within the interviews themselves. An exception is the important work of Fredrick Erickson and Jeffrey Shultz. From a study begun thirty years ago, Erickson and Shultz wrote “The Counselor as Gatekeeper” in 1982. That was an early attempt to look at characteristics of co-constructed interviews between counselors and students. They recorded on videotape verbal and non-verbal behaviors between junior college counselors and students from two settings during brief (ten minutes or so) discussions about the students’ school and

16

Voices of Reason

career goals. The authors selected 25 interviews for analyses of qualitative and quantitative differences, focusing on what they called construction of “performed social identities” as ways that influenced the outcomes of the interviews. They argued, in part, that the degree to which counselor and student established “co-membership” influenced the outcome of their exchange. And in so doing, they argued, the counselor plays an important role as institutional “gatekeeper” with some students perhaps being less adequately guided in their pursuits because the counseling exchanges were less collaborative. Their work therefore is about what and how sociocultural and language factors influence co-constructed talk. It goes beyond simply observing talk on the surface, to look at what particular verbal and nonverbal behaviors appear to be contributory to more successful talk. Doing so, the authors say, can provide us with systematic ways to examine our own practices. There are a number of differences in the design of their study from the one I present here and, as I will point out shortly, differences in some of our conclusions; but we are wholly in agreement about the nature of counselors’ roles and the power they have. Erickson and Shultz write: The counselor acts as an institutional gatekeeper. He or she has the responsibility and the authority to make decisions about the social mobility of the student within the organization. In a sense the counselor is tending the gates and channels of mobility not only within the junior college but within the larger society as well. (p. 4)

A fundamental perspective for my study is that knowledge (as in conversations) is constructed and conveyed in social and cultural contexts. As such, and as noted by Erickson and Shultz, conversations are organized by actions taken by both the speaker and listener, based on what the other has just said. And conversations are culturally organized in that the interpretative framework that people bring to the exchange is based on the communicative conventions they’ve learned in their own social worlds. In their analysis, in the broad sense of social construction of language use and meaning, Erickson and Shultz argued that examination of nonverbal cues such as eye contact, body posture and body movements, must be considered. While I have that data from my videotaped interviews, I did not use it in my analysis. And, while I agree that the visual data can be beneficial (and possibly salient in some cases) in the analysis of successful talk, I take the position that its absence neither diminishes the value of the discourse analytic tools I present in book nor the analysis of my results based on the tools I’ve used. Related to this, Erickson and Shultz talked about interview success in terms of a reflexive process, where each move by the counselor and the student deter-

Theoretical Orientation

17

mines the forward motion of the talk, talk that is to some degree coherent (communicative competence) or what I refer to as a “dance.” And so it is about a sort of rhythmic flow of turn taking that can be also examined as patterns in time.1 Erickson and Shultz borrowed Greek terms Kairos and Chronos to talk about time in co-constructed talk. Kairos means that right time such as in the way questions and answers in interview discourses are organized, and chronos refers to the duration of time that a particular piece of discourse as a topic is discussed. With chronos there are the “rhythmic cycles” and the “wave patterns” in verbal and non-verbal behavior. It is: The underlying rhythmic wave patterns in verbal and nonverbal behavior of speakers and the listening behavior of listeners are the communicative means by which a relatively stable context of timing is enacted in conversation. In that context of chronos organization, conversational partners are apparently able intuitively to recognize and predict the onset of strategically crucial kairos points in conversation—the “now moments” in which certain actions are appropriate, and the “next moments” at which a redirection of action will soon become appropriate. (pp. 74–75)

As noted earlier, while there were design differences regarding some of what we were measuring and who the participants were, we were both interested in what the features were that seem to be found with the more successful interviews. Erickson and Shultz hypothesized that “social identities and communication styles of the counselor and the student affect the character and outcome of the interaction” (p. 169). In testing their hypothesis they looked at the relationship between social identity and special help (given to the student by the counselor). They concluded, based on social identity variables of ethnicity, panethnicity, and co-membership, “that the students of the same ethnic background as the counselor tended to receive more special help than students of different ethnic backgrounds” and that intra-panethnic (same panethnic group: white ethnic or third world) also received more special help. Other factors such as “situational” co-membership appeared to make a difference as well. Although my study was different in that I was less a counselor and more an interviewer in the exchanges with the ten students, the classifiers that Erickson and Shultz examined were available in my study and I did not see those factors at play. In other words, in my study something other than ethnicity or social status accounted for the differences in degree of groundedness and interview success. As isolated factors ethnicity and SES did not conclusively explain why some students in my study were more communicatively competent and were able to make more grounded references to their educational and vocational goals than were others.

18

Voices of Reason

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: AN OVERVIEW To this point I have argued for the need for better (and different) types of school guidance with respect to career decision-making, as supported by my own experience in the field and by my own studies and studies of others. And I have revealed my position that qualitative approaches to the study of these and other types of social issues is expedient. In order to study (and understand) the co-constructed nature of student’s talk about their goals and evidence (grounded references) for their goals I will turn to discourse analytic techniques to analyze the transcripts of our five consecutive years of talk. Discourse analysis indexes a broad tradition of sociolinguistic research and offers a wide range of methods (and sets of tools) for looking closely at talk and text. These tools and approaches are used by researchers within a wide range of disciplines including education, cognitive psychology, sociology of knowledge and linguistic and educational anthropology.2 In broad terms, discourse analysis involves the study of human experiences through close examination of the relationship between the participants to each other and to their respective social and cultural worlds through analysis of language use. In my analysis of future talk I attempt to uncover the degree to which students are grounded in their choices and how the patterns in our talk together relate to their ultimate choices and options. I am therefore interested in what seems to constitute successful talk. In the case of my co-constructed interviews with these ten students, I am concerned with how coherent their arguments are for their choices. In that sense, then, I want to know what discursive features seem to co-occur with what I identify as successful interviews (which I define as interviews in which the students and I together produce highly grounded talk) as a way of revealing students’ social and cognitive processes and my role as interviewer in positioning students as grounded or ungrounded. We each come into the interview (the student and myself) with different social and cultural backgrounds that must be part of any discourse analysis. Thus the interview outcomes are a result of the unique differences these students bring to the interview with respect to the various social practices in which they are members. Meaning is only possible when it is placed in the context of the one doing the talking and the other as recipient of that talk. In other words, a word, a sentence, or a stretch of talk has its meaning in social setting. Gee (1992) argues, “meaning is a matter of words or actions being ‘recognized’ as meaningful in specific ways within the practice of certain social groups.” The social settings and social practices are associated with particular Discourses (note the capital D). He writes:

Theoretical Orientation

19

Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiation of particular roles (or “types of people”) by specific groups of people, whether families of a certain sort, lawyers of a certain sort, bikers of a certain sort, African-Americans of a certain sort, women or men of a certain sort, and so on through a very long list. Discourses are ways of being “people like us”. They are “ways of being in the world”; they are “forms of life”. They are, thus, always and everywhere social and products of social histories. (1996: viii)

Gee thus distinguishes (D)iscourse from (d)iscourse. And, most recently, Gee underscores the notion that it is about “recognition and being recognized” and to do that involves much more than simply talking. The talking part is the little d in discourse to mean the stretches of talk as in conversations (Gee 1999: 17). The big D Discourses, simply stated, are “always language plus other stuff.” For my study, as I noted before, longitudinal interview data was used. The interviews, as I will show, represent complex social processes, that offer opportunities for much deeper understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of its participants; the interviewer’s role in construction of the “story” can be examined, and the interviewees’ capacity to use language and to articulate their positions (decision, choices, goals, etc.) can be examined. There are overlapping uses of aspects of various approaches to discourse analysis but each has emerged from a cross of academic disciplines and problems (to study) arising out of those disciplines. I will touch on four approaches that offer consideration/guidance for method and theory for my work with respect to analyzing my data. But first let me say that for quite some time now the works of Gee, Michaels and others have greatly influenced my thinking about how people make sense of language and how we as discourse analysts make sense of what was said. What follows is a brief presentation of some highlights of what I consider a “sociocultural” approach to discourse analysis.

Sociocultural Approach: Sociocognitive View of Mind through Discourse Analysis Studying language use is one important way in which we attempt to understand how the mind works. It is, as Wertsch (1991: 19) points out, one of L.S. Vygotsky’s major themes regarding the claim that both social and individual actions of humans are mediated by tools and signs (e.g., language use). Furthermore, words as utterances in social situations get their meanings (thus benefit) from being understood in some contextual way. About this, Bakhtin writes:

20

Voices of Reason The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists on other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (1981: 293-94)

Discourse With a Capital D and Co-Construction of Interviews At the outset of this section on discourse analysis I presented the reader with Gee’s (1996, 1999) definition of Discourses (with a capital D). And I noted his position that language meaning is only possible when placed both in the context of who are the players in the talk and what are the social settings and social practices of its participants. The interview, as one possible setting, is a complex social process that offers the opportunity for a much deeper understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of its participants; the interviewer ’s role in construction of the “story” can be examined, and the interviewee’s capacity to use language and to articulate his/her positions (i.e., decision, choices, goals, etc.) can be examined. The interview is a co-constructed exercise that results in a “joint product” of what the interviewer and the interviewee talk about together and how they conduct the exchange (Mishler, 1986). In addition to Gee’s position on social construction of the meaning of discourse, Mishler ’s four propositions contribute to my thinking about the analysis of interview discourse for this study: 1. Interviews are speech events 2. the discourse of interviews is constructed jointly by interviewers and respondents 3. analysis and interpretation are based on a theory of discourse and meaning 4. the meanings of questions and answers are contextually grounded. (p. ix) It should be generally agreed that we would know nothing about what students think regarding their educational and vocational experiences and goals if they did not tell us. Thus language, in both its structure and function grounded in social context, is necessary to convey and interpret the meaning of discourse. As such, a particular form of text is a “discourse genre,” one which has “some socially recognized

Theoretical Orientation

21

and patterned use of language” (Gee, Michaels and, O’Connor 1992: 234). Genres, as patterns with beginnings and ends (Hymes, 1974: 442), can be defined as etic, where the researcher develops a definition for his study based on what he/she has observed in that genre. Or it can be labeled emic for the terms that are the norms of the community being observed. Genre and Social Activity From a sociocultural perspective a particular genre is always produced through some social activity in a social setting. To identify the social activity is to learn what the expected roles of its participants are and “the characteristic ways in which people playing these roles are expected to act, interact and appear to believe, value, and think” (Gee, Michaels, and O’Connor, 1992: 234). If we fail to understand how to act in a particular social activity we fail to connect to its manner of talking, reading, writing or thinking. In the case of my study, if the interviewees did not understand what was asked, how and why (to an extent) I was there to ask the questions, and generally how to conduct themselves in an interview setting, I would only be analyzing how, and maybe why, my research project failed to understand how students talk about their goals and rationale for their goals. An Audience for All Occasions With or without an audience in the physical sense we are still engaged in talk that has the quality of being a dialogue and so is constructed as a social activity; so that even one who has no listeners has him/herself to ground “talk” culturally and socially: there simply is no way to get away from sociocultural influence and interpretation. This poses an interesting question with respect to my students’ own behaviors both during our interviews and outside the interview setting. Were the ones who were more grounded (i.e., providing more evidence for their goals) busy having “head conversations” about their interests and goals throughout the year? If so, are we to say they are members of the right Discourse, enabling them to carry about constructive talk that results in appropriate decisions? One has to know how to behave, “how to go on” in Wittgenstein’s (1958) famous phrase, in such a way that this is recognizably the sort of thing “people like us” do on occasions like this. The same is true of thought itself: Even private thought is social, directed toward these “imagined others,” and assumes forms appropriate to the identities we choose at the time and place in which we think. (Gee, Michaels, and O’Connor, 1992: 235)

22

Voices of Reason

Related social activities form “activity systems” where rules for how they work together to bring about the desired outcome are employed. In the case of my study with the ten students, the whole process of the co-constructed interviews as an activity system can be fully understood only by looking at various aspects of it as I have done. And into the larger sociocultural setting these activity systems are found where participants carry out their roles.

SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS What follows are four traditions that can be considered sociocultural approaches to discourse analysis. Conversation Analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is derived from ethnomethodology, an approach that refers to how people make sense of their everyday lives. Ethnomethodologists strive to discover how people make social order of their lives by observing them in situ, and then describing what was observed. CA does this by looking at language use in natural settings. The analyst looks to the structure of transcribed talk as evidence for social order using rules and tools (including mechanical devices such as timing pauses) that continue to be developed from the early, comprehensive work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson.3 Thus the structurally organized interaction between speaker and hearer derives its meaning from the text only, not going beyond it to explain social actions. The transcripts are much less concerned with social relations or social contexts (setting, SES, etc.). It is for these reasons that CA uses a structural approach to discourse analysis, and requires data to be from “naturally occurring” settings.4 While my study was not conducted in naturally occurring settings in the pure sense, they were nonetheless settings in which CA could be used to conduct analysis, particularly with respect to turn-taking and coherence of the moves between interviewer and interviewee. Interactional Sociolinguistics In a number of important ways, interactional sociolinguistics (as the second of four approaches discussed here, and labeled as such by Schiffrin, 1994) offers more potential for guiding the analysis of my work and closely aligns with the work of Gee, Michaels and others. Although in its purest application, interactional sociolinguistics, like

Theoretical Orientation

23

conversation analysis, obtains data from naturally occurring situations, unlike CA it looks to the social setting and culture to bring meaning to discourse. It recognizes that we bring to the exchange our own perceptions, perspectives, experiences, etc., which in turn creates different meanings for people. The work of two scholars, Gumperz and Goffman, each from their respective disciplines of anthropology and sociology, have contributed significantly to this discourse analytic approach. Quite simply stated, Gumperz takes the position (from a social and cultural anthropology perspective) that language use and its meaning is socially and culturally grounded. He has given us the term “contextualization cues” to refer to signaling mechanisms that we use. His work on contextualization cuing (to indicate what language activity we are engaged in and how we want our utterance to be understood) is based on the notion that “what we perceive and retain in our mind is a function of our culturally determined predisposition to perceive and assimilate” (1982: 12). In that sense, then, social and cultural influences and experiences affect how we think and communicate. He developed a theory of verbal communication that brought together theories about language and social action. He observed that one of the characteristics of modern urban societies is the impact of cultural heterogeneity on communication challenges as a result of having very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. He observed what Saussure (1959) called marginal features of language, which Gumperz describes as “signaling mechanisms such as intonation, speech, rhythm, and choice among lexical, phonetic and syntactic options, said to affect the expressive quality of a message but not its basic meaning” (Gumperz, 1982: 16). His work, particularly the notion of “inference” based on sociocultural knowledge, has found its way into a different approach to discourse analysis called the pragmatic approach which will not be reviewed here5 (Brown and Yule, 1983: 35). Two other concepts, which Gumperz has addressed and are relevant to later analysis of my work, are “discourse coherence” and “speech activities.” He argues that communicative meaning (talk that appears to have been understood by the parties to the talk) results from a hearer’s correct inference about what the speaker intends to convey by interpreting contextualization cues. Thus coherence depends on a successful interplay between the speaker and the hearer. In other words, the speaker successfully integrates different verbal and nonverbal “devices” to place their talk in an “interpretative frame” for the listener to respond to based on his/her interpretation of those cues (Schiffrin, 1987: 21–2). Given that my data derives from interviews, Gumperz’s use of “speech activities” is salient here. Gumperz defined a speech activity as “a set of social relationships enacted about a set of schemata in relation to some communicative goal. In a variety of settings, including

24

Voices of Reason

interviewing, speech activities imply certain expectancies about thematic progression, turn taking rules, form and outcome of the interaction as well as constraints on context” (Gumperz, 1982: 166). In the case of interviews, as in all situations, understanding is achieved between the interview participants based on proper contextual interpretations. As Gumperz notes, “labels” participants use for their speech activities do not alone tell how and how successfully they engage in the talk. The labels provide guidelines for interpretation of the speech events but the interpretation of those activities are observed in action. Schiffrin summarizes Gumperz’s contribution to Sociolinguistics as follows: The key to Gumperz’s Sociolinguistics of interpersonal communication is a view of language as a socially and culturally constructed symbol system that is used in ways that reflect macro-level social meanings (e.g. group identity, status differences) and create micro-level social meanings (i.e. what one is saying and doing at a moment in time). Speakers are members of social and cultural groups: the way we use language not only reflects our group-based identity but also provides continual indices as to who we are, what we want to communicate and how we know how to do so. (1994: 102)

Starting with his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman, a sociologist of enormous influence, introduced the concept of “a front”; followed by “the medical model and mental hospitalizations” in Asylums in 1961, where he introduced the concept of “moves”; to the concept of “frame” in his 1974 book, Frame Analysis, and in his 1981 “Footing,” in Forms of Talk. Goffman has coined a number of key terms in discourse analysis. His position is that the self is a social construction and that what we do in our social interactions is, in part, about how to present ourselves in positive ways, what he describes as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman 1967a: 5). During our social interactions we attempt to present ourselves as we wish to be seen. He also talks about it being a “front,” an image we wish to project to an audience which is created from how we use language that is appropriate to the situation. In the process, in part, we reveal our values and expectations (Rubin & Rubin 1995: 24-5). Frames are the totality of factors that make up the situation in which a person is engaged. It provides organization for meaning making but it is “more than meaning; it also organizes involvement.” All frames involve expectations of a normative kind as to how deeply and fully the individual is to be carried into the activity organized by the frames (Goffman 1974: 345).

Theoretical Orientation

25

The individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him of which he himself is allowed to paint only certain parts. Each individual is responsible for the demeanor image of himself and the deference image of others, so that for a complete man to be expressed, individuals must hold hands in a chain of ceremony, each giving deferentially with proper demeanor to the one on the right what will be received deferentially from the one on the left. (1967:84)

Goffman’s talk about “frames” relates to Gee’s notion of (D)iscourses with regards to fluidity, where more fluid, more situationally constructed talk is more likely to shift from moment to moment.

Ethnography of Communication Although linguistics and anthropology are often seen as two distinct disciplines, they share an interest in language as humans’ central way of communicating with each other. Thus, together, these two fields contribute to an understanding of discourse as a sociocultural process. Dell Hymes, a sociolinguist, and Gumperz, are recognized as having developed this approach over the decades of the 1960s and 1970s through a series of papers, culminating in the publication of Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (1974). They argue that culture can be studied by examining its system of ideas which in turn provides meaning to our behaviors as a society. Culture therefore comprises of a set of assumptions and beliefs that serve to situate and organize the way people think, feel and act, what can be called a “world view” (Schiffrin, 1994). We can analyze the culture of communication using the method of participant observation that has the researcher (as ethnographer) involved in the setting to be studied at some level, anywhere from a distant observer who attempts to remain “invisible” to one fully immersed in the cultural setting. Several concepts and methods are shared by these two disciplines: (1) examining communicative competence, which is “knowledge of grammar and knowledge governing appropriate use of grammar”; (2) examining how meanings and behaviors compare in different cultures (both their differences and similarities); (3) the resulting identification of the “particularities” are language-based both in form and structure, both of which inform the “message.” Hymes emphasizes this point metaphorically: “Interpretation that excludes speech falls short, as would treatment of painting that excluded paint” (1981: 9). Hymes developed a grid that classifies different components of communication using an acronym, SPEAKING, that can be used to locate the talk “in some recognizable way bounded or integral” (Hymes 1972b: 56).

26

Voices of Reason

S setting: scene, physical circumstances, and subject definition of an occasion P participants: speaker/sender/addresser and hearer/ receiver/audience/addressee E ends: purposes and goals; outcomes A act: sequence, message, form and content K key: tone, manner I instrumentalities: channel (verbal, nonverbal, physical) forms of speech drawn from community repertoire N norms: of interaction and interpretation. Specific proprieties attached to speaking. Interpretation of norms within cultural belief system G genre: textual categories The units of analysis can be as large as the social occasion being studied (speech situation) which are not governed by a single set of rules, or speech events which are “activities , or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules for the use of speech” (Hymes 1972: 56). And the smallest units, speech acts, which Schiffrin suggests is “most fundamental to the local, turn by turn, management of discourse” (1994: 142), although the broader units of discourse are important too. Unlike the previous two discourse analysis approaches I’ve reviewed, ethnography of communication does offer a fuller framework for guiding the analysis of my work with respect to interviewing as the source of discourse data. From this perspective, interviews are viewed as speech events. They serve many functions but in particular, with respect to my work, they serve gatekeeping functions. In school guidance counseling situations, as I noted earlier, they serve as “asymmetric speech situations during which a person who represents a social institution seeks to gain information about the lives, beliefs, and practices of people” (In Schiffrin 1994: 146; reference to Erickson and Schultz, 1982), for the purpose of giving guidance about their next steps in their educational and vocational careers. Although interviews are characteristically conducted as questions to be answered it is not simply a matter of looking at those questions and their component answers. It is as Briggs states, “the interview must be analyzed as a whole before any of its component utterances are interpreted” (1986: 104). And it serves well (I believe) to use Hymes’ units of analysis (speech acts, speech events, and speech situations) to bracket texts contextually for later analyses. Thus, using Hymes’ SPEAKING grid the communicative components of an interview I conducted (as researcher and interviewer) may look something like this:

Theoretical Orientation

27

SETTING: Quiet room off library at Interviewee’s (Ivee’s) school PARTICIPANTS: Interviewer (Iver): researcher and Ivee: being researched ENDS: Overt/covert information about future goals, etc. Iver lacks information to determine Ivee’s modes of reasoning, groundedness, and degree of alignment with Iver. ACT SEQUENCE: Opened by Iver Iver: requests information Ivee: provides information Ivee/Iver: requests clarification Iver/Ivee: provides clarification Recycles Rearranges Range of acts: varies, partially controlled by Iver. Closure by either depends on compliance with time constraints; closure is temporary. KEY: Medium range—formal, school-based exchanged INSTRUMENTALITIES: Verbal and gestural NORMS: Interaction is based on need to obtain information from the Ivee. GENRE: Mixed: Counseling interviews with narrative accounts. Question and answer format with the Iver asking questions, directing topics, opening and closing conversation. Both institutional talk/informal chat. These are what Schiffrin refers to as “sociolinguistic interviews” (1994: 160) addressing one of the components of my future talk analysis with respect to the types of questions the interviewer uses. The researcher–respondent communication exchange, although a “research” interview, still is one acceptable as counseling discourse to analyze. “The interaction between researcher and researched does not produce some anomalous form of communication peculiar to the research situation and misleading as to the nature of ‘reality.’ Rather such interaction instantiates normal communication on one of its forms” (Cameron et al., 1991: 13). But with respect to genres (as in Hymes’ grid) these are mixed interviews in the sense that they are both institutional talk and conversation. In this “asymmetric power distribution” (Schiffrin, 1994: 163) I want information from the respondent which will be used to research particular interests that I’ve defined (for example, degree of/evidence for groundedness of “future” talk). Thus the types of questions I ask and the functions they serve are influenced by the researcher-as-interviewer’s agenda. And

28

Voices of Reason

thus the mode of co-constructed talk is an institutional one, not everyday conversation. Each approach I’ve discussed thus far has influenced my thinking about the structure and function of language and has offered ways to think about how I may conduct analysis of my interviews. It should be clear to the reader now that there are aspects of each of these approaches that surface in each other’s territory, and that there are numerous ways to go about the business of discourse analysis based not only on where one finds oneself oriented, but what he/she wishes to know: language structure or function or some aspect of each. At this point, I am more concerned about function than structure, although I address both. Schiffrin, describing function, states: “Our task is to identify and analyze actions performed by people for certain purposes, interpret social, cultural, and personal meanings, and justify our interpretations of those meanings for the participants involved” (1994: 360). With respect to function of language, in the broad sense, I want to know how students articulate their goals and rationales for their goals and so I look for instances of talk that collectively tell me (us) about the students’ degree of groundedness. As a matter of co-construction of our interviews, how that is done, and how successfully so, I also turn to examination of the talk, this time, both as function and as structure. When we talk about function we are talking about how the analysis of the text reveals thoughts and actions.

THE NOTION (AND NATURE) OF INTERVIEW CO-CONSTRUCTION: AN EXPANDED REVIEW Of particular interest to me is the notion that interview analysis must have as one of its objectives the joint efforts that interviewer and the interviewee each bring to the exchange. Simply stated, in order to adequately understand interviews one must pay attention to how the interviewer asks the questions, reformulates questions and how interviewees respond to those questions based on their own understanding of what they think the interviewer has asked (Mishler, 1986). This “circular” process of questions, answers, reformation, etc. is expected to produce meaningful dialogue. Naturally then the success of an interview relies on both the interviewer and interviewee making sure each understands the other and on the interviewee’s ability or willingness to give the interviewer what he/she is looking for. On the surface, the interview exchanges with my ten subjects appear to be without difficulties but, as I will argue in this book, this is not a simple matter. What is of great importance

Theoretical Orientation

29

is whether the interviewer (or counselor, whichever the case may be) is facilitating a joint exchange effectively. That is, the degree to which the student successfully relays his/her “story” relies very much on how and how effectively the interviewer guides the exchange. And the capability to do that relies on the interviewer ’s perceptions about the students’ own sociocultural backgrounds and their own biases that they brings to the interview. The following is an exchange with a female, African-American student early in our interview history: Interviewer: Now, are you going to college after high school? Evon: I might, yeah. I: You’re not sure yet? E: No. I: What would be some of the reasons why you wouldn’t go if you decide not to? E: Because I never get D’s, and F’s. I always get A, B or C. I: But you’re not sure if you want to go to college? E: I want to go. I: You want to go to college, okay. But you’re not sure? E: Be in that chair. I: But you do want to go? E: If I get the money. I: Pardon me? E: If I get the money. I: So you’re thinking that you might not go to college? You think that’s a possibility that you might not go? E: Well, my grandmother says she’ll pay for it, but I want to go for four years for the full four years.

30

Voices of Reason I: Four years, okay. You want a bachelor ’s degree. E: And that’s like a lot of money each year, so— I: So, the money is the thing you’re worried about? You’re not worried about the grades. You get good enough grades to go to college. You’re worried about the money? E: Yeah.

In this exchange it was necessary for me to redirect and clarify her comments about whether college was in her future. I was thrown off a bit by her comments about never getting low grades as it appeared at first that she was correlating that with not going to college, only to learn that for her the college option was in jeopardy because of financial concerns. Instead of responding to her “I might, yeah” in line two by asking “You think so” as a way to encourage more talk, I ask “you’re not sure yet?,” which suggests a focus on inability not ability. Again she refers to ability in a different sort of way when she responds to my negative questions—it is possible she might not go?—by saying that she wants to go, in fact to go to a four-year college, but infers that her grandmother will pay for only two years. Thus, her comments were there for me interpret, clarify and then produce new questioning for further clarification and my focus was on the obstacles or inabilities. As such, as in this case, the interviewee acknowledges the interviewer’s interpretation of what she said and allows the interview to proceed, and it is the acceptance of the interviewer’s framework of meaning that plays predominantly in successful interview talk. Mishler notes, “Agreement by respondents to cooperate with interviewers and do what they are asked to do is often seen as the essential but only requirement for adequate participation” (1986: 54). His summary, which follows, relates to my attempt to develop tools to uncover my co-constructed talk with these students about their futures: Interviewers and respondents, through repeated reformulation of questions and responses, strive to arrive together at meanings that both can understand. The relevance and appropriateness of questions and responses emerges through and is realized in the discourse itself. The standard approach to the analysis of interviews abstracts both questions and responses from this process. By suppressing the discourse and by assuming shared and standard meanings, this approach short-circuits the problem of meaning. Interpretation relies on a variety of implicit assumptions and ad hoc hypotheses. To come to a more adequate understanding of what respondents mean and to develop stronger theories as well as more valid

Theoretical Orientation

31

generalizations in interview research, we must attend to the discursive nature of the interview process. (p. 65)

CONCLUSION Children, early in their lives, begin an attempt to make connections between abilities and interests, but many, as I have argued, fail because guidance is not there or it is inadequate or possibly detrimental to them. To examine and document this concern, I interviewed ten students over five years resulting in over 600 pages of transcripts. Using discourse analysis of co-constructed interviews, paying close attention to the “future” talk segments, I analyze the degree to which these students showed evidence for the groundedness of their goals as a joint production. To conduct the analysis I employed a range of tools that provide ways of showing patterns in the students’ discourses and in our co-construction of talk. What I think is salient here is that these discourse analytic tools can be used by people who find themselves in helping roles to bring awareness to the degree of students’ grounded or ungrounded talk. Of particular interest will be the guidance counselors in our inner-city schools who are often faced with struggling and alienated students. The guidance counselor can serve as a powerful influencer (maybe even the most influential person) in a student’s life as he/she struggles to identify goals and attempts to determine how to achieve them. The counselor, as gate opener, I believe, has a serious responsibility to reach those in need and as such, it is imperative that effective communication takes place. It is as Erickson & Shultz wrote: Inside the encounter the student establishes a performed social identity through his ways of interacting with the counselor. The student’s ways of speaking and ways of listening—of showing interest in, understanding of, and commitment to the interview as it is happening—are communicative means of making an impression on the counselor. That unofficial impression of the student’s performed social identity becomes inextricably involved in the counselor’s judgments of the student’s official social identity as they inform the counselor’s gatekeeping decisions. (1982: 21)

WHY THE MEASURES FOR THIS STUDY ARE APPLICABLE TO COUNSELING SITUATIONS In arguing for the applicability of the discourse analytic measures that I used for analyzing interview talk with students to that of counseling situations, I suggest two things: (1) the interviews are representative of first counseling sessions. In other words, the early stage of any counseling situation requires completion of interview-like

32

Voices of Reason

information gathering in order to develop an understanding of what the recipient is looking for; in this case guidance counseling about their educational and vocational futures. (2) It is also, in a larger context, about measuring communication effectiveness. How that is defined (what we are investigating) depends on the situation. For this study, it was co-constructed talk between interviewer and interviewee regarding future talk. It could be counseling session, psychotherapy, doctor-patient sessions or any other co-constructed communication in which the goal is to bring about (positive) change. My measures look at communicative competence with respect to decision-making skills and knowledge, by assessing interview performance and efficiency. What changes is only what is being examined. In other types of counseling situations it could be about marital difficulties, family issues, drug addiction, mental health, and so on. Whatever the situation, we are concerned with some way of systematically examining quality and quantity of co-constructed talk. For example, in cognitive psychotherapy where treatment is centered around correcting flawed cognitive processing, Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist who first worked extensively with treatment of depression, later came to see his methods applicable to other situations, such as marital problems. He states that cognitive therapy is much more than just revealing a person’s cognitive distortions. It is predominantly about establishing a relationship between the therapist/counselor and the patient/counselee by several means including “cognitive rehearsal.” Together with weekly writing assignments, his emphasis is on communicating what the person feels and thinks and in so doing helping them to correct those distortions. Furthermore, Beck prefers to call his sessions with his patients not therapy sessions but interviews, pointing out that it takes about 15–20 “interviews” to bring about positive change (Beck, 1976). So, with respect to my work, it is clearly about the interviewer-interviewee role, about communication competence and identification and clarification of thoughts, actions and goals, all of which can be examined by looking at the recorded transcripts of talk. Along those same lines, but termed humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, a psychologist best known for his “client-centered” approach to counseling, built the core of his treatment foundation around the importance that joint roles of the counselor and counselee (i.e., rapport) have on the outcome of treatment. He recognized the importance of giving voice to the person seeking help in a warm and supportive environment, “a facilitative climate in which the client can explore her feelings in the way that she desires and move toward the goals that she wishes to achieve” (Rogers, 1951). Rogers saw his client-centered approach as a set of hypotheses that “serve as tools for advancing our

Theoretical Orientation

33

knowledge” (p. 244). He believed that the benefits of his work could be empirically tested, in part through looking at recorded interviews, as he termed them, instead of relying on memory of what took place (p. 245). It is therefore not surprising that Rogers repeatedly stressed not only the importance of a warm and supportive environment, but that the communicative qualities of the counselor is paramount in any helping situation. Citing a research finding, Rogers in his book On Becoming a Person writes: The quality of the counselor’s interaction with a client can be satisfactorily judged on the basis of a very small sampling of his behavior. It also means that if the counselor is congruent or transparent, so that his words are in line with his feelings rather than the two being discrepant; if the counselor likes the client, unconditionally; and if the counselor understands the essential feelings of the client as they seem to the client—then there is a strong probability that this will be an effective helping relationship. (p. 49)

Rogers further notes that studies that examined what constitutes “helping” relationships have concluded that helpful ones have different characteristics from those which are unhelpful, and that attitudes of both the counselor and client contribute to those characteristic differences. But he adds, “it is equally clear that the studies thus far made do not give us any final answers as to what is a helping relationship, nor how it is to be formed” (p. 50). In that context I think my work attempts to do just that; where “attitudes” are captured in words from the co-constructed talk, we can look at the characteristics (which I call features) of the talk to gauge groundedness and quality of talk interaction. Thus, the tools I developed here can be adapted to all sorts of helping situations to evaluate the effectiveness of co-constructed talk. Only what changes in other types of helping situations is what is being coded. The approach is the same, that is, looking at performance and efficiency of the co-constructed talk. What is being quantitatively and qualitatively coded would be what is applicable to that situation. In my case, the measures I used (see Chapter 10—Rg score, P-Iver and P-Ivee scores, and Actual R Rating) are directly applicable to both interviewing and counseling situations where we want to examine adolescents’ talk about their educational and vocational futures. Naturally, what is different is the nature of the counselor’s role in providing guidance, whereas the interviewer is more concerned with eliciting information from the interviewee; but these discourse analysis tools are useful in both cases. The distinction is more in what we do with the results. That is, in counseling situations we would expect different qualitative and

34

Voices of Reason

quantitative outcomes with respect to groundedness talk than in interview-only situations. This book, then, essentially offers tools that guidance sources and researchers can use to help ask and answer important questions about their own roles and students’ roles, in making judgments and offering advice that grows out of their joint efforts.

NOTES 1. During earlier analyses I looked at word count patterns to graphically display talk patterns between interviewer and interviewee, much like an EKG where peaks or spikes seemed to suggest that something important was going on. I do not include it here. 2. See Gee, Michaels, and O’Connor (1992) for a helpful review of this body of work as it relates to education. 3. Their paper, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation,” in Language, 50, pp. 696–735, is considered a seminal contribution to CA. 4. There is an extensive body of writing explicating the reasons for the need to have the data in CA to be from naturally occurring settings. If interested, the reader may refer to Psathas, George for a good summary of CA: Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction, 1995, Sage Publications. 5. If the reader wishes to learn more about the “pragmatics” approach to discourse analysis, an excellent review can be found in Deborah Schiffrin’s Approaches to Discourses, 1994.

II

A Vivid Introduction to the H-Team Students

Each of the seven chapters in Part II opens with an interview style label and description and then introduces one or more of the ten adolescents through excerpts in their own words about their home and school lives, their hopes and aspirations, and much else that concern them. The period from the eighth to the eleventh grade is presented, followed by a synopsis of our interviews in their final year of high school, and closes with “powerful” quotes—words spoken by the adolescents that leap out as especially revealing about who they are, about their worldviews that were not covered earlier. The excerpts are given line numbers for reference purposes; they are numbered as they appear here, not as they appeared in the original transcripts. Due to considerations of confidentiality their names are fictional (they were selected by the adolescents themselves). The names of their schools and communities are fictional as well.

3 The Great Orator

The Great Orator

DEFINING THE GREAT ORATOR The predominant feature of this type of interview is the interviewee’s exceptional command of the spoken language. The interviewer’s job is made easy because questions are answered fully and often with a strong capacity to connect at several levels. The responses are often punctuated by stories within stories, generally as metaphors, which result in powerful interviews. Quantitative features include general dominance of the turn lengths by the interviewee, seen clearly in graph form as peaks or spikes, which represent comprehensive answers and, collectively, the core of the discourse. The unfolding stories build vertically with little prodding or interference from the interviewer. There is little concern about what closed-ended questions will do. In other words, questions are often elaborated upon even when the interviewer asks questions requiring only yes or no answers. The interviewee is adept at anticipating the pertinent follow-up questions and so will often proceed without those questions being asked.

JOHN: GRADES 8–11 I first met John alone seven years ago at an urban community middle school where he was participating in an experimental heterogeneously grouped program of 82 students. In that first recorded interview he told me he was fourteen years old and was from ethnically mixed divorced parents; his mother, whom he lives with, is Lithuanian and his father, who lived in New York at the time and whom he had not seen since he

38

Voices of Reason

was two years of age, is Middle Eastern. He has a half-brother from a different father, who at that time was five years old, in foster care. He said he longed to see more of him but his mother could not handle it emotionally. As we will see, that has improved significantly. We will learn that, ironically, his brother is in a better situation economically; John lives in a housing project and revealed that he fights with his mother about her poor management of what little money they have. John has been keenly involved in sports since sixth grade when someone pointed out that he had a height advantage (he was nearly six feet tall by grade 8). We will see how it has played a part in his school and career-related decisions through these past five years. And we will also witness (via interview discourse) his sense of how he sees his responsibilities to use his talents and strong intellect to make “wise” decisions which may profoundly impact his future as an adult, and specifically his choices about postsecondary education and career in spite of his troubled home life. Understanding John’s decision-making methods and capacity requires analysis of our co-constructed talk through a systematic examination and coding of the interview transcripts. And making sense of the instances of talk related to making decisions needs to be conducted in social contexts. In other words, we need to see what he says about such social institutions as school, family, friends, world problems, and so on, to understand what he really says about his educational/vocational goals, and to identify what I call the motivators and influencers of his goals and actions. What makes this an especially useful piece of research is that these co-constructed discourses take place over a span of five years, thus giving us the opportunity to see John’s decision-making processes change and mature (as they do in the other nine students). As he gains personal and social understanding, his choices and his reasons for making those choices seem to rise out of some coherent structure. John: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School “I thought engineering would be a good field to go into.”

John dominated our interview talk, averaging 60% of total talk. While he had more to say about topics of passion such as basketball and his very positive H-Team experience, John needed only to be asked the questions to elicit detailed answers. As we will see, he was not hesitant about stating his positions and reiterating them if necessary (for instance, that college preparation is more important than a vocational goal). At the outset I asked for a description of himself:

The Great Orator

5

39

John: I’m fourteen years old. My name is John. My dad was Saudi Arabian and my mom was Lithuanian. And I haven’t seen my Dad since I was two years old, so I was raised by my mom. And I have one brother, who’s five years old. I’d tell them that I was five eleven. I have dark hair. Brown eyes, brown hair, and my facial features and stuff like that. They’d say I’m funny, because most of the time I just fool around. You know, I’m good in school. I’m an honor student. But I don’t just sit down and do my work. I have to fool around, also, and enjoy myself. That’s just the person I am. I can’t just sit here and do stuff. . . .

John is from an interesting and difficult background; he lives with his mother, who we later learn has significant emotional problems; he has little contact with his only sibling, a half-brother, who is in a foster home, presumably because his mother is not fit to care for him. 10

15

John: Yeah. My neighborhood is like a—it’s a bad neighborhood for the city. I see it all the time. But seeing all that—all the violence and all the effects of all this stuff is kind of what made me stray away from it, because I seen what the effects were. Maybe if I lived in like the suburbs or something and was never—never shown that stuff, I would have never seen the effects, never been warned about the dangers, I probably would have been into it, if it weren’t for the environment I grew up in.

To complete the basic background profile for John it is necessary to include his love of the sport of basketball:

20

John: I like sports. I’m wicked into sports. Basketball, football, baseball. I play all sports. I collect baseball cards. Interviewer: Which of the sports do you like the most, of all the ones you’ve named? J: Basketball—I play with kids in school, outside of school. I play for the school. I play for church teams, city team and the Massachusetts (...). I play basketball whenever I can get a chance.

Considering examples of decisions and their association (or influences) to other facets of his life, the text below introduces John’s story about how basketball came to be such an important part of his life. His height brought him the invitation to play basketball but it was his initial experience of humiliation from playing poorly that turned this into a passion for him—a determination to do better, as he says here. We will learn, in the later interviews, the significance of this activity as it relates both to educational and vocational choices.

25

Interviewer: Any chance you get to play. Where did the interest come from? Have you had it for a long time? Can you— John: Actually, it was in the sixth grade. I was tall and they all said I

40

30

Voices of Reason should use my height; so I just joined the team, but I had no idea about how to play. I wasn’t good at it. I was so humiliated at how poorly I did that I was determined to get better. So, every day I’d go outside and practice at a crooked churchyard hoop in my neighborhood. And eventually I got to the point I am today.

John, who, in the non-tracked H-Team program in eighth grade considered himself at honors’ level if he were to be in a tracked program, had this to say about the school subjects he liked the most:

35

Interviewer: Okay. What is your favorite subject? John: My favorite subject? I’m fascinated by science. I like science, but I really like a part of English, the creative writing part. I really don’t enjoy like learning about paragraphs and grammar and stuff; but, like—when you get a chance to sit down and express your ideas, I just—I can get right into that. I’ll just sit there and do that all day. Creative writing, I’m into that. I’m going to say—My best two subjects are science and math—my highest grade averages.

John was able to make an important distinction between the school subjects he liked and those he did well in, which we will see later in my analysis has important implications. He said he liked science very much but if able to claim one piece of his English course, he would say his strongest interest is creative writing. If the criterion was which subject he best performed in, John noted science and math, as they were his highest grades. As he alluded to earlier with regard to English grammar and spelling, John stated that, except for French, he finds it to be his most difficult subject. 40

45

Interviewer: What’s the most difficult subject for you? John: French. But, as like my regular academic, my four classes, I say English. Not so much the writing part about it, but like grammar and spelling and so forth. I make a lot of grammatical errors. I have like an A/B average, if you were going to do just that alone; but since the creative writing is something I’m good at, it brings up my average. You know?

Now, going back to our earlier interview where I asked John about his favorite subjects, I followed with questions about his vocational goals, looking for his views on what connections, if any, there were.

50

John: I thought engineering would be a good field to go into. And I’m going to still play basketball, because that will enhance my chances of getting a scholarship. Besides my grades, I have the athletics to go with it, too. So, I’ll keep working at both of them. I just—my main goal right now is to go to college, you know? Once I get there, I can decide. But what I have to worry about now is going to college.

The Great Orator

41

John suggested engineering as a logical vocational possibility because of his strong math and science preparation. He was even able to tie in his strong basketball interest as a means of obtaining a scholarship, something he already knows he needs to think about, coming from a poor economic background. But he let it be known to me that he was not certain about his vocational direction, nor did he feel that it was necessary that he be; he felt that getting good grades for college preparation was more important than any decisions about vocational goals. John reiterated that his grades and school-related choices were more important than his vocational goals, and although he does not yet know where he wishes to attend college, he has already begun to make decisions about where or what college he does not want to attend.

55

John: Like I said, I don’t know [about vocational goals]. I’m working hard at my grades and my basketball, so I’m going to apply to as many colleges as possible for a scholarship. I want go to a university. I don’t want to go to just like Brayton State or anything like that. But I do kind of want to stay in the New England area. I don’t want to go like out to U.C.L.A. or anything.

Another decision John had to make at the conclusion of his 8th grade was where to attend high school. He had scholarships to two parochial schools but made the decision to attend Marion High because the others did not seem to have the right atmosphere for learning. As will later be seen, John actually took a leave from Marion High in his next year, but later returned there.

60

65

John: Yeah. I had a scholarship to St. John’s and Holy Name and I could have gone to— . . . well, with St. John’s, I had transportation problems and all that; but, that’s not the atmosphere I want to—I can learn in. Like I said, I have to be fooling around. I have to balance the two and St. John’s is like—sit down, you know, do your work atmosphere. Plus, when I took the entrance exam, the freshmen class was getting pretty— like racial against me and stuff. And it’s just not the type of people— environment I feel good working in.

From this first interview we are able to “hear” John’s view of his social world; at home and surrounding neighborhood, school, and sports. We learn about the social practices, which are shaping his choices such as school subjects he enjoys and presumably spends more time with, his participation in basketball for possible scholarship considerations later on. And we know that as a 14-year-old eighth grader, he considers engineering a natural career choice, but at the same time sees vocational choice-making much less important (or relevant) than doing well in school and finding ways to pay for college, i.e. scholarships. Given his

42

Voices of Reason

socioeconomic situation, John realizes early on that scholarship assistance will be necessary. He is motivated to do well in school and in basketball by this economic reality and faces up to it rather than assume it will be taken care of by others as may be the case for middle class children. He is certainly influenced (encouraged) by his teachers in their desire to accommodate his intellectual strengths. Yet, through all of this, John reminds us that he is just a kid like everyone else who wants to have fun and be funny. John: 9th Grade—Marion Community High School “I seem to lean towards something from the English department, journalism or something of that sort, because it comes like really naturally to me.”

At the start of our second year interview John was more open about his home situation. He talked more about his mother’s mental illness and the impact it has had on him. It was also the first time I learned the particular reason for his seven-year-old brother’s foster home placement.

70

John: And my mother went in for severe depression and because of my brother’s illness of the diabetes she wasn’t able to—she wasn’t able to, like, give him the shots and stuff that he needed, because she couldn’t handle it mentally. And my mother’s just—you know, the same, on a lot of medications, Prozac and Klonopin and stuff.

With noting his mother’s absence of responsibility we are able to get a sense of John’s own rather exceptional sense of responsibility for his present actions and future goals:

75

80

John: Like she can only understand what’s happening to herself and she doesn’t understand the future or how it affected things in the past. Like if I ask her—Like, if she sees dishes or a chore she has to do, like a lot of laundry building up, she’ll say, okay, I’ll do it later. And then even later on she’ll say, I’ll do it later. I don’t think she’s realizing that the more she puts it off, she’s going to have to do it eventually. All she sees is that right now at this moment I can’t do it or I don’t want to do it, and I’ll be able to do it later. But she’s always saying, I’ll do it later. So, things never get done.

John also talked more about his brother ’s situation: John: Well, he was placed in foster care for like—for about two years now he’s been from foster home to foster home, because of he’s had some problems like—like he just recently was put into an institution because he was talking about devil talking to him and stuff.

The Great Orator

43

For John basketball was still an important part of his daily life. He said that though he failed to make the Junior Varsity team at school he still played for several outside teams and was even now using it as an outlet when he was mad. 85

I tried out for J.V., I wanted to be healthy but I ate a bad combination of food and was too sick and I didn’t make the cut and all the freshmen, they were like, John should be on the team, but I didn’t make it, so I just maybe work harder for next year. I seem to use it as an outlet. Whenever I get—mad or something, I just go and shoot.

His favorite subjects had not changed in ninth grade; he still found English enjoyable. He said that it reminded him of his positive experiences with the H-Team during the two previous years. 90

95

Interviewer: So, of the subjects you just named, including the science and English, which one are you really enjoying the most this year? John: I’d say English. I: Okay. J: Because English is more—it kind of reminds me of when I was in the eighth—seventh and eighth grade. It’s more open, you know, for—you take it your own way and you do a variety of different things instead of the same thing, book—.

I asked John if he remembered what he had told me the previous year about his vocational goal. His answer surprised me. He remembered he had considered engineering, but also has taken the year since to reflect on it and to conclude that although he does very well in math, he finds it tedious and would not want a job, such as engineering, which requires a considerable use of math.

100

John: I knew before I sort of wanted to become an engineer or a science engineer, but after taking a year of comprehensive algebra and, you know, a lot of the things that are involved in that, I’m good at the subject. That’s the reason I thought I would get into it. But I really would rather do something I enjoy more, because I just find that like a tedious thing. If that was my job, I’d feel like kind of boring.

As was the case when I had interviewed him in eighth grade, John again said he really wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for work (“I’m only a freshman in high school”), adding that he would likely still be undecided even in college. But he was willing to entertain possibilities based on his current knowledge (which is all that I really want or can expect):

44

Voices of Reason

105

John: I probably won’t even be, even when I’m in college. I’ll probably switch my major. But, I seem to lean towards something from the English department, journalism or something of that sort, because it comes like really naturally to me.

He now was able to make his love of the creative writing part of English class and give it a future in terms of work, by suggesting journalism.

110

John: It’s something I enjoy and it comes naturally to me and I just—I don’t know. I like to write, because you can branch out—you can do it in so many different ways. It’s something around—I don’t know. Something in the journalism field. I’d like to do that.

But John isn’t closing the door on the other possibilities associated with his strong abilities in both the academics (math, and science) and sports, although he is pragmatic about being a player; he suggests realistic options such as sports trainer or sports commentator.

115

John: The math and science thing, I could go into, but—that’s an option for me, but it’s something I prefer. . . . Well, of course, the door to sports are always open, not necessarily the NBA. I understand that’s an unrealistic approach towards it, but there’s a possibility. There’s other professional leagues. You can get into like a sports trainer or sports commentator or whatever you’d like, something in that field, because I do enjoy sports.

Here I suggested he could combine his writing and sports interests.

120

Interviewer: And there are sports journalists and sports writers? John: Possibly. Possibly I can incorporate the two.

Later in the interview I asked John how long he has been thinking about what he will do for work some day. He replied. John: Oh, I’ve thought about that ever since I was like a little kid in first grade, I had a career I wanted to go into.

John, during his freshman year in high school, rejected his guidance counselor’s recommendation that he double up on math courses.

125

John: They wanted me to double up on math, but I didn’t want to…. Well, it was not necessarily that. It was actually other subjects that I had more interest in.

The Great Orator

45

During his second term, John accepted a scholarship to attend a parochial school because he was unhappy with his initial experiences at Marion High. But after four days he decided it was not what he wanted and was able to slip back into his program at Marion High without anyone knowing why he was absent.

130

John: Well, during the beginning of the year, I didn’t like high school— Well, I don’t know if it was—I didn’t like Marion High. I was sick of the attitudes people give and the environment. Coming from Jasper, it was a much—I don’t know, much more—much—a better learning environment than this is. This is mostly like all the students coming here because they have to. They all have that attitude, even the teachers and stuff, you know? They’re like, oh great, we’re here at Marion. So, I decided to transfer around the end of the second term, right halfway through the year.

The following text from our interview offers important insight into John’s perception about effective pedagogy and learning as he talked about his disappointing, short-lived experience at a Catholic school. It provides further testimony about his strong feelings about the HTeam’s effectiveness and at least his opportunity to still get some of that at Marion High. 135

140

145

John: It wasn’t—I don’t know. It was like fake. It didn’t—It wasn’t real to me. Like in the real world you don’t see a bunch of people, you know, all acting like that. And like the peer pressure there was sort of weird. They’re so suppressed in that environment. Like a lot of them they’re all talking like I want to do acid and drugs and this and that, just because they think it’s like—they want to be different, so that’s their way to do it. And I didn’t like their attitudes or anything. But, besides that, it was the classes itself which really made me come back to public high school. Because despite all the things they say about how better Catholic school is and how more learning environment it is, it’s more or less all the kids went in there and they were lectured. They were lectured. It wasn’t hands-on work. They gave—they spit out the facts and all the kids just wrote it down and the next day (came) in and took tests. That was the kind of environment it was. It wasn’t where like you had any hands-on work. It wasn’t like groups or creativeness.

And finally, when asked again in our year two interview about colleges he may possibly wish to attend, John again mentioned financial reality and need for scholarships. Naturally this reality for John is a significant component of his choice-making. 150

John: No, because I know from my financial situation that where I go is going to be based on scholarships, grants, loans, financial aid, and

46

Voices of Reason that sort of thing. So, out of all—after all going that process, the one I choose will be the one I choose. I really don’t know right now.

To this point, what had John said about his choices that may impact his school and work goals? Who were the influencers and the institutions that played a role in his choices? In what way(s), if any, did he change his views from year one to year two as evidenced by our interview transcript? Can we make predictions about his successes based on his grasp of decision-making processes? Each of four societal institutions (school, family, society, self) and the people and events that influence him, form the basis for his sense-making and subsequent actions. His mother, as one of the significant influencers, has been very problematic for him. He struggles with her incompetence as a mother on a daily basis, dismissing her mental illness as an excuse to abdicate her responsibilities. For his troubles, living alone with her, knowing his brother is not with him due to her inability to care for him, and his father leaving home when John was two, he finds it necessary to look out for himself more than most other children his age. And not only must John look out for his own wellbeing at home, but also for his physical safety in a neighborhood that he characterizes as dangerous, living in a housing project as he does. Those realities John brings with him to his school environment where, in contrast to his stark, negative family/home life, John is a success. Beginning with his two-year H-Team program, ending in 8th grade, John has excelled in all of his core subjects. Here all of the influences in his life (people, places, and events) play important roles in shaping his views and decisions. But as he progressed from his early middle school years to high school as a freshman, John had to rely more and more on his own sense of what was right or best for him. In his earlier school years he was inspired and supported by his English and math teachers and felt learning was optimal in the H-Team, non-tracked experiment. But by the end of his freshman year he was faced with the need to make decisions less by what others had to say and more by what he thought was best for his educational and vocational future. Examples include his decision to decline a guidance counselor ’s recommendation that he double up on math, to reject two parochial school scholarships, and to reject the pedagogy of one and return to Marion High, where he has still some opportunities to learn in ways similar to his H-Team days. And then there were experiences outside of home and school that also influenced his decisions. For John, basketball has been the premiere “free time” activity in his life since sixth grade when he was approached to play because he was tall for his age. Not only is it significant that he played at every chance for several teams but that it represents two things: one, his determination to excel at this sport after suffering humiliation at

The Great Orator

47

how poorly he first played, and, two, he sees it as an opportunity to earn a scholarship for college, knowing painfully well that it will be his financial responsibility to find a way to go to college. Each of these facets of John’s life are prerequisites of and aids to his important, evolving educational and vocational choices; they are elements of his decision-making capabilities. Even at the point of our second interview John had been at the “game” of making choices, educational or otherwise, he felt would lead him to successful college and work futures (“Oh, I’ve thought about that ever since I was like a little kid in first grade. I had a career I wanted to go into”). John’s qualifications in answering questions posed to him about his vocational future lend testimony to his rather exceptionally mature decision-making capacity. When I asked him what he wanted as a career he said it is was not yet possible to know, but he was still able to pull together all of his resources to say both which would be logical choices and which would be choices based on interests. For example, he suggested engineering as a possible vocation in view of his strong math and science skills, but over time (over the first two years of interviews) he had come to feel that he would like to do something with his strong English interest, specifically his creative writing talent, suggesting journalism. Yet he was even able to take that further, incorporating his love of basketball, and suggest sports commentator. I suggested sports journalist or sports writer. Again, there is that nice connection between his home, school and personal lives that gives coherence to his choices. The various aspects of his decision-making are generally not mutually exclusive and they are in a constant state of change. While what he said about preparing for a good college as being his primary goal may be true, John was also clearly making choices about his future beyond college. And I think his interview talk also shows that those decisions were being made by a variety of external factors, by social forces which impact his perceptions about what is right for him. Another good example of John’s changing educational and vocational views, was his interesting revelation during our third year interview (grade 10) that he had become very interested in psychology and was considering vocations along those lines. John: 10th Grade—Marion Community High School “Every year it changes. Every year I think of something—well, I still—I still like journalism and something of that nature, but lately I took an interest in, like, psychology.”

Each of the preceding years, John talked about the impact of his mother’s problems on his home and school life. But during our third

48

Voices of Reason

year interview he really had much to say about it, often in sad, frustrated, or bitter tones (we will see later that things only get worse in the fourth year), and how it has motivated his interest in psychology.

155

160

165

170

John: Same situation, with my mother, and my little brother being in a foster home, and at one point during the year, DSS [Department of Social Services] wanted me to move in with one of my relatives. Interviewer: Oh. J: Because things were pretty bad between me and my mother. Interviewer: Really? In what way—what ways does it manifest itself? J: Meaning what was like wrong? I: Well, yeah. I mean, what are some of the things going on at home that — J: Well, she’s been ill for quite some time, but I, like, try to tolerate, like, things that were going on. Like oftentimes, she’d spend all our money on like junk, to say, you know, to be—in general, a lot of different things but instead of things I needed, like food and— I: Oh, I see. J: She’s on public aid, you know, that things were supposed to go on to help me and I would go hungry, where she would be flaunting around with a diamond ring or something. I: Oh, I see, okay.

He knows well enough that the public assistance monies were provided to help take care of him, but instead her choice is to think only of herself. He goes on to say:

175

180

185

190

John: It’s upsetting, (to see) things like that. And I’d get into like verbal arguments and it would escalate. Interviewer: And you would tell her how silly it was for her to be spending the money on diamond rings when— J: Yeah. Well, obviously, she has a different set of priorities and—I don’t know, she blames her illness, but think it’s more like an excuse. I: So, you’re still at home with her? J: They gave me till a certain time. They were like, if you—we want you to make a decision. We don’t want you to go into a foster home; so, if you feel the need to leave, then you tell us which relatives you want to go to; but I just never went back to them. I thought I’d just give it like another chance and sweat it out, and things kind of calmed down for a bit. But this always happens like periodically, and things will escalate again. I: And it’s just you and your mom at home? J: Yeah, well, my uncle moved in this year, my uncle Rich. I: Did that help? J: Kind of, having a male role model around kind of—he speaks up for me now and then when he’s there, but he’s often working out and stuff and—he’s a lot—does a lot of stuff with me that—you know, I haven’t

The Great Orator

49

done, like goes fishing with me and stuff, or goes out and plays with me. And my mom would just—could care less.

In spite of his difficult relationship with his mother he has made the choice to stay with her and has gained what he sees as a male role model with whom he has a chance to do things, perceiving that his mother “could care less.” Yet, in spite of her evident failure to meet most of his needs, John still turns to her for support, as below when he was faced with what he sees as an unfair evaluation of his behavior from an incident in which his teacher (French) decided to give him a poor grade:

195

200

205

210

John: Yeah, I did complain. I told my mother and my mother called her and she was like, Oh yeah, well, he acts up now and then. My mom knows that she’s lying, so I talked to my guidance counselor and they said, Oh no, you earn the grades you get, because they don’t really listen to me. Because she kind of—like if I hadn’t—she does like things purposely to make sure—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. I’m sure you’ve been to school, you’ve encountered them—these people—people say, Oh no, you earn your grade, but there are some teachers that are like that. Like I brought in a project that was due one day and I was taking a meet test and she was collecting the projects, it was for extra credit, and she said, Does everybody have after class. I said, okay, then I brought it to her after class. She goes, This is late, you get a D. I said, I got a D? She goes, Yeah, you brought it in late. I said, I asked you for a pass. She goes, Too bad you didn’t have it when I asked you for it. I said, Okay. She goes, But make sure you hand it to me after lunch, I’ll be in the halls. I went to her in the halls. She wasn’t around. I waited around, she wasn’t around, so, I left it on her desk. And the next day she said, John got a zero because he didn’t follow directions and put it on my desk instead of my hands. It’s just little things like that, she—.

As a result, John decided to drop French and take Latin, to avoid the French teacher. He stated that he maintained strong grades in all of his other subjects, all honors classes (Honors English II, World Civilization II, Honors chemistry, Honors geometry and French IV). He said he found English still to be of strong interest to him:

215

John: This year? I like English and World Civ best. Interviewer: English and what? J: World Civilization. I: Oh, okay. Tell me about the English and what you like about it. J: It’s English. I like English, in general, creative writing. It’s more of a thought-provoking process than the computation of math or chemistry.

This is what John had to say about his vocational considerations:

50

220

225

230

Voices of Reason Interviewer: But what about how this all ties into your vocational goals? What are your thoughts about where you’re going now at this point? John: Every year it changes. Every year I think of something— I: That’s fine. And I would expect that. I think that’s—that’s what’s going to happen for most kids. J: Well, I still—I still like journalism and something of that nature, but lately I took an interest in like psychology. I: Oh, okay. J: Well, I was in a psychology course last year for a study and I was really interested, instead of like going to sleep in my study or doing work, I like sat there and paid attention to the class, and then like this year, I looked in a few books and stuff, because I was curious because like my mother always claims to have this illness and whatnot, and just a lot of things that just were interesting to me, not even looking at something, I’d just open up to a page and start reading, because it was interesting.

So, although English continues to be his strong interest, and he continues to do well with his math and science subjects, John talks about psychology, partly due to his desire to seek the truth about his mother’s emotional problems. But when he was asked what particular type of employment he would engage in should he pursue the study of psychology, John later admits, after saying “Psychotherapist or some kind of research” that, although he is “extremely” interested in it, he may not pursue it vocationally. He presents more variation this year in his interests which in turn offer a variety of career options but at the same time he says that he really doesn’t know what will happen. I offer a summation of school-subject-to-vocation connection going back several years and John agrees, stating that if the creative English interest could lead to employment “I’d take it” and agrees that, although he is good with math, “I’d be successful, but I wouldn’t like it.” 235

240

245

Interviewer: All right. So, getting back to psychology, so you’re thinking that this—this may be a new area for—if you were to continue in psychology, what do you see yourself doing for work? John: Psychotherapist or some—some kind of research. Like I read it all the time and stuff. I even read about Clark—Sigmund Freud making stops. I: Do you read outside of class? Do you read on your own, things that are related to psychology? If you look at a magazine or newspaper article and it relates to psychology, you’ll pick it up and read it? J: Yeah. I: Okay. So, you’re kind of drawn to it? J: Yeah, I like—like, I don’t know, I’m trying to figure things out that like—I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it, really.

The Great Orator

250

255

260

51

I: So, basically, what you’re thinking about right now—and as you just said a few minutes ago—they keep changing. So, we’ll see what happens next year, things that you’re thinking about, and that’s one of the things that I’m doing to follow you guys along and see how you keep—you know, changing your ideas and why. The why part is important. So, the creative writing, do you see any future in that at all, for journalism? J: Of course. I mean, I’m good at that and I enjoy it, too; so, if the opportunity was there, I’d take it. I: So, you’re still carrying that forward. A couple of years ago you talked about engineering, but then you kind of ruled out the idea that math— while you do well in math, it’s boring, is basically what you’ve said. Is that how you still feel about that? J: Yeah. I: If you were to do it for work, or things that relate to— J: Yeah. I’d be successful, but I wouldn’t like like it.

John: 11th Grade—Marion Community High School “Well, I decided I want to major in Computer Programming, most definitely…If I was a computer programmer I could do something pertaining to sports.”

My fourth year interview with John nearly failed; it was not until my fourth visit to his school that I met with him and just days before year’s end. John was absent, injured his ankle and at a basket ball game for each of the first three attempts, respectively. John’s home situation with his mother has become much more disruptive, for the first time seriously impacting his school performance:

265

270

275

John: Well, this year was kind of a rough year for school for me because a lot of things have been going on at home with my family as far as that’s concerned. And like it caused me to have a lot of more—I had a lot of absences. Not an extreme amount, like 11 and 12 but I was like perpetually tardy, like late to school, I mean, late like an hour or two towards the end of the year a lot. And it was difficult because my uncle, who’s like homeless—not homeless—well he doesn’t have a place to stay. He’s staying with us, and I have a small apartment for housing you know, a housing project. My mother’s boyfriend now who comes in drunk like half the time. He’s there and it’s like disturbing me at night, you know, there’s like all yelling and stuff. And sometimes I get up because I’m worried about my mother, you know, ’cause he can get violent or some stuff like that, so it’s been kind of rough. Interviewer: Boy there’s a lot going on. Last year when we talked about it, it was you and your mom, and there was some talk of maybe you living with your uncle or maybe he’s coming to live with you. Now your

52 280

285

290

295

300

310

Voices of Reason mother has a boyfriend. She didn’t have one last year, right? J: Well, she did but this year he’s been living— I: Okay. I see. So, why are you late at school an hour or two because you wanted to get yourself prepared before you— J: Well, like, they come home at night, like 3, 4 in the morning. They’re yelling. I mean really yelling loud or they’re playing music, and I have a small, small apartment. It’s a two-bedroom apartment but it’s in like a housing complex and the walls are like paper thin. So, you know, if I don’t have my fan going like I can hear a little pin dropping. Even with the radio on and stuff, I’m waking up really easy. I: So you hear all that stuff that’s going on? J: Right. And sometimes they’re arguing, like, arguing all the time. So I have to get up and go out there and, you know, make sure my mother’s okay. And, I don’t know—It was like I was only starting going like a little late, like every day, like 20 minutes, a half hour. Like as the year went on, it progressively got like—like I wake up like an hour or two late. I: Yeah. J: Yeah. I’m angry with myself because I know my grades—’cause I’m much better. Because my absences—not, I was absent from school but coming in late on a routine schedule, you get like an absent from this class here and there. And they accumulated and I miss a lot of material and I could do a lot better. I: Is your mother aware of what impact this is having on you in your schooling? J: She is, but I don’t really know if she’s that concerned as far as my grades and stuff goes. Because she’s like—oh, she’s kind of passive and stuff. Even my own well being, she’s kind of like a self-centered person, ’cause she’s sick. In the other interviews I told you about.

It is really quite remarkable that John is able to remain stable enough from within himself to stay focused on his schooling to the degree that he does, although his first period subject is a problem due to tardiness. He seems less angry about his mother ’s situation, offering that she is self-centered because she is sick but angry at himself because his grades could be better. Although he told me previously that he lives in a housing project, it is the first time I learn that it is an apartment. I listen to his description of his home life and wonder how anyone manages to cope, especially a 17-year-old. In the next turn he does show how he came to the decision to stay in his home in spite of the turmoil, when DSS was giving him a chance to go somewhere else, weighing it all, and concluding that he has the comfort of home, church association, and his basketball:

310

John: Well they talked to me and they said it was an option for me if I ever wanted to do it. And I know it would be good for me in that aspect

The Great Orator

315

53

that I would be able, you know, to be free from a lot of those things and focus on my academics and so forth. But there’s a lot of comfort in my own home. You know, I’ve been there for so long. It’s my neighborhood. I have my church, my basketball. Everything’s like concentric to that area to me here. Moving out would be difficult.

In spite of his uncharacteristically weak performance in some of his classes due to his tardiness (math) or to “personality clashes” with teachers (French), John is doing well with his AP (advance placement) classes including AP History and Biology, both “A” grades. He will drop French and will take math again due to his tardiness, a decision he has made even thought (by switching to another time period for math) he will pass—he said he would rather take the course over again than settle for a possible 65. When asked about his courses for next year (grade 12), John introduced computer programming as a completely new interest triggered by a recent purchase of “my own personal computer”:

320

John: Well, I decided I want to major in computer programming, most definitely. I got my own PC this year—my own personal computer. And I’ve been really spending a lot of time on it. And you know, I picked up HTML like nothing and with all this other stuff, and I really want to learn programming. And I started playing around with Q-Basic and stuff. And it would be nice to make my own software. So, I inquired to a few schools and stuff so next year I’m taking computer programming here.

Characteristic of John’s display of initiative, he not only has begun self-teaching computer programming, he has also begun inquiries into formal training opportunities. This sort of independent decision-making and information search is generally not found with my other interviewees. He has the capacity to serve as his own best (or worst) critic (as we’ve seen with his comments about the impact his mother and chaotic home life have increasingly had on him), to evaluate the fairness of situations, voice them and take appropriate action (change math classes), to accept responsibility for actions about which he has some control to weigh what he feels is the better choice (for example, remain at home or accept a DSS move). Together with his concern for his educational and vocational future, John takes an active approach to assessing his strengths and weaknesses and then sees what are logical choices. In this case, at this point, it is the computer programming interest that is captivating him. Instead of simply saying loosely that he wants to do something with computers because it seems fun, as I’ve had so many people (adults often) tell me, John articulates the inception of his choice, evaluates its feasibility in terms of employment prospects to some degree, and examines what the training requirements are. All of

54

Voices of Reason

this is quite remarkable for someone with practically no guidance at home and very little elsewhere, and without a traditional, middle-classvalues orientation. To carry this analysis even further, we see also, from what John has said over these last four years, that, while he may passionately state a decision/choice, he always reminds us that he knows his decisions of today can be expected to change as he continues his explorations. Yet he, sometimes cleverly so, manages to tie in some of his other interests such as sports. Hearing his words at this point one could be convinced that he has found his vocational direction:

325

330

335

340

345

John: I sort of want to go into computer programming. I’ve been inquiring to a specific school of the number one programming school in the total world actually. It’s called Digiten Institute—Digital Pen— it’s actually in Vancouver, Canada. But it’s a special kind of school, like, it’s only a two-year program, you go to school for ten hours a day, you have to live there stuff. It’s pretty hard to get in. Some in the portfolio— Interviewer: So you’re really thinking about—You would actually think about going up to Canada spend two years there? J: Well, it’s something I really, really want to do—I really want to do that. I: So, how about the journalism as one area that you were thinking about? J: As a career? I: Yeah, in the past, you had expressed an interest in being a journalist or a sports journalist. That was one of your vocational goals that you had in mind. So that’s kind of dropped away in your thinking? The computer programming is the thing in your mind right now? J: Yeah, I rather say that’s most definite. I: Okay. J: I mean, I could—If I was a computer programmer I could do something pertaining to sports. I: Yeah. Oh yeah, of course. So, when you say computer programming, are you thinking about actually developing the software or —. J: Interactive software development.

So the psychology interest of the previous year has waned; the journalism interest of the year before is less of a passion and the engineering consideration from eighth grade never got off the ground.

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW WITH JOHN “Heads raised from the administrative people and you could hear murmuring. John was noticeably agitated as he walked briskly around and behind the counter that separates the students and school personnel, to greet me.”… “To ask John about his future goals seemed obviously absurd given his current situation. And he told me so.”

The Great Orator

55

When I called Marion High to arrange interviews with John, Evon, Angela, Geraldo and Tracy, I learned that John had not been attending school recently. The school’s administration and teachers were attempting to work out “problems” that threatened his graduation. I obtained his home telephone number from an operator, first by calling his grandmother, whose number is listed as John’s is not. She knew of me and willingly gave me his telephone number. John answered the call on the second ring. He agreed to meet with me at the school the next day at 10:30 A.M. The next day I interviewed Geraldo first and then went to the alternative school for expectant and new mothers to see Angela (whom I also had to call at home). When I arrived back at Marion High John had not yet arrived. By 11:00 A.M. I grew concerned that he would not keep the appointment. I called his home and spoke to his mother. She said he was on his way to the school. I went ahead with my interview with Tracy. Afterwards, when I came out of the interviewing room, I was told that John had arrived and was at his locker and would be back in a few minutes. Ten minutes later he came into the office area. Heads raised from the administrative people and you could hear murmuring. John was noticeably agitated as he walked briskly around and behind the counter that separates the students and school personnel to greet me. We walked back to the office at the end of a long hallway where I was conducting the interviews. As I adjusted the camera, John said that things were very bad for him. I told him I wanted to talk about all of that when we were set to go (when audio and video recordings were activated). John opened by saying that he would not be graduating from high school because he failed some of his subjects. He explained that he has had a barrage of significant events to deal with, and that cumulatively they were just too much for him to handle. He began with startling news about his father contacting him from Saudi Arabia for the first time since he abruptly left the family when John was two years old; he has asked him to start a life in that country. He told John it was time to introduce him to the Muslim religion. John said he is of two minds about this: One, he is curious about his father and so seeing him may be interesting and important; the other is that he feels his father should not be interfering now after so many years and has no right to make any demands. John added that this has caused considerable tension at home where tensions were already high. And so his second crisis is his mother’s worsening mental health and her physical and mental abuse of John. Connected with that abuse is her failure to have food there for him and so John has had to work to have money for food. His brother, who is now ten and still living in a foster home, is asking him why he has stopped seeing him as much. As I revealed in our previous year’s interview, John had begun to see his brother much more than at any

56

Voices of Reason

time since his brother had been placed in a foster home at age five because their mother could not take care of him. Collectively, then, the very disruptive home situation impacted his sleep habits resulting in school tardiness to an even greater extent than the last quarter of the previous year. And so his grades began slipping. John said he’d work to get caught up on one subject only to see problems mounting with others. His depression grew worst to the point where he said he finally could not cope and was placed on antidepressants and began seeing a psychiatrist and a counselor regularly. If that wasn’t enough, John said, he had made the varsity basketball team and was elected captain—only to injure his knee in the first game, resulting in his being unable to play for the rest of the season. But all of these problems pale in comparison, as John described it, to the devastating breakup, about a month earlier, of his long-time relationship with a girl whom he described as someone who knew him better than anyone else and to whom he thought he could turn when he fell into his darkest hours. She abruptly stopped seeing him, presumably because she could not or would not deal with his problems. To ask John about his future goals seemed obviously absurd given his current situation. And he told me so. He said he could not think beyond his emotional turmoil, which he described as a very heavy weight on him that made it very difficult to eat, sleep or function adequately. He said he supposed he could get his GED at some point and then go to college but added, what would his college selections be with his poor ending to his academic program at Marion High? He talked about how he knows he has let himself down as well as others who have had high expectations for him. He talked about knowing that he is bright with a potentially very successful future ahead of him if he wasn’t where he is now. And he talked about how he remembers me asking him in earlier years how he coped with his difficult home situation. He said he was able to put a shield in front of him for protection but now he feels like someone who has his head repeatedly pushed below the surface of the water each time he barely breaks through as he gasps for more air.

POWERFUL QUOTES John

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

The Great Orator

Journalism/Sportswriter

The “H-Team”

Well, I don’t know if I make sure of it, but the way my—the way the format was for me in junior high school has it so now that my mind automatically

The Great Orator

Racism

Applying Knowledge Across Subjects

does that. When I’m sitting in science, I’m applying my math—the things I learned in math and so forth, because that’s what we had to do in Heterogeneous. You know, like sometimes in my other classes, when students need help they just sit there, you know, trying to work with each other and I see like me and Dave and other people from the H-Team going to each other and like helping each other, like the ways we were taught. Because we did a lot of programs with like facilitators and administrators, you know, trying to help each other out. And we do a lot of times when other people just sit there and like not knowing what to do, how to help them. They just sit there staring at the paper blankly. I don’t know. I think we have a lot of problems with our youth, racial tensions, you know, violence. The society they’re being brought up in is what they— that’s what they see and that’s what they’re going to do. They see their big brother’s doing it and they see the bigger kids (that have respect) doing it, and they’re going to try to do it, too, and that’s the way our school—even my school—this school, in particular. I don’t know if it was so much at Jasper, but this school is definitely characterized like that. I may have this mindset, but I know I’m one of the minorities of people. I don’t mean minorities in skin color, I mean—the low number of people that think this. And—I don’t know. It’s not really anything I learned or was taught. I just realized that down the long run, this is what would be better for me. I can’t get caught up with what’s going on right now. I have to look at the big picture, not just right now. I don’t think a lot of people see that. They see well, right now, I want to do this and later on I’ll do that.

John

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

10th Grade

The Great Orator

Psychotherapist/Researcher

H-Team Experience

57

Every day. Every day, we’re all—sitting there talking how—talking about how we wish we were still in that environment (H-Team), we miss it, it was so much better than this. And it’s not necessarily the building or the teachers, but just the atmosphere. One day I was sitting in class and we went on a field trip and it was—it was on a

58

Societal Problems, i.e., Racism

Lives in Housing Project

Voices of Reason *SPUR program, some kind of program with the U.S. defense department to like fix problems in the school, and I was in a bus with a representative group of the entire school, I mean, from all kinds of classes, all kinds of kids, and I suddenly I realized I hadn’t been in class with a black person in two years. I mean, I’ve been with—two Puerto Rican people in two years have been in my class…Because I’m in honors. And I know for a fact that there are some kids that are—that are—you know, that are in college because they’re black or something, and they’re a lot smarter than the kids I have in honors. I have kids in honors that are really dumb. They’re white, but that’s *how they got there*, I don’t know—I really don’t know. There’s something wrong about the system, I know that much. (Racism) Well, in my classes, honors, I can speak for them, because I’m in it. We haven’t been in class with black students now like—to always like say things about them and I get offended sometimes, not because I’m black or anything, but they really don’t know what they’re talking about because they don’t live in those situations. The majority of them—I’m not saying all of them, but the majority of them—of my classmates, like their mommy and daddy, you know, can pay for their car and whatnot and they come from a household where the—you know, the father’s working, they have a good job, and if they hear about someone getting free lunch or something they’re like, Oh, get off welfare or something, you know? And I, myself, am on public aid, so I’m kind of offended. They really don’t know what they’re talking about. They walk around saying, Oh, these niggers and these spicks do this and that My neighboorhood, personally, I live in a housing project, but it’s right near to—near like a middle class neighborhood with a lot of single-family homes, and they’re pretty biased towards the *use of the community. They have crime watch meetings. They’re always having slanderous opinions of me. They’re saying, This kid’s selling drugs and whatnot, and my priest laughs at them and says, you know—it’s just—it’s odd, the way they see the youth of today. They automatically assume because I’m wearing baggy clothes or something that I’m some kind of thug, uneducated and I’m in a gang and whatnot, and that disturbs

The Great Orator

Making the Best of the Situation

me. The other day, I was stopped by the police, and they’re like, Are you Puerto Rican? And I was like, What relevance does that have to whatever you’re doing? The way I see it, there’s like two kinds of people in my situation—because there’s a lot of people in my situation, you know, got a lot of things wrong with their life, a lot of responsbilities, and they could easily just let it all go. There’s one person that will say, woe is me, look what’s going on to me, and just give up and expect everybody to feel bad for them. And the other kind of person is the kind of person that’s saying, This is what’s going on with me now, so I want to try and make something better. And I’m the kind of—I want to make something better.

John

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

The Great Orator

Computer Programming

Societal Problems, i.e., Racism

I hate racism. It is really evident in this school. And like I’m subject to it all the time because I’m like the only colored kid that’s not, you know, Asian or Anglo-Saxon in my classes. So I get ridiculed and stuff a lot and they say it with indifference and it gets me really mad. They all say something like, aw shut up, John, you make a big deal out of it. I’m like, it is a big deal. Or they go off like, a genocide. Well you know what I mean. I’m trying to install how important it is. It’s just ridiculous. And I experience that in a lot of other things besides that and that really bothers me because—it exists and people don’t even realize it a lot of times. Like, my class, as if I wasn’t there, they say it without consciousness of it, like it’s a big joke. As a matter of fact, they say—If there was more people than me it can cause a serious problem. Or even to my self-esteem, if I wasn’t as well—

John

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

The Great Orator

Computer Science

Not Graduating from High School**

59

I’m not graduating this year....Yeah. It’s all baloney for me to start to begin talking about it without

**Post-interview telephone call reports that he has graduated from high school and hopes to attend college mid-year for computer science.

60

Voices of Reason

breaking it down. It’s kind of—well, this—I don’t know—At the end of last year, things seemed to be a little awkward for me. Like I started waking up later and missing a bit of school and umm—as this year began, a lot of different things popped up in my life. When I was younger, I went through a lot, and I was able to kind of like lock it away and channel that anger to do stuff. Girlfriend and Father And for a while, I know you knew I had been with this certain girl, Tina, for four years of my life, and you know, that was always a wonderful thing. Well, entering this year, I had all these—I got barraged with a lot of pressures and things that weren’t there before. My father, who had been gone since I was two years old, reentered my life. He tried contacting me from Saudi Arabia and put all these new pressures on me about, you know, my religion, since he’s Moslem, and I was confirmed. Father renews Contact Yeah. I mean, he wants me to go to meet him in Saudi Arabia. He wants me to, you know, do all these things that he had done, and he wants his son to do, and at the same time I was really confused, like, angry at him from one point. Why weren’t you there all this time? And the other part, like, wanting to know and wanting to try and do this. And at the same time I tore apart my family in a way ’cause they were really—didn’t know which way to go and that. My mother has been mentally ill—suddenly took a turn for the worse. And I had new abuses, so to speak, to put up with. I mean, it was really ridiculous where I’d have to—I had to work just to make sure I could eat the next day. And I had to wonder where I would be living a week from now ‘cause she would kick me out of the house for few reasons. And you know it was pretty difficult going through that. Mother Continuing Well, she had seemed like she was okay, kind of Psychiatric Difficulties recovering from whatever she was going through, and then she just seemed to relapse. I don’t know what they called it but she definitely, certainly got more, I don’t know, like, lost touch with her sensitivity for me, like, even like I wasn’t even her son. Like I was just some nuisance in her home. I mean, she would throw stuff at me, I mean, try to hit me and stuff. It was really getting bad. My little brother, who I always have a heavy heart for, he’s like felt a lot of responsibility for him having to leave. He had grown up somewhat now. He’s 10

The Great Orator

Seeks Help

Depression

Breakup with Girlfriend

61

years old, and he has all these new—like he wonders why I don’t go over and see him as much as he wants me to and stuff like that. And I got all this thrust on my shoulders the same time I was entering my senior year of high school. And suddenly I’m supposed to, you know, tenths of a point in my grade, it’s a huge difference. I have to worry about colleges and now money and now to be concerned about getting myself an apartment because my mother’s gonna throw me out. At the same time, I’m trying to maintain a relationship with a person and trying to support them so to speak, you know. It was just tremendously difficult for me to deal with. I do talk with someone but it’s—like, I can talk really openly about it but it was still something that affected like every other—It was strange. It was like this vortex I was caught up in. And every time I’d reach to try to gain back ground that I had lost and then something else—like say, school, I was becoming later and later. I would try, you know, to make up work and to do that, and then I would end up losing time in another subject or not making enough money at work so I would be able to pay for this or that. And then when I did concentrate more on that I’d lose ground on the other thing. No matter what I did to try to publl myself out I was sinking farther and farther in, and I wasn’t giving up. I was still trying to do what I can, and at a certain point I slipped into a depression—into a deep depression. I got put on anti-depressant medication. But I feel like I’ve lost everything in my life. Like I lost my—I mean, this year, I lost varsity basketball captain, you know, a goal that I aspired to be for four years of my life...The first game of the season I tore the interior cartilage of my left leg, and I was out for the season. And a lifetime of dreams and hopes and goals were just down the tube. I mean that’s how my year went along with everything. Even Tina—the person who I felt closest to in the world. And I can honestly say I loved her very much. After going through my depression, I guess she was at a point where she needed me or something. I don’t know—it was really strange. But she said like she would come to me and I wouldn’t be there—like I’d be there but not totally there mentally. And I couldn’t help it. I

62

Sees Psychiatrist

More about Current Emotional State

College

Voices of Reason mean, I was in depression. And so she questioned our relationship for a bit and she became close to someone else, and not two months ago she came to me and said she didn’t love me anymore—she was leaving me. And that was like the last—It was the most devastating blow to me. That was the last thing I had left in my life. I mean, I lost my athletic skills, you know, it was important to me. Academically—I lost socially. I wasn’t part of the social scene anymore, which isn’t that important, but I had nothing, you know. My family life, work, school, everything, and now the last thing I had— you know, my love, my relationship like that. That was gone too. I just felt like everything was over, like I didn’t even care anymore about school, about myself, about anything. I do. I see a psychiatrist and a counselor but, you know, I have so much built up, I mean, after all this time, I mean, every time I go, it’s just like a talking, and then it’s time to go. And I just keep going and going. Every week I go through a new trauma and a new episode, and things don’t seem to lighten up or get better. They just get worse and worse, you know? It’s like people tell you, well things will get better, and if you move on, and you don’t see it now, but down the road, you know, I can become the most successful rocket scientist ever and have the most money in the world and marry super models and be successful at everything, it doesn’t matter because this feeling, you know. I’m not gonna get all philosophical on you, but you know—I don’t even feel melancholy. What does it mean to me to be successful and a great, you know—it’s like I live like a—it’s like I’ve been sentenced and now I have to carry it out. And this torment won’t go away. I mean, my friends try to do things. We go to basketball games and we go out to clubs and parties and things that, you know, and really a good time but it doesn’t work out that way. It’s just depressing. I mean, I was with the person for a long time—five years nearly and you know—with the person for a long time—five years nearly and you know—. Oh, no, not at all right now. I had an acceptance from a bunch of places but then this hit me and I couldn’t even—I could barely—I mean—My friends had to be there at night with me when I got home because I would be a mess—hitting stuff and

The Great Orator

63

breaking stuff and crying. And I was really hysterical and they would have to be there stuffing my face with pizza and taking me out just so I’d stay somewhat sane, I mean. At some point I could say I was almost suicidal. I really was. And it’s peculiar for me to say that because I’m not a stupid individual, and I can see beyond, you know, emotional things and what’s, you know, what’s earthly important, what’s the greater good and stuff like that but it’s just so overwhelming I just can’t—It’s hard for me to handle it. I kind of just put myself in other people’s hands and say, Look, here I am. I need you to—.

4 Goes With the Wind

Goes With the Wind

DEFINING “GOES WITH THE WIND” Interviews of this type are easy to identify primarily because the story(ies) unfolds over many turns in a horizontal scaffolding manner. The discourse is replete with closed-ended questions by the interviewer and treated as such by the interviewee with little attempt to go outside the question (little elaboration). While some turns may offer fairly detailed responses, overall both the interviewer and the interviewee keep their turns short, usually under 25 words, with some to 75 words but rarely exceeding 100 words. For perspective, in contrast, the “Great Orator” interview averages in the 50 to 75 words range with occasional peak turns over 200 words. The “Goes With the Wind” interview feels like light talk, nothing too serious or too intense. Responses generally lack substantiation beyond such statements as “Well, I think it would be fun,” or “I think I’d like that.” There is the clear sense that the interviewee is cooperative, pleasant and sincere but lacks an understanding of the “greater picture” as it relates to their educational and vocational choices.

ANGELA: GRADES 8–11 To interview Angela has always been interesting, enlightening and unpredictable. Her interviews are the kind that warrant looking at the videotapes to capture their richness due to her facial expressions, mannerisms and voice tone. Except for the fourth interview transcripts, simply reading the transcripts misses much of who she is and my part in

66

Voices of Reason

that dialogue. That fourth interview was quite a bit of work to arrange and may not have happened had she not told her school principal: I just had a feeling you were gonna come back this year. But I’m saying to myself, I hope he comes to me because I’m not at Marion anymore. But I guess they told you, so, and then Mr. Barnes the principal, he comes up to me. He says, Someone wants to see you. He goes, he comes from another school. I go, oh, yeah, he’s been following me since, I should say eighth grade, I think … you know, he just asks me questions because this school’s like protective, you know because—he goes, well let me call Miss—of the other school just to make sure this guy, you know, he don’t bite nobody.

Angela lives with her parents and three sisters in what she describes as a “nice neighborhood”. She states that her mother, who currently is not working, was a nurse, and says about her father: “He works with metal, scrap metal. I really don’t know what he does, but he’s been at that job for twelve years.” She has not participated in school sports, opting instead to work each of her after school days. I will present these and her other decisions that ultimately impact, influence or otherwise guide her educational and vocational choices in the following pages through transcripts of our interviews. We will see that, while her immediate post-secondary goal is to go to college, she moves between several possible vocational directions until she settles on nursing. However none of these choices, at this time in her life, could compare to one of the most difficult decisions a very young person has to make—about an unplanned pregnancy. However, as we will see, in making that choice she seems to have taken a more confident posture toward her school and work future. Angela: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Do you know where you’re going to go after high school? Angela: Not really. I want to go to college . . . I want to take up like nursing.

Angela has an intact family unit, consisting of her mother, father, and three sisters. She describes herself:

5

Angela: I like music. Interviewer: Okay. A: Describe myself? I: Yeah, describe yourself and what you like. A: I’ve got freckles. I: Okay. A: Long, brown hair. Brownish-blonde— I: How would you describe yourself? Talk about what you like, your

Goes With the Wind

10

15

67

personality. What kind of a person do you think you are? A: I think I’m a nice person. I: Okay. What do you think your friends think? A: That I’m a nice person. I’m tall. I: Okay. A: I’ve got freckles, blue eyes. I: All right. A: brownish-blonde hair, curly. I: Okay. A: I’m a nice person.

Angela was the only one of the ten H-Team children in this study to consider herself tracked at the academic level of “standard” during our first interview in her eighth grade (later we will see that she considers herself on the college track). She says she wants to attend college and she wants to go into nursing but she doesn’t appear to have any real sense of how school and personal interests may provide direction nor does it seem that this is a real concern to her at her age (we will see significant changes later). She considers “Amherst College” (actually University of Massachusetts at Amherst) because on a field trip there she liked it. When I asked her again, later, about college nursing, Angela’s vagueness was apparent:

20

25

30

35

Interviewer: Okay. So, are you thinking about going to college? Angela: Yes. I: Thinking about making a goal of going to college? A: Yes. I: Work hard in high school? A: Mm-hmm. I: So, what do you think will happen after college? Try to think about later on, down the road. A: I hope I become what I want to become. I: Nursing? A: Mm-hmm. I might become a nurse, but— I: But what? A: If I don’t, then I think— I: What’s holding you back? You said but— A: Well, if you can’t get the job or something. I: Well, they have a lot of jobs in nursing. Are you thinking about going to nursing school after college? A: Mm-hmm. I: It could be a nursing school at the college? A: Mm-hmm.

I further attempted to see if Angela had any more than this loose sense of her educational and vocational choices by asking her to consider life

68

Voices of Reason

for herself in ten years. From her responses we see further evidence that she has not-so-unusual kinds of expectations about family, work, home, transportation and residence:

40

45

50

55

Interviewer: Think about where you think you’ll be in ten years. You’ll be out of college? Angela: Mm-hmm. I: Maybe a nurse, maybe nursing. What else? Are you married? What do you think will happen to you at that point? A: I’ll be married, probably. Have a baby or something. I: Okay, then what are some of the things that will happen? What are some of the dreams you have? A: To own my own home. I: Okay. Where? A: Like in New Hampshire or somewhere like that. I: Oh, yeah? Have you been up there before? A: Mm-hmm. I: You like it there? A: Mm-hmm. I: So you’ll be married have maybe a kid or two, maybe do nursing, have a home up in New Hampshire. What else? A: Have my own car. I: Have any idea what kind of car you want? A: Not really. That’s (...) It’s kind of hard to tell you what (...).

Angela: 9th Grade—Marion Community High School I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen. Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that. I (could) go to law school for that. Police academy. Stuff like that, but—

This is Angela’s first year at the urban community high school and out of her two-year non-tracked program. Her family situation is unchanged but they’ve moved to a larger home. She now works after school at Dunkin Donuts, which she says she likes very much. She now reports she is on the college track and that she likes science and physical science the most and later, when asked again, added English which she also reported the previous year. She is doing “bad” in math, which she says is her worst subject. She finds her new learning situation much different from her H-Team format and harder as a result:

60

Interviewer: Okay. So, is it different than the H-Team here? Angela: Oh, much different, yeah. I: In what way? A: ’Cause in the H-Team you’re like every class you go to, you’re with

Goes With the Wind

69

the same people, but now I’m with different people, so it’s kind of harder.

The following piece of discourse is especially poignant and revealing about Angela. Here she first said she really didn’t have any idea what she wanted to do for a living someday but then added that she has her dreams, ideas that are at arm’s length, feelings about things she has interest in but doesn’t feel they are attainable. We will see though, in our third-year interview, that Angela dropped her nurse interest, nor does she mention being a lawyer, but instead indicates a strong desire to become a police officer. 65

70

75

80

Interviewer: Any ideas at all about what you might want to do for a living someday? Angela: No, not really. I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen. I: Well, what do you dream? A: Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that. And I (could) go to law school for that. I: All right. What other dreams do you have? A: Like to help little kids, you know, them little Down’s syndrome kids stuff like that, be like a little nurse or something. I have a lot of dreams. I know all of them ain’t going to come true, but— I: Well—. A: I hope someday one of them will. I: Let’s pick one just to see how. A: All right. I: Which one do you— A: A lawyer. I: Okay. A: I would say a lawyer.

When I asked Angela who influenced her interest in becoming a lawyer, she said she didn’t know anyone who is a lawyer but has seen it on television: “No, but I just see people on TV acting out their stuff, I like it, so I just—.” And so, by the end of this second year, we know Angela’s home life is apparently reasonably secure, coming from a working middle class, two-parent household with several siblings. Instead of sports, Angela has made the choice to work much of her time outside of school and says that she very much enjoys it. Because she is less revealing about her personal life and has far less passionate interests than (for instance) John, it is not as easy to determine who the influencers are regarding the choices she has made. Her discourse style is radically different from the more loquacious interviewees, with responses that are much less elaborate. In

70

Voices of Reason

part that is likely due to her thinking and articulation capacities although we will see a gradual but significant change by our fourth year together. At this point, we are able to see some of her choice-making ability; during both interview years Angela said English has been her favorite subject. But, she displayed no sense that that subject (or any other) will directly relate to a particular vocational interest, with that interest in the first interview year being nursing. However, she stated that her goal essentially is to go to college. There does not seem to be any family influence involved in this choice, or from her other social orientations such as school. But it is perhaps within herself, where she later, in year two, says that one of her dreams is to work with disabled children (“Like to help little kids, you know, them little Down’s Syndrome kids stuff like that, be a little nurse or something”). Her year two interview offered a fascinating insight into Angela’s uncertainty about her educational and vocational choices. Related to her thoughts about working with disabled children, she said she had made the choice to take an early childhood class in the next year. But when asked later about her vocational goals, Angela gave a profound response: “I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen.” Only after I prodded her to tell me what some of those dreams are did she mention working with disabled children, becoming a lawyer or working as a police officer, three very diverse goals with only the first one having some connection to her educational goals/interests. It would appear, then, that Angela is not able to connect her various social settings/influencers to meaningful goals. In other words it does not appear that Angela at the time of our second year interview was able to see a school-to-work connection and thus lacked strong, coherent arguments for her educational and vocational choices, with the possible exception of early childhood course and caring for disabled children. What is interesting here, though, as mentioned before, is that in our third year interview Angela begins to show significant decision-making maturity as she comes to definitively choose police work as her vocational goal. Later I will illustrate that Angela has begun, in this third year, to shape her educational and vocational views with some in-school guidance. So, for Angela her decision-making capacity concerning school-to-work choices is just beginning to operate, whereas John, for example, has had a remarkably well developed one for some time. Angela: 10th Grade—Marion Community High School Interviewer: Okay. Now, what are you—what is your vocational goal? What do you want to become? Angela: A police officer. I don’t know. I just like want to be one. It looks interesting, you know?

Goes With the Wind

71

Just as Angela had once said that she wanted to be a lawyer because she saw actors on TV playing the part and it looked fun, in this third year, her sophomore year at Marion High, she wants to be a police officer because it looks interesting. But, additionally, as further impetus, she has been approached by her assistant principal about participating in a summer project for youths interested in police careers, from which she could earn $1000.00. Angela was able to see that her world history course (the law aspect) has some relevance to her new vocational goal.

85

90

95

100

105

110

115

120

Angela: A police officer. Interviewer: A police officer? A: Mm-hm. I: Okay. A: Next year, I’m doing a project. I: Okay. A: My principal set it up. I: Oh. A: They come they—for summer, they come like let you go through the courts be with the lawyers the police officers you get a thousand dollars at the end of the summer. I: So, you’re going to be a part of that program? A: Mm-hm, next year. I: It will be next year in eleventh grade? A: Mm-hm. I: You’ll go through the courts/course every— A: Every—like every day in the summer. It’s like a job. I: Okay. A: But you’re really learning, too. I: That will be for police officer work? A: Mm-hm. I: Great. That’s a good idea. Now, what made you be interested in becoming a police officer? A: I don’t know. I just like want to be one. It looks interesting, you know? I just like— I: Do you know what you have to do to become a police officer? A: A lot. I: What’s required? A: A lot’s required. A whole lot—college, I know that, and training. I: Okay. A: All that stuff. I: So, you finish high school, you go onto college, you’ll take courses in things that will help you to then go on to the police academy— A: Mm-hm. I:—for training? A: Mm-hm. I: Then would you be a police officer here in Brayton, is that—or does

72

Voices of Reason it not matter? A: Maybe. It don’t really matter to me, you know?

When I asked Angela about social problems in the community she gave a one-word response, “racial” as though that tells it all. I asked her to offer examples:

125

130

135

140

Angela: Racial. Interviewer: Okay. A: That’s the most problem. I: Tell me about the racial stuff. Where do you see it, what do you mean by it? A: Like, Why are you trying—like this happens a lot in our school, like, Why are you trying to wear that? You think you look like—what do you think you’re black, you know? Or, She thinks she’s cool because she’s wearing that. Or why—Like some girls have extensions if they see a different girl wearing that, Oh, she just wants to be black or, you know, they always do that. Or like I guess some of the white kids, like messing with the black kids, you know, calling them names and stuff, they don’t like them. And that’s about it. I: the girls mostly? A: Yeah, it’s mostly girls that say that. I: Oh, really. A: Like if I’m wearing a dress if it don’t look—if it don’t look right on me to them, they’ll say, Oh, it looks better on me, or, It looks better on the black, you know, like that? I: What do you do when they do that? A: I just ignore it, because I don’t buy my clothes for them. I buy my clothes for myself.

Angela, we learn, lives in a nice neighborhood, emphasizing that these sorts of problems with drugs, violence, racism don’t exist there. 145

I: Do you see that in your neighborhood? A: No. I: Okay. A: Never in my neighborhood. I got like a good neighborhood, I’m glad.

Angela: 11th Grade—Brayton High School for School Age Mothers I had a difficult time locating and then scheduling Angela in our fourth interview year because she was attending school in another location in Brayton—a school for school-age expectant mothers. Angela is participating in a full academic program here but dismissal is a bit earlier than at Marion High where she was enrolled until December.

Goes With the Wind

73

This powerful interview is about her acceptance of a new environment, albeit temporary, and the obvious major changes coming in her life after the baby arrives sometime early next fall. We see an extraordinary capacity to map out her future with much more clarity and determination then I would have expected based on our previous interviews. On several occasions throughout this interview Angela said, on the one hand, that things are different now (“Yeah. But things are different now, as you can see”) referring obviously to the substantial responsibilities to come but also about her determination to see to it that everything works out. And so her educational and vocational goals become paramount to her practically overnight. And for the first time I really learn about her personal life, her parents, her boyfriend, and even about her assistant principal, who very much wants to see her back at Marion High. This was an interview filled with many important aspects of this young person’s life. In many ways, in spite of her decision to keep and to raise her child (with her parent’s help) which brings with it prematurely heavy responsibilities, and my own empathetic understanding, I was not prepared for the sense that Angela could actually make this all happen. Listening to her gave me that sense that she has the determination and support to take a difficult situation and turn it into something quite workable. Marion High has a day care facility so Angela will be able to attend school in her twelfth grade. And she has her parents to help as well:

150

155

160

Interviewer: Are you still living at home? Angela: Yep. I’m still gonna be living at home. I’m still gonna be going to school. I: Okay. A: It’s gonna be kinda harder but at Marion they have a day care there too so — I: Oh, they do? I didn’t know that. A: Yep. So I can bring my baby to school. And then when I get out of school, the baby comes home with me but it’s just gonna be a struggle now. I: Do you have family at home to help you with that? A: Yeah, of course.

Angela offers powerful reassurance, in spite of her parents’ initial anger, that she will continue along with her life: Interviewer: Okay, how are they doing? How do they feel about all of this? Angela: Oh, they felt mad at first but they know that I’m gonna still go on with my life and be that person I want to be—just because—This is

74

Voices of Reason

165

not stopping me just because I’m pregnant. It’s not gonna stop who I want to be.

And even Angela recognizes the change in her capacity to make decision, particularly here as it relates to her vocational future:

170

175

Angela: Yeah. Well, I really, I really want to be a nurse. That’s my goals are to be. Interviewer: Okay. So when you say your goal is to be a nurse, you sound very sure of yourself. More so than last year about what you wanted to do. Why are you so sure now? A: Because, just like, I really know what I want now. Like, last year the year before I didn’t know what I wanted but the guys I see I like what they do for people how they, you know, just do their job stuff. I worked in a nursing home so I’ve been there , you know, seen all that.

It is apparent from Angela’s talk that she has been investigating her options. For example, with her nursing interest she knows that she has essentially three options for training including the 2- or 4-year college route. She even has a new car to look forward to when she graduates from college as a gift from her parents and even knows what it will be (a Neon). Later in the interview I returned to the topic of her pregnancy and asked her who made the decision:

180

185

190

Interviewer: When you first got pregnant, did you have to have a hard time deciding what you were gonna do or did you know right away that you were gonna have the baby ? Angela: Yeah, I had a lot of pressure. A real lot of pressure. I: Who gave you the pressure? A: Not my parents. To them it was my decision. Really the baby’s father, like telling me. I: Did he put a lot of pressure on you? A: Yeah, like just say stuff like, and if you don’t do this, then I’m not gonna be with you, you know, like that. I: You worked through it, made your own decisions? And is he still a part of your life? A: Yep. ‘Cause he knows that I made my decision. He can’t change it. I: Okay. All right. Is he gonna be there for you when the baby’s born? Is he gonna help support that? A: Yep. He got two jobs too. I: Okay. He’s not in school now? A: Yep, he goes to school. He goes to Davis High.

More statements about Angela’s determination:

Goes With the Wind

195

200

205

75

Angela: No, not really. Just like when people say, well, she’s pregnant, she’s not gonna go through school. She’s not gonna go through college just because I’m having a baby. That’s not really true. It happens to some people but others, if you want to do it, you can do it. It’ll be a little more work, but I can do it. This year Math has been good. I got all B’s in Math. All my grades like went up. You know, they went from B’s and D’s all the way up— Next year I’ll probably be a mother. You probably could see my baby next year. Interviewer: Yeah, it’ll be great. You can bring the baby to the interview if you want. It’ll be great. A: Things have changed, though, you know. At least I sit there and say I have faith in myself that I’m gonna be a somebody.

I close our interview with plans to see Angela next year at Marion High.

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW WITH ANGELA But because of the rapidly dwindling time problem I knew I’d have to call her at home myself to have any chance of seeing her the next day. . . . She told me that she had the baby in September and returned to Marion High as she had hoped to do. But one month later she returned to the Alternative Program.…Her plans are to complete a five-week summer CNA (Certified Nurse’s Aide) program and then attend Becker College’s two-year nursing program.

Angela wasn’t at Marion High, as I had expected she would be from our interview last year, but instead she returned to the Alternative Program for expectant mothers, except now she has a child. I called the Alternative Program to learn that there was just one day left for completion of classes and that Angela had called in sick due to an asthma problem. The school called her at home to let her know I wanted to see her. But because of the rapidly dwindling time problem I knew I’d have to call her at home myself to have any chance of seeing her the next day. The first call was answered by her sister who told me that Angela was sleeping. I left a detailed message asking Angela if she could meet me at Marion High (this was suggested by Mrs. Hanson at Marion High) the next day for the interview. I waited several hours and called again. Angela answered the telephone and said she would see me but it would have to be at the Alternative Program because there were rehearsals to attend in preparation for graduation. Angela greeted me enthusiastically at the school office at the agreed time. Subsequently we took the long walk through several corridors

76

Voices of Reason

ending at the site of our interview last year, which was a small classroom adorned with illustrations of pregnancy-related information. She told me that she’d had the baby in September and returned to Marion High as she had hoped to do. But one month later she returned to the Alternative Program. I asked her why and she said it was too much of a disruption to her studies to have her baby in the daycare center at the school. I asked her who now cares for her child while she attends school and she said her mother. I asked her why that arrangement could not have been implemented when she was at Marion High. She revealed then that she had been failing geometry and that returning to the Alternative Program provided easier academic study, especially geometry, although she did attend Marion High for some of her required classes. These arrangements have resulted in successfully completing her high school education, paving the way for continuation of her education toward her goal of becoming a registered nurse. Her plans are to complete a five-week summer CNA (certified nurse’s aide) program and then attend Becker College’s two-year nursing program. I asked her if she has formally been accepted at Becker and she said that she has not yet received an acceptance letter but said she was told by her guidance counselor that one would be coming soon. I asked her where she sees herself working after she completes her schooling and she said that it really doesn’t matter where. I asked her about her upcoming living arrangements and the status of the father of her child. Angela said she will move into an apartment, and have her mother help care for her baby. She is also receiving child support from her boyfriend, who is the baby’s father. There is no talk at this point of marriage. She stated that he will soon enlist for three years in the Army but expects to return for visits. And finally, in response to a question that I asked all the students, Angela said she would rate the success of her educational experience a “10 “ because “I learned a lot” but added that seventh grade was her worst year. It does not appear that Angela understood the “success” scale as I had described it. The other interviewees, as we will see, seemed to understand my question.

POWERFUL QUOTES Angela

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

Goes With The Wind

Lawyer

Societal Problems

Big problems I think is—the most scariest problems are people with AIDS really, Big problems?. . . Racial disputes. (What racial problems have you

Goes With the Wind

77

seen?) Like people get jealous over stupid—like stupid stuff that happens, so then they go up to the person and then gets in a fight, then if they’re black or white, they start calling people names—or Spanish and stuff. And we just need to—got to work on that.

Angela

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

Goes With The Wind

CNA/Registered

Reaction to Annual interviews

Yeah, I needed to come back this year. I think it’s kind of good that you follow up on us. It keeps us— you know what are you gonna say. I think it— That’s the real part about it. I know you’re gonna come some time this year and then the school year and I look forward to it.

5 Pulling Teeth

PullingTeeth

DEFINING “PULLING TEETH” The chief differentiation between the “Going with The Wind” and the “Pulling Teeth” interview styles is the latter’s general absence of enthusiasm during the interview, giving the sense, at times, that they would rather be somewhere else. The interviewee appears uneasy, with frequent moving about and relatively little eye contact with the interviewer. The manner of the co-constructed story is similar to the “Going with The Wind” style, particularly regarding the characteristic horizontal scaffolding talked about earlier. This is a difficult and challenging interview for the interviewer because of the obvious discomfort by the interviewee and his desire to alleviate it and, at the same time, attempting to complete a “successful” interview. A review of “turn” graphs offer significantly similar turn length/taking pattern and so would not reveal the talk style without examining the text.

TONY: GRADES 8–11 Tony is white and the oldest of three siblings living with his parents in what he describes as a once-nice neighborhood that has deteriorated due to the influx of gangs that gather at a park across from his home. In my early interviews with him it was difficult to elicit anything more than a few words or a few sentences at most and there was very little eye contact. In the later interviews, especially year 4 (eleventh grade), Tony was noticeably more vocal (turn-taking statistics indicated he went from as little as 1/4 to 1/3 of the talk to reaching a majority share

80

Voices of Reason

of the talk in our eleventh grade interview), but has maintained a certain sense of caution in what he said to me. Although he always answered my questions he usually did so in an abrupt fashion. However, it was interesting that he asked every year, beginning with the second, as we neared the end of each interview, if I would continue to see him as though it surprised him that anyone would want to take the time to learn what he had to say. Tony was one of the few students who knew what he would do for his education related to getting ready to go to work. He never wavered from his goal of becoming a plumber. As early as eighth grade he stated that goal, adding “You make a lot of money.” We will see as we review the interview transcripts that he candidly talked about his academic strengths and limitations. We will also see who have influenced (family, friends, teachers) his decisions through analysis of our co-constructed talk. Tony: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School “Plumbing, Electrical”

I started, as I did with all of the interviewees, by asking Tony to describe himself:

5

10

15

20

Tony: I’m fourteen years old. Interviewer: Okay. T: I’m white. I: All right. T: I don’t know. I: Yeah, you’re doing well. T: I have brown hair. I was born in Brayton, Mass. I: Do you have any brothers or sisters? T: Yeah, I have one brother and one sister. I: Older or younger? T: My brother’s older than me and my sister’s younger than me. I: What about your mom and dad? Do you live with your mom and dad? T: Yeah. I: Okay. That’s good because it tells us something about your background. How about interests you have? T: Interests? I: Sports? T: Yeah, I like to basketball. I: Okay. Have you been playing that for a long time? T: (nods) I: Are you good at it? T: I’m all right. I: Do you do a lot of it after school?

Pulling Teeth 25

30

81

T: Yeah. I: So, that’s an important thing in your life? T: (nods) I: What else do you do, besides basketball, after school, in the afternoons or on the weekends? T: I hang with my friends.

This piece of dialogue is representative of the kind of tedious backand-forth turn taking that was necessary to gather together enough information that could be meaningful to the questions asked. As we will see later, the talk pattern here is much like some of the other students in the study, where scaffolding responses eventually bring out enough information to answer the question. In the case of John, a question asked was answered fully before he stopped. Tony was difficult to hear both because of his very quiet voice and his sometimes inarticulate responses, or no verbal responses at all (nods), especially in the earlier interviews. We learn here only that he resides in a traditional family consisting of an older brother, younger sister, mother and father, likes basketball, and hangs with his friends. As with all eighth graders, Tony had to decide which high school he would attend next year. We see that his choice to attend the Brayton Vocational Technical High School was a direct result of his early vocational decision to study in the plumbing or electrical trades:

35

40

45

50

Interviewer: Okay. where are you going to go next year? Tony: To the voc. I: You’re going to the vo-tech. T: Yeah. I: Okay. What interests do you have? What are you thinking about studying? T: Plumbing electrical. I: What? T: Plumbing electrical—electrician. I: Oh, all right. Okay. So, who made the decision about going to the vo-tech? T: Me. I: All right. That was your decision alone? T: Yeah. I: Where do you get the interest in plumbing, electrician? T: I don’t know. I: Do you know anybody who does that? T: No, but you make a lot of money. I: Okay. So, money is important to you? T: Yeah. I: You’re smiling, so I guess it must be pretty important? T: Yeah.

82

Voices of Reason

It’s interesting to note that he made the trade choice because he could make a lot of money and that he said he made the school choice independently. When asked about interest in plumbing other than its earning potential, Tony said he did not know anyone who was engaged in it. Yet, several turns later, when asked what will happen after he completes high school, he said he expects to work for his brother, who he says is a plumber. We’ll learn later in this interview and subsequent interviews that his brother, being two grades ahead of him, was not a plumber at that time but was in training for it. Obviously then, in addition to the wage considerations, Tony was influenced by his brother ’s vocational direction. Later we’ll see that, although the plumbing interest may have been sparked by his brother’s choice, Tony claimed it as his own decision and remained dedicated to it even after his brother abandoned the trade after working in it for a short time after graduation and deciding he didn’t like it.

55

60

65

70

75

Interviewer: So, what’s going to happen after you finish your high school training? What do you think is going to happen, thinking down the road? Tony: My brother is a plumber, wants his own business, so I’ll probably work for him. I: Oh, all right. so your brother is already trained or he’s in high school now? T: He’s in high school he’s (. . .) for two years. I: All right. he likes it? T: Yeah. I: So, for him, he’s going to get and start his own plumbing business? T: Yeah, if I—. I’ll probably work for him. I: Okay. Have you talked to him about that? T: (nods yes) I: I mean, does he know that you’re interested in doing that? T: (nods) I: You’re sure you’ll join him when you get out? T: Yeah, if he has a business. I: So, when you think down the road ten years from now, you see yourself being a plumber, maybe working for your brother, maybe not. What else? You’re going to be twenty-five. T: Yeah. I: What else do you think will be going on in your life at twenty-five, besides working? Will you be married? T: Yeah, probably.

Tony: 9th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School At the conclusion of his first year of plumbing training at the vocational technical school, Tony said that he enjoyed the program and

Pulling Teeth

83

affirmed, by accepting my statement of his vocational goal, that he intended to stay with plumbing. But now he wishes to establish his own plumbing business instead of working for his brother.

80

85

90

95

100

Interviewer: Okay. That’s good. So, you’re very set on where you’re going from here. You’re going to complete four years of training in plumbing. You’re going to come out of here, you know that you’ve got to do two or three years as an apprentice. Tony: Yeah. I: Then what do you think is going to happen after that? T: I’ll probably get a job in plumbing, if I can. I: Do you remember what you said last year about that? T: No. I: You talked about your brother going into plumbing and thought maybe you’d work with him. T: Yeah. If I could—If I could I would, but I try—I’d want to go on my own. I: Okay. So, you’re hoping that you’ll—you’ll do your own thing? T: Yeah. I: Go out and have your own business? T: Yeah. I: Is he working now as a plumber? T: My brother? I: Uh-huh. T: He’s a junior here. I: Oh, okay. All right. So, you’re not that far behind him. T: Not really.

In this interview Tony reveals more about his academic interests and weaknesses when he talks about his school subjects. I asked him what his favorite subjects were:

105

110

Interviewer: Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay. All right. Now, let’s talk about the academics. Favorite subjects you have? Tony: Favorite subjects? I: Yeah. T: Literature or gym. I: You wouldn’t say math or English? T: Yeah. They’re all—I don’t hate any of them, but I don’t like them a lot. I: Okay. But you’re doing okay in there? T: Yeah.

Later in the interview I bring up the subject of math again when I suggest that plumbing requires good math skills:

84

115

120

Voices of Reason I: Yeah. Yeah. You did. Yeah, you said college probably. Okay. So, in the plumbing area, mathematics is important? T: Yeah. I: I mean, you’ve got to have some good math skills. How are you doing with the math? T: Good. I: No problem with that? T: It’s kind of—It’s kind of hard, but I’m passing. I: Well, what kind of math are you doing now? T: Pre-algebra. I: Okay. You take it home and you do your homework and all that? T: I don’t really—I don’t get that, that much homework, but when I do—like, I do it.

When I asked Tony how he was doing with the math he said good, but after further questioning, he conceded that it was “kind of hard” but that he was passing. This is an example of Tony’s candor when he knows he is being asked to “tell the truth.” It is not my sense that his first response is untruthful as much as it is a reflection of Tony’s own assessment of how well he is doing in relation to his goals. In this case, a passing grade in math is fine and does not pose a problem for him with respect to achieving his goal of being a plumber. I believe he knows that if he were college-bound, for example, just a passing grade would not be adequate. And so, for Tony, his vocational choice to be a plumber has directly influenced his choice of schools and his degree of motivation to participate in his classes, which naturally impact his performance record. In each of the interview years, as noted earlier beginning with our second interview, Tony asked if I would continue to see him. Considering how difficult it appears it was for Tony to be interviewed, I was never sure that he would continue to see me each year. Since he does so, it appears that he is getting something from it. For several of the other H-Team participants, it was clear they enjoyed the interviews (John, Angela, Sarah, Mona).

125

130

Interviewer: All right, Tony. Any questions for me at all? Tony: Yeah. Are you going to do this to me every year? I: Yeah, yeah. We do it every year. T: Like, I mean, until I graduate? I: We do it until you graduate. I’m going to see how you—how you turn out. How you’re making out—if you don’t mind, of course. It’s voluntary, so you—you know, if you want to do it, I’ll be back in a year to see how you are. Okay? Any questions? Anything else? T: (Inaudible.) I: Okay. Thank you for coming.

Pulling Teeth

85

Tony: 10th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School Aided by his uncle, Tony began working at a deli after school several months before our third-year interview. He has just completed driving lessons and is saving his money for automobile insurance. He has stayed with plumbing training at the VHS but admits that it has been a bit difficult this year, “Pretty good. But this year in class is a little bit hard—theory.”

135

Interviewer: So how much theory do you have? Do you have one class of that? Tony: Theory we have one day, class every day except for when I’m in Shop, I’m in the whole week. I: So the theory part of it is a bit difficult.

When asked again this year about his vocational plans after high school graduation, Tony says at first he wants to work for his brother, who has just graduated, but then later says he doesn’t really care who it is with, as long as he can do plumbing. Yet he apparently has thought this through, noting that by the time Tony graduates from high school, his brother will have his master license, which is necessary to be a self employed plumber. Also note that Tony does not answer in the affirmative when I suggest that he has talked with his brother about joining him.

140

145

150

155

Interviewer: Clearly what you’re gonna obviously come out of school with a trade—then what will happen after that? Tony: After I come out of the school? I’ll probably work for my brother. I: Okay. Now, I remember you talking a couple years ago about your brother possibly having his own plumbing business. Does he have one now? T: Yeah. He just graduated a couple days ago. by the time I get out of school he’ll already be done with his two years of apprenticeship then will have his journeymen’s license. I: Okay. So you two have already talked about that. T: Well, I’m hoping that either he could hire me or if he’s working for someone he could recommend me. I: Okay. So you’re hoping he’ll kind of give you a break. But if your brother goes off on his own, after he gets his apprenticeship completed, do you think he would take you along to work with him—if he has his own business? Or do you not want that? T: Well, as long as I get—It doesn’t matter who I work for. I just want a job in what I’m doing now. I: You really don’t care where as long as it’s a plumbing job. T: Oh, it doesn’t matter.

86

Voices of Reason

Tony very clearly states his position about college considerations and why it is not applicable to his vocational future.

160

Interviewer: So, college is not in your future. Tony: No way. I: Okay. You don’t want college. You just want to get out— T: There’s no reason for me to go to college anyways. I mean, I’m here for a trade. I don’t think I can learn that in college.

The previous year Tony revealed that math was difficult but he was passing. This year his theory class is challenging but he clearly states that he is having a very difficult time with his drawing class (that is, blueprints). Again, he is candid about it.

165

170

175

180

Interviewer: Let’s just get back—I want to get back to your school subjects. You were saying the theory stuff was difficult. But you have also taken some math and different things like that. How are you doing with the math? Tony: Well, everything’s pretty easy—except for one other thing—my drawing class which we’re doing plumbing drawings—when you set— I: You mean blueprints? T: Yeah. That’s hard. I don’t understand that one bit. I: Okay. is that gonna hold you back? T: No. I’m— I: You’re making the grade. T: Yeah, I’m doing it right now. I mean, I did it—it’s finished—I’m doing pretty good. He showed me most of it today. I: Okay. But it’s not easy. T: It’s not easy. I: Okay. What comes easy for you with all the subjects that you take? The ones you like the most. T: Gym’s pretty easy—as long as you dress—and everything else but those two classes.

Tony: 11th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School You haven’t wavered at all from your interests in plumbing. You’ve stayed with that interest all along? You never had any doubt in your mind? Tony: No, I want to be a plumber. I know I’m going to be, too.

At the time of our 4th-year interview, when asked about changes related to home/family, Tony told me that his mother was serving time in jail for driving without a license.

Pulling Teeth

185

190

195

87

Interviewer: Good to see you again. You’re still here. It’s your third year at the school here. Anything that’s going on differently at home? Are you a different place or a different family or— Tony: My mom has—to prison ’cause (Tape was not clear at this point.) of driving something. She’s in jail (Can’t hear tape because of background noise.) I: Yeah. Tell me more about that. I didn’t hear that. T: Oh, her license got taken away and then they caught her driving so they put her away. I: They put her in jail for doing that? T: Yeah. I: So how long is she gonna be in jail for? T: Two and a half months. I: Two and a half months. How long has she been in so far? T: Like a month.

When I asked Tony how his mother appeared to be handling her incarceration he seemed to express pride in the fact that she earned her high school diploma and is taking other classes:

200

Interviewer: How is she taking it? Tony: Good. She got her high school diploma in there. And she’s getting some other (noise on the tape again)—some kind of classes in there. Yeah, she’s doing good in there. I: So she’s making the most of it. T: Oh yeah.

Tony still has his after-school job at the local deli and he gave the same answer as the year before about what he was saving the money for—car insurance, and soon he will be buying a new car—a 5.0 Mustang—after a settlement that he expects from an automobile accident. Interestingly, Tony goes home after he finishes work at 6:30 p.m. to “check in and see what’s up there and then I leave for the night and go out and come back.” If he has homework he says he’ll do it but the weeks that he has shop (for his plumbing training) he has no homework. He’s had to make a decision about continuing to work after school or to play basketball, noting that he is now quite tall. He stated his decision as though he didn’t have a choice:

205

210

Interviewer: So, anything else besides the work you’re doing outside of school? Are you involved in any sports? Tony: No, not lately. Not in school because, like, I wanted to go on the basketball team, but then I would’ve had to quit my job and I couldn’t do that. I: Okay. You certainly have the height for it. How tall are you now? T: 6’2", I think, or 6’1”.

88

Voices of Reason

Tony continues to have difficulty with the theory aspect of his plumbing training but this year is not struggling with the drawing (blueprints) course as he had the previous year. In fact he now considers it his favorite course because he finds it a time to be with “all my friends” and doesn’t find it difficult. He agrees with my characterization that it’s a time to socialize but assures me that “you do work too.” I ask Tony how he is doing in his subjects overall:

215

Interviewer: How are you doing in those? Tony: Oh, I’m doing good in all those. Well, halfway decent. No A’s but no F’s. I: So none of them are in trouble? T: Oh no, I’m not failing any classes. I’m not worried about staying back.

Looking at the videos of my interviews with Tony reveals a dramatic change in his demeanor, particularly his body movements and eye contacts. In his earlier interviews he was very visibly nervous. By this fourth interview year he displays much less agitation, is more verbose, has more eye contact, and, overall, presents as someone more comfortable with himself and his life plans. We see that in his comments about his grades (“Oh no, I’m not failing any classes. I’m not worried about staying back”), his earlier statement regarding his certainty about his vocational goal (“No, I want to be a plumber. I know I’m going to be, too”) even after his brother abandons it. In fact he states that he hopes to have his own plumbing business: Tony: Well, individually, I’d rather do it—when I get out of school, I’d rather do it individually. You know, just work for someone, a master plumber, you know, just work for him. Then after I get my license, I would probably go into the union or start my own business or whatever.

As in the previous years, Tony asked if I would be coming back next year for another interview. This time he expressed surprise: 220

225

Interviewer: Okay. Any questions you have for me at all? Anything you want to ask me before we end our interview? Tony: Oh yeah, are you gonna be following me throughout high school, too? Are you gonna be doing interviews? I: I am. T: Really? I: I’m gonna come back next year and then when you go out into your work world do your work I’m gonna follow you as long as I can keep finding you. There are ten of you and all of you have stayed with me all these years.

Pulling Teeth 230

89

T: Well, I’m not gonna be that hard to find ’cause I’m never moving from my house.

Tony says he will not be hard to find “’cause I’m never moving from my house,” yet earlier in the interview he said:

235

Tony: I don’t know. I don’t wanna stay here. I’ll move somewhere. Not out of the state, but out of the city at least. Interviewer: Is there any reason why you want to move out? T: I’ve been here too long. I don’t know. I’ve seen the same places every day.

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: TONY Tony had me waiting for quite a period of time while he completed the year-end tradition of gathering course grades from each teacher. But I was pleased to even have had the chance to get in our fifth-year interview, a task that I was not optimistic would be accomplished given the wild year-end activities of these students in addition to trade assignments that have them working away from the school. Tony immediately affirmed that he has stayed with the plumbing trade training right to the end: actually quite near to the end, because he said he still has 12 hours of classes to complete his degree requirements which he said could be done in two day’s time. Next for Tony will be the completion of two to two and one-half years of apprenticeship under a licensed plumber, and then his own license. Tony reported that he has had a “tough” year at school but has managed to pass all of his subjects. He rates his educational experience a 6.0 to 7.0. And finally, when asked if he had questions for me, Tony asked if I would see him again next year. I said yes but I said I did not know how to get in touch with him and he replied that his address and telephone number will remain the same.

POWERFUL QUOTES Tony

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

Pulling Teeth

Plumbing/Electrical

Unfair Use of “Demerits”

(And you already told me a little bit about what you do on the weekends. Is there anything about your education now that you would

90

Voices of Reason change if you could? For example, the HTeam, the way that you’re being taught, the way that your classes are? What you would change, if you could? You did say earlier that you thought the teachers sometimes pick on you when they shouldn’t.) Yeah. (Besides that?) Like, the demerits. I don’t like the way they give you demerits if you go to your locker. They give you five demerits if you go to your locker. (How many demerits do you have to get before you have a problem?) You can get twenty-five demerits you get suspended. (All right. Has that happened to you?) No, I have twenty. (You’ve got twenty. You’re close.) Yeah. (So, do you think you’ll make it through the year before you get twenty-five?) (shrugs) (Are you going to try?) I’m going to try. I don’t know.

Tony

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

Pulling Teeth

Plumbing

Societal Problems

(Are there problems out there that you think we need to work on?) There’s too much violence out there…We need to get more cops on the street or do whatever they’ve got to do to get rid of the violence. (How do you think we could get rid of the violence?) Put more cops out there. (Put more cops on the road?) Yeah. (Well, how come we don’t have more cops on the road?) Probably because they can’t afford to put them out there.

Tony

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

Pulling Teeth

Plumbing

Goal Is Same but Brother Leaves Trade

(You haven’t wavered at all from your interests in plumbing. You’ve stayed with that interest all along? You never had any doubt in your mind?) No, I want to be a plumber. I know I’m going to be, too. (Well, you’re very close to it now. But there were never any times that you thought well maybe there’s something else I want to do. Your mind was always set on that.) Yep, even when I came into this school, I wanted it, ’cause my brother was in it. (Now, you told me last year that there was a possibility that you

Pulling Teeth

Wants to Leave Hometown After Graduation

Type of Neighborhood

91

would work for your brother at that skill. Is that still a possibility?) Nope. (Why?) ’Cause he left the business. (Oh, he did?) ’Cause he just graduated from here last year and he had got some—most—of his apprentice hours done but then he just stopped plumbing. And he works right down the street over here at Jackson and Jones. It’s a plumbing supply place but you don’t get hours there though. (I see. You have to be actually out doing the plumbing itself.) Yeah. He’s not gonna be a plumber, he told me. He said he don’t like it. (So that doesn’t bother you that your brother decided to get out of it?) No, ’cause I was thinking of joining the union. I wanna do that. No. (No. Where are you going to go?) I don’t know. I don’t wanna stay here. I’ll move somewhere. Not out of the State, but out of the city at least. (Is there any reason why you wanna move out?) I’ve been here too long. I don’t know. I’ve seen the same places every day. (You want a change?) Yeah. I just wanna get out of here. Just get up and leave and not come back. Just start somewhere else. (What about where you live? I don’t know what kind of a neighborhood you live in. Do you live in a area that—) I mean it was a good neighborhood until about a year ago. (What made it change a year ago?) Just. I don’t know. Around the park and everything. ’Cause I live right off of Maple Hill. And it’s not too good of a neighborhood. (So it’s just the people who have moved in aren’t taking care of their properties?) Yeah, down below probably my house it’s not that bad but I’m not always down there, I’m always up at the top, around by the park where everybody hangs out. It’s not somewhere I’d wanna be all the time. It’s not that good of an area. Too much drugs goin’ around. You know, gangs and all that stuff. (And you stayed away from all of that?) I mean, I’m around gang members before. Some of my friends are because, you know, I’ve been friends with them and they’ve just gone into that life and I haven’t, you know, so I stay away from them.

6 A Balancing Act

A Balancing Act

DEFINING “A BALANCING ACT” Regarding an interview’s success as one that concludes with rich information about the topic(s) at hand, this type of interview is much like the Great Orator interview but with a much different style. The interviewee and interviewer are choreographing a dance with words, where the questions and answers flow nicely and fully. It is what I also call the “Easy Talk” interview because it’s pleasant, engaging and comfortable, with a natural rhythm, which builds to a conclusion that does not seem forced (as some of the others do and must). Together, the interviewer and interviewee rise and fall (in terms of turn length) as the topic warrants: topics that are emotion-laden (for instance, racism) are shared in more detail. There is less revoicing, as though there need not be clarification because what is said is understood the first time and because the interviewee needs little prompting to continue the dialogue. The interviewee offers additional information without prompts from the interviewer. Amount of talk can vary significantly from short, medium to long turns from one co-constructed interview to another with the other characteristics discussed here present for all such interviews, whereas with the Great Orator talk long turns will always be present.

MONA: GRADES 8–11 Mona, who described herself as “A black girl, smart, nice and is willing to do anything,” arrived in the United States from St. Croix,

94

Voices of Reason

Virgin Islands, at age seven with her mother and sister. Her father, with whom she has no contact, lives in New York. Illuminated by a review of my statistical analyses and graphs of five years of interview transcripts, my co-constructed interviews with Mona were the most evenly balanced in terms of amount of talk between us, averaging 17–18 words per turn across four years. The significance of this is that it reveals a consistent amount of talk from the start of our interviews in eighth grade, at a time when there were wide variations in talk amount among the other nine students (I’ll discuss this in more detail later). In our interviews are numerous instances of her talk about influences (family, school subjects, aptitudes, friends, and the like.) which are guiding her changing educational and vocational goals. We will see her go from a firm stance about orthopedic surgeon as her vocational goal to a reluctant pulling away as she learns more about training requirements and time commitments that could significantly impact on her other life goals, for instance to have a family. (“I want so much to be a doctor but my mind is changing”). Our eleventh grade interview is fascinating, powerful, full and wide ranging; she talks about her AP classes, visit to Howard University and her mother’s concern about “money, money money,” her scholarship options, PSAT scores, beautifully articulated talk about the H-Team experience of several years earlier, world problems (race, teen pregnancy, single parent homes, drugs), implications of failure to have guidance about educational and vocational choices, and ends the interview asking, “When am I going to see my videos?”

Mona: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School So, you say math is your favorite subject. Do you see yourself having that turn into any kind of a career in your life later on? Mona: I want to be an orthopedic surgeon. I’m not too sure if that requires a lot of math, but I don’t—like the science that we’re studying now, with the cells and the genes and stuff, I know it has something to do with that, so (. . .) math and science.

This is our brief dialogue of Mona’s self description which is typical of her occasionally concise discourse: Mona: I would describe myself as a black girl, smart, nice, is willing to do anything. Interviewer: Okay. What about hobbies and special interests you have? M: I like to roller skate, write poetry, and come to school.

A Balancing Act

95

We will see from my analysis of our interviews that one of Mona’s major themes is about being smart and wanting to have an academic agenda that will give her what she wants both in her professional life and family life. We will see that, while her career choices evolve over these five years, she has, in some ways more than John and certainly in more detail than Tony, a coherent structure to her decision making. Being smart, she clearly knows, is a necessity for her to satisfy the kinds of ambitions she espouses. She also knows that embracing the social institution of school, where she will get the skills she needs to achieve her goals, is necessary. She often says that her school work is not challenging—both, I think, to remind me of her intellectual strength, or to convey a sense of superiority (possibly because she feels a need to prove this to herself) and because she actually finds herself not challenged. She first spoke of this at the conclusion of her H-Team experience: 5

10

15

Interviewer: Do you feel that you’ve been able to keep the honors level—classical level of work challenging to you? Mona: I don’t feel that it’s challenging at all. I: Okay. M: Some stuff is challenging. But, like the math, it’s a lot easier than some of the other classes in the school, not on our team. Because like we don’t do like the algebra and stuff. We do like—to find the perimeter and work with integers—in math? I: Have you talked about that with your teacher or do you just do the work— M: Yeah, I just do the work, because like, if I say anything, nothing will be done anyway. But—

When I ask her to talk about the subjects that interest her she cites math and science and later reveals the genesis of her vocational goal, which she has had and will continue to have for some time, as we will see when we look at her later interviews:

20

25

Interviewer: So, you say math is your favorite subject. Do you see yourself having that turn into any kind of a career in your life later on? M: Well, I want to be an orthopedic surgeon. I’m not too sure if that requires a lot of math, but I don’t—like the science that we’re studying now, with the cells and the genes and stuff, I know it has something to do with that, so—math, science. I: You want to be an orthopedic surgeon. I want to finish our conversation and then you can go back. You say you want to be an orthopedic surgeon and I think that’s fascinating. Where did you get the idea that you want to be a doctor and how long have you had that interest? M: I’ve had it for about three years now, because in the sixth grade, we were studying a unit—the bones in the body and that interested me most.

96 30

35

40

Voices of Reason I: You’ve been thinking about that ever since, for the last two years? M: Mm-hmm. I: So, it’s not that there’s anybody in your family or anything in particular that has led you that interest, it’s that you had a subject in sixth grade and you just were fascinated by what you learned? M: Mm-hmm. I: And realizing bones, of course, if you want to be a doctor—. Do you have any idea about what you need to do to prepare for that kind of work? M: I know that I have to go to college and I have to work maintain a certain level of grades and study my hardest. I: And you plan on doing that? M: Mm-hmm.

So the influence here, for Mona, was not a person but her own fascination with human anatomy and her own sense, even at age 13, that interest and ability in mathematics and science indicate capacity for this kind of career and that a “certain level of grades” is necessary which happens by studying “my hardest.” Certainly, at this early stage of career exploration, this seems like a reasonable, coherent position. To ascertain her knowledge of preparation requirements (which often is very weak at best and sometimes grossly misinformed), I asked Mona what she would be doing following college graduation and saw from her response that she has a general understanding of training requirements to be a physician, if a bit on the short end for an orthopedic specialty:

45

Interviewer: Thirteen. Now, ten years from now you’ll be twenty-three. What do you think you’ll be doing ten years from now? Do you think you’ll be working as a doctor? Mona: I’ll probably still be in college, because I heard that becoming a doctor takes six to eight years of college.

Each year I asked each of the ten students to talk about “world problems.” For some there wasn’t much interest in that question (for example, Tony). For Mona (and other “minority” students including Sarah, John and Evon) this was an important topic, about which she had much to say. She talked about violence as inevitable with no practical solutions, yet if something is not done the world is doomed:

50

Mona: I think that we need to work on the violence and the racism, because if we don’t, everything’s going to come to an end. Interviewer: Do you think we’re making progress with the violence problem? M: I don’t—They try to make progress—in schools they have metal detectors and stuff all that, putting people in jail; but it costs money to

A Balancing Act

55

97

keep people in jail, it costs money to get metal detectors, one day we’re going to run out of money—.

Mona’s own perception of her place in her social setting directly impacts how she behaves in certain situations by keeping her distance from people “that look at me the wrong way.” She says she sees evidence of racism “all the time” and says she knows that people think she is bad like the stereotype of blacks simply because she is black and that makes her sad. Mona: Nobody has said anything to me yet because I just keep my distance from people that look at me wrong, or if I walk by and they’re like—if I say hi they just like—Because like older people, like older white people, like if I went in a store or something, they say oh, a little black rugrat or something. Like they think I’m bad, like most people out there. So they have stereotypes. Mona certainly “knows” some of the things that are important to success in life even at age 13:

60

Mona: I think we need to work on education—educating people, making them learn that there’s certain things that have to be done in life. You have to be educated if you want to live, because if you want to live you have to make money and not just live off of welfare everything, so education. Interviewer: Education is the way to do it?

She is saying that she does not, and will not, live her life as a stereotypical black and so has made and will continue to make decisions that insure that does not happen.

Mona: 9th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School Mona: But I would have to say biology, because I want to be a—an orthopedic surgeon, so I’ve been— Interviewer: Has there been anything else that you’ve been thinking about that might be interesting? M: Like, the arts, dancing; but nothing else, really.

Our second interview takes place at Mona’s new school, Johnson Memorial High School. She quickly establishes that she remains in the honor track and finds the work harder than when she was on the H-Team and that she is surprised to find she is doing better than most of the other students in the honors classes in spite of her two-year H-Team program:

98

65

Voices of Reason Mona: Yeah. Yeah, same level. In my class, like, I wouldn’t say that—I’d say that I’m a lot better than—well, not better, but you know, I do my work and I understand and I get better marks than a lot of people in my class. don’t understand it, because like, you are—you’re led to think that everybody—when—before you come to high school, that everybody in a class, if you’re in an honors track, is going to be so accelerated everything.

With this piece of discourse we also get more of her somewhat boastful comments about her academic strengths. The following piece offers more of that as well as gives us her ready assessment of her interest in her courses:

70

75

Mona: I take all honors. I have biology—biology one, Spanish three, world civ.(civilization) one, English one and algebra—algebra one. Interviewer: Okay. M: And like, they’re basically easy, but you just have to keep up with the work, or you fall back and fail. I like—I like biology best, because it’s like, the most—it’s the most interesting, because like, algebra English—English we read books. Reading is fine, but it don’t interest me. Algebra we just do numbers, numbers all the time. That doesn’t interest me. World civ, history is the past and I really don’t care for it so much what’s my—Spanish. I like Spanish because I want to learn the language, so I try to—you know, pick up on it. But I would have to say biology, because I want to be a—an orthopedic surgeon, so I’ve been—.

Mona’s interest in biology and her motivation to do well in it (“So, I like, work my hardest in al—biology, I mean, to like—you know, understand everything, grasp all the concepts so that I can do good and become what I want”) certainly relates to her decision to become an orthopedic surgeon. So Mona makes a coherent argument for her choice, over several years at this point. She is not simply saying she wants to be a physician but is particular about the type of physician and can attribute her decision to a particular time when she first learned about bones. She also understands the relevance of biology to her occupational choice and the need to do well with it. Furthermore, she knows that education is the necessary route to success and that success is measured, in part, by level of income. All of this assures her that she will not be one of those stereotypes of blacks on welfare as she described it earlier. She is determined, even at her young age, to succeed. In fact later in the interview, in addition to her own experiences with racism and her interest in medicine, she makes a powerful statement about another very important influence in her life: 80

Interviewer: What about your mother? How—how is she—how much—how is she a part of all this to you?

A Balancing Act

85

99

Mona: Well, she’s like—she’s, like, the main reason that I try to make myself better. Because like, I see where—where she is then I know where I could be. So, I try not to, like, not lower myself, but I try not to—I don’t know the words. I try to work my best so that I can get farther. So—you know? Because I’ve seen it, you know? She had me at what—like, twenty-one, or whatever. She graduated from high school and everything, but she never went to college, so she never got that full chance in life, you know?

This year, in addition to concerns about violence and racism, Mona questions why kids do drugs and their impact on education: 90

95

Interviewer: Do you see the—the impact from the drugs? Do you see what happens Mona: Well, I don’t really see what happens. I don’t know the after-effects or whatever, because I’m not around for them, but they’re—they aren’t needed. I don’t see why, because—what are they, depressants? They just eat away, they take away from things that you probably don’t even have that you could get, you know? Like if you’re using drugs, you come into school messed up, you don’t have your education. You’re eating away at that. You’re taking that away, depleting it. So, I really don’t see the need for them.

For Mona it’s about taking control of her life, making changes and being certain that she gets the chances that she feels her mother never had. Mona: 10th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School You’ve been saying that now for quite a long time. Is that still what you want to do? M: I don’t know, because I want to be an orthopedic surgeon, but then lately I been thinking I don’t wanna be doing surgery. I might just wanna, you know, be a doctor but not doing surgery. Maybe something else.

This year we begin to see a bit of a shift away from her previously steadfast career goal and an admission that she is “slacking off” on her school work this last term, after maintaining an “A” average. She offers dancing as a serious alternative to a career as a physician. This is an instance of the power of television, where something that looks fun becomes an important criterion for making selections/decisions/choices. It replaces a cohesive decision making process (to this point) with more ambiguous “feel-good” kinds of decisions but it is also about her increasing awareness of the realities of her choices, as she gains real life knowledge (career day presentation and confessions from

100

Voices of Reason

a cousin) and her desire to be sure there is more fun than pain/sacrifices in the process of achieving her goal(s). After all, she is only 15 years old at this point, yet she speaks with a confident voice when she says she knows—not just thinks—that she could be one of the best. 100

105

110

115

Mona: Yeah, I wanna be a dancer. Interviewer: A what? M: A dancer. I: Okay. M: I don’t know, like, in the arts or something. I: Have you just recently been thinking about that? M: Not always, well, like, I haven’t really thought of it as something real. You know, like, dance for life or something? I: Yeah. M: But lately I been seeing like on TV and stuff, you know? The famous dancers. I: Do you do any of that now? M: No. I can dance. I know that but not—I haven’t been like trained or anything to do all the stuff but, yeah, if I was trained, I could be one of the best, I know. I: It looks fun when you look at it—when you see them on TV—It looks like it would be a lot of fun to do that.

I learn about a National Macy Scholar program from which Mona received a certificate:

120

125

130

Interviewer: So, of course, you’ll be going off to college. Do you know where you’re going to go at this point. Mona: I don’t know. I wanted to go to NYU or Cornell or UMass, but lately I’ve been saying, BU, but I don’t know—saying that I’m a National (Macy) Scholar. like they help me, like—if I continue my good grades, everything, like, I don’t know if they’ll help me or what—I still don’t quite understand it, but it’s like there’s six colleges in the—like the (Macy) Scholars—like the college is gonna help or something with early admissions stuff. Cornell is one and NYU, I think, is one. I: Those are good schools. Now, so, what you’re saying is you did very well in your PSAT. So, they obviously must participate in a program where they try to recruit people who are very promising academically and it seems like that’s where you’re at. Knowing that, you still don’t mind slacking off your last term, even though you got all this going for you. M: I tell myself, you know, you can’t slack off, but I just say, oh well, I’m lazy.

Mona’s views about racism remain essentially the same as the previous year; she relates at length a situation involving a woman fighting

A Balancing Act

101

her way off a bus and a man making comments about “welfare kids” with an implication about her being black. Again, Mona’s self-confidence, as evidenced by her talk, enables her to deal with it seeing the problem as the man’s ignorance. Here Mona talks about her own struggle to be polite, only to say, why bother? when she has to face people with nasty attitudes. This reality, which she confronts almost daily, certainly influences her life decisions in general and the current choices that she hopes will later give her membership in a part of society where she feels people will be more fair-minded. And, again, she sees education as the catalyst for achieving her goals:

135

140

145

150

Mona: Well, one time I was, like, going home on the city bus, it was winter, this lady like everybody—it was cold –everybody was trying to get on the bus, like the bus I take is always packed, everybody always fightin’ to get on first so they can get a seat. One lady didn’t even, like, get off the bus yet—everybody just rushed on. You know, I was standing there, you know, waiting patiently, not doing anything, you know, ‘cause, why bother to fight? I know I’m gonna have to stand up anyways. And like the lady—I was gonna let her go, right, but then she started getting smart, with a nasty attitude so— Interviewer: And she was complaining. M: Yeah, and so I was just like, be that way, you know. So I just kept going on with the line or whatever and going on the bus. And when I was getting on the bus, this one man, who let her pass, she was like probably 20–28—late 20s or 30s or something. He said some comment about—not color—but he said “welfare”—like, “Welfare kids” or something, and I’m just like—I didn’t say anything to him but I wanted to say something to him but I just like ignored him. It made me see how stupid he was ‘cause like—because I figured because I was black he’s gonna automatically assume that, oh, I’m on welfare or something, and he don’t even know me.

Mona: 11th Grade—Johnson Memorial Urban High School I want so much to be a doctor. But my mind is changing, ’cause like I talked to the—we had career day last week, and people came in and they talked about how they spent all these years, all these hours, and whatever, and I know that’s like what you have to do, but I see myself, like, not wanting to live that kind of lifestyle.

This discourse review is replete with examples of choice-making; it’s been a busy year for Mona regarding working, school subjects, college visits/preliminary thoughts, scholarship considerations, PSATs, and further shifting away from a career as a physician. We will see lots of examples, also, of the influencers, both positive and negative, who have contributed to her decisions. Throughout all of the changes, Mona

102

Voices of Reason

continues to have a cohesive structure to her educational and vocational choices. Mona began working this year, as did most of the other H-Team students, first, for only 7 weeks at the Sandwich Shop, leaving after a dispute about her hours. She now works as a bagger at a supermarket. She says she is saving her money for nothing in particular. Several of the other students said the money would be for purchasing an automobile, but Mona quickly dismissed that as superfluous, adding she has her mother’s car if the need arises. Mona’s grades are strong again this year, but she laughed when I asked about her grades. In reply to my inquiry she revealed that she has not been happy with English this year because of the teacher ’s attitude—again an important determinant in Mona’s life. We saw this in the past with teachers, strangers, and recently at her first job. Her discourse below illustrates again the issue of justice in society; it was the bus scene before and now it’s in her classroom:

155

160

165

170

175

180

Interviewer: You’re laughing. Is there any particular one that is a problem? Mona: My English. It’s like, I mean, I have B’s—A’s and B’s, but it’s like, my average is like a B, but throughout the ten weeks, for the term I get maybe like a B or an A. I’m just not into that class. I: Is it the class itself or the way it’s being taught, or just English as a whole? As a subject? M: I don’t think it’s English as a subject. I think it’s how the class is being taught because I won’t say my teacher’s name, but she, I don’t know, she’s trying real hard to twist us into these, like, moral people or whatever, and the way she goes about it is, I don’t know, it’s kind of—she, like, tries to put people on the spot; embarrass them, if somebody doesn’t know the answer. Or if like, nobody is answering, taught to speaking up in class, she’s like, Is this an Honors class? What’s wrong with you people? And then she compares us to her other classes and stuff, it’s like, that’s no way to build a relationship with us students to, you know, try to—for them to look up to you say, Oh, you know, my teacher—she’s positive. I: Sure. I think you’re right. Has it been that way from day one? M: Well, I thought I was gonna like her in the beginning, like, the first day of school, ‘cause she seemed like reinforcing or whatever. But then, like, after a while, she just . . . I: You’re not the only one who feels that way, I guess. M: No. A lot of— I: Do you guys talk about it outside the class? M: Yeah, they say, like, Oh, Miss so—so, she’s just, I don’t know, she’s so, you know, so this, so that. I don’t even talk about it anymore. I: You’re disappointed. M: Yeah.

A Balancing Act

185

103

I: What about your other classes? Your Math . . . M: I really like Math this year. I have Algebra II - Trig, and my teacher ’s a good teacher. And we go fast, but, and if you miss a day of class, you’re behind, but she’s there after school to catch you up with the stuff, but she, like, explains it, it’s fun.

Mona switched from Spanish, after four years, to French because she didn’t want to be confronted with an excessive amount of homework that, last year, interrupted her Christmas vacation, and since her aunt speaks French to her, “I wanted to understand.” Now, as Mona nears the critical decision-making time about college and ultimately career goals, we learn about her enlightened trip to Howard University during spring vacation and her mother’s concern about costs. Mona reminds her about her scholarship considerations and availability of financial aid. And she says that the decision is hers to make, not her mother’s, but admits that where she goes depends naturally on money requirements. She had visited Holy Cross, which was, in a previous year, a strong consideration, but now, after a visit there, she has decided against it.

190

195

Mona: Yeah. This past April vacation, I went down to Washington, D.C. with my mom. And we visited Howard University, and I really liked it there, but my mom was saying, money, money, money, I’m just like, “No, no, no, scholarship, financial aid.” Interviewer: Well, then how—will it come down to you deciding if you want to go to Howard, or does your mother have a lot of influence on that? M: I think I can say where I want to go for as long as I want to say it, but I don’t know I think it’s gonna probably come down to, not so much my mother, but money.

Mona now grapples with difficulty about her vocational direction after learning graphically from her cousin, who attends pre-med at UCLA, the time commitment and its impact on her everyday life (“She has a lot of stress”) and from several people to came to speak at her school for “Career Day.” It’s not only that she is learning more about the requirements of her choices but new realities are surfacing that incorporate a larger social world for her. That expanding world now includes thoughts about a family of her own (in the future), time of her own, and being able to carry on meaningful relationships. Again, as I mentioned before, for Mona it’s about having/taking control of her life. She talks about her changing mind and her other vocational considerations: Mona: I want so much to be a doctor. But my mind is changing, ‘cause like I talked to the—We had career day last week. People came in and

104 200

205

210

215

220

225

230

235

240

245

Voices of Reason they talked about how they spent all these years, all these hours whatever, I know that’s like what you have to do, but I see myself, like, not wanting to live that kind of lifestyle, so, my cousin, she goes to UCLA. I probably told you about her before. She goes to UCLA and she’s pre-med. She’s a Junior and she’s changing her major because she goes to class on Saturday for lab or something, she goes to class three days a week, her roommate goes to class two days a week, you know, or whatever it is, she’s just studying, studying, studying. She has a lot of stress. She has to work, too, to pay for college, you know. I don’t know, she says it’s just really, really, really hard. I think I want to still have something to do with medicine, but not have to be, like, on call for 24 hours a day, for, you know, you get vacation, but— Interviewer: Do you have any idea what else you might be besides a doctor? M: I don’t know, maybe, like, administration. I: Okay. The person that came in to talk to your class—It was a doctor that talked about all this? M: Oh, no, we had an R.N., she was, I don’t know, like, circulate, that goes to all the departments or whatever? I: She was telling you what it would take to be a doctor? M: She was telling us about the nurse—the requirements or whatever. She was saying that she went to school for eleven years and she got her master’s or whatever, she was telling us about a doctor who had been—what was it—like a 20 something hour surgery—surgical or whatever, I was like, what? And it was an orthopedic surgeon, you know, ’cause it had something to do with the brain or something. I: And that’s the area you were interested in—wasn’t it surgery? M: Yeah. Well, I was like, no—I mean, well, she was talking about her husband, that when she goes home, it’s just like, hi, I’m going to sleep. It’s not like they have a relationship, you know. ’Cause she’s tired, she’s been working all day, I don’t know. That’s not—I want kids. I want to raise my kids. I want to be married and have a relationship with my husband. I: Sure, you want to have a life, huh? M: Yeah, have a life. I mean, go out somewhere sometimes, not just being in the hospital and be on call, having to answer the pager. I: Well, then it’s been very helpful to have people give you a sense of what it’s really like—to get a reality check on it. You’ve got your cousin in New York that’s telling you, hey, it’s not always, you know, what it’s cut out to be. M: Yeah. I: Did she tell you what majors she’s gonna change to? M: Law. I: Okay. So, I mean, you have time. But it’s just interesting to see how, as you guys go through year to year how you start to move around in your thoughts on this. But in any event, when you go to college, you’ll have a chance to think about that. You don’t have to know right away. Is there anything else that’s totally outside of medicine that’s been a

A Balancing Act

250

105

thought for you? M: Like, social—not a social worker, but kind of like psych doctor or something. I: Okay, psychologists or a counselor, helping people. M: Yeah.

To hear what Mona has to say about “world problems” offers further insight into her thoughts and resulting actions. She talks, albeit briefly, again about race issues, offering how she handles it:

255

Interviewer: So, if people don’t treat you well, you’re just not going to put up with it Mona: Yeah, I’m gonna let you know, and I did—I have. So, I don’t have a problem with it. I mean, I don’t act towards anybody in a racial whatever—in a racial manners—or whatever, hate—but, if they want to act like that towards me, then I was raised to defend myself.

Each year Mona has asked me why I’m doing these interviews and now asks when she can see her videos of the interviews. She offers, for the first time, that our interviews, which she calls “question/answer sessions” give her an opportunity for introspection; on several occasions she had said that her school guidance counselor does not provide vocational guidance. As seen here, when Mona asked me if her statement makes sense I enthusiastically said yes. I remember feeling quite pleased that she said it. In fact I re-voice and expand on her comment and ask for an affirmation:

260

265

270

Mona: Like, I guess just like, question/answer session or whatever, like, makes me think or whatever about my thoughts. Does that make sense? Interviewer: Oh, it does. It really does. M: Well, I, like, I try to, like, figure out things, just throw that stuff out and try to have some kind of answer for myself. I: I think—Tell me if this is true or not. That our meetings together aren’t just what happened today, then think about them. You think about what we’ve talked about, and then as the year, throughout the year, you’re probably thinking some of these same issues that I bring up about you in school, what you’re going to do for your future, all of that. Because you know we’re going to meet again. It gives you a chance to, what we call, reflecting, you know on your own thoughts. M: Yeah.

Mona believes that kids “kind of know what they want to do” and that the ones who say they don’t know really block those beliefs because they are frightened. She says everyone has dreams. She adds:

106

Voices of Reason Mona: And they know what they want to do, they just don’t know how to go about getting a hold on them or whatever, or they don’t have the resources or whatever.

In the last segment of our 4th-year interview Mona spoke very positively about her H-Team experiences from three years earlier. During her earlier interviews Mona expressed concern about being at a disadvantage coming into an honors track after two years in a heterogeneous group. The year following that program she saw that she was not disadvantaged, particularly in math, her primary concern at the time. And now Mona strongly endorses that pedagogical approach: 275

280

Mona: I think it’s cool. And I think we’ve probably all come to our senses that the H-Team was the best thing as far as education ’cause being tracked or whatever is, like, I don’t know, there’s really no need for it. Why not intermingle? And who’s to say that somebody else is smarter than somebody else? I mean, the kid in the college level course could do just as good as anybody else. I mean, as far as resource class, below standard, I know they get (the) flow, whatever, but everybody who’s capable of working can do the same work.

SYNPOSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: MONA “I knew already that Mona was accepted at Umass Amherst by Dr. Mathews the previous Friday as we searched for her. At that time, Dr. Mathews told me that Mona had done well at Johnson and was all set with her college future. … But, as we talked, she turned to me with a wide smile and said that she has thought a lot this year about her future and has grown a lot and has concluded that she has a more realistic view of what her future goals may (or may not) be.”

Immediately following my interview with Mona at Johnson High School I wrote, “Excellent interview, very pleasant-confident...Shakes hands with me...Gives me her home address.” I had arranged with Dr. Mathews, Principal, to interview Mona, Sarah and Dan on the Friday before their last scheduled day of classes; but when I arrived at the agreed time I was greeted with fire and police apparatus and students and faculty streaming out of the school’s exits. Later I learned there was concern about a gas leak. I waited at the base of a hill to the side of the school surrounded by the loud, animated voices of students whose year was just about over. Many of the students took the opportunity to have their yearbooks signed by friends. Here I was, a stranger, wondering what was happening, when it would end, and whether I would miss my opportunity to conduct these important interviews. I stood there

A Balancing Act

107

with my large “pocketbook” and tripod, waiting for someone in authority to approach me and ask what I was doing there. No one did. Half an hour later the students were allowed back in the building. I went at a fast pace to the office. Mrs. Weisman, who has been very kind to help me through the years with arranging these interviews, made the calls to the students to report to the office. They never appeared and we concluded that they had left school after the scare was over. I had one last chance to interview them the following Tuesday. I was forewarned that it would be difficult because that was their final day at school and they would be “running around” getting their report card grades and then were free to leave immediately. I arrived early Tuesday, and waited anxiously to see if the students would appear at the office when their names were called. I’ve come to value these interviews very much, wanting to know what had transpired during the course of their lives since we last met, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. When Mona and Sarah arrived together I was very relieved. We arranged for Mona to be interviewed first. I knew already that Mona was accepted at Umass Amherst by Dr. Mathews the previous Friday as we searched for her. At that time, Dr. Mathews told me that Mona had done well at Johnson and was all set with her college future. I got the sense that she was quite pleased to tell me that. At our interview, Mona opened by confirming the Umass selection. She told me that she chose it because of its reputation, particularly regarding pre-med curricula. She also told me that she received a financial aid award. Mona reiterated, from the previous year’s interview, that she does not think she wants to be a physician but feels at least, at this point, that she wants to do something in the medical field, and so the pre-med avenue. But, as we talked, she turned to me with a wide smile and said that she has thought a lot this year about her future and has grown a lot and has concluded that she has a more realistic view of what her future goals may (or may not) be. She explained that she had always felt that she needed to make some sort of statement about what she would be when she grows up (in this case, to be an orthopedic surgeon) and “So I thought that’s what I’d have to become.” Now she says “If I don’t become that it’ll be okay.” We had an interesting close to the interview, talking about her upcoming summer vacation to St. Martin and her desire to return there to reside permanently, after she completes her college education, because it is where much of her family lives. She likes the pace, which she calls “island time” (a reminder here to the reader: she was born on St. Croix). And finally, Mona gave a 6.5 to 7.0 rating for the success of her education, saying that she could have had a better education, in some cases, by trying harder or taking advantage of other course offerings, or by having better teachers. She does not feel that a private or

108

Voices of Reason

parochial school education would necessarily have changed her educational experience.

POWERFUL QUOTES Mona

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

A Balancing Act

Orthopedic Sugreon

Comparing H-Team Experience to Current Pedagogy

Role of Guidance Counselor

Guidance CounselorContinued

And we were a team and I had the same teachers—you know, the team teachers and the same kids every day I seen. And we were like— you know, like a family and everything. But then when I came up here it was like, you’re by yourself. You got to—Your teacher gives you homework. The other teacher doesn’t care how much they give you—as much as they want, you know? They don’t compromise and work as a team like we did last year, so it’s harder. And like my guidance counselor like, she—she really didn’t tell us like how to choose—how to choose courses or, you know, along that basis, you know? Like help us out in picking classes or whatever, or what we want to do, what classes we need to take, what credits you need and everything. But I found out from one of my friends that you really didn’t need history, or—I mean, we only needed two years of social studies…And I—I was going to take world civ. two, but when I found out that I didn’t need the four years of history, I decided not to take world civ. and take something else that I could use. I don’t—I don’t know if the other guidance counselors do, but my guidance counselor, she—she didn’t do any of that. My mother—I—Well, I picked my courses and they had the—the book for the prerequisites, or whatever. And I read through that and saw the course descriptions and—you know, picked and chose what I liked, but the guidance counselor, she never really—she never really helped me choose. And then when I passed it in, she was calling me down, saying that I had chosen too many classes, but whenever I went she was either at lunch or something, so I never got to talk to her. But one day I asked her for a pass and I went and I finally talked to her and she said that—that

A Balancing Act

Mother’s Influence

they had taken care of it and I was like, what do you mean you took care of it? I didn’t talk to you, you know? So, I guess they had taken off any class they wanted without me knowing or whatever. I went. I went. And she—I told her I didn’t want this, this, and that, and she was like, well, okay. So, it was like, either I help myself, or I wasn’t going to get helped. Well, she’s like— She’s, like, the main reason that I try to better. Because like, I see where—where she is and then I know where I could be. So, I try not to, like, not lower myself, but I try not to—I don’t know the words. I try to work my best so that I can get farther. So—you know? Because I’ve seen it, you know? She had me at what—like, twenty-one or whatever. She graduated from high school and everything, but she never went to college, so she never got that full chance in life, you know?

Mona

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

A Balancing Act

Doctor/Administration

Say About College Choice

People Have Dreams

I think I can say where I want to go (to college) for as long as I want to say it, but I don’t know, I think it’s gonna probably come down to, not so much my mother, but money. I think people, not that they don’t have a clue, I think they kind of know what they want to do. Or, they could be undecided, but they know they want to go to college or whatever. But as far as the people who, like, who don’t know what they want to do, they do know what they want to do, but they’re just like—to me, they’re, like, just scared. I forgot what I’m trying to say. But they’re, like, they have dreams. Everybody has dreams. And they know what they want to do, they just don’t know how to go about getting a hold on them or whatever, or they don’t have the resources or whatever.

Mona

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

A Balancing Act

Medical Field

Changing Expectations

109

I don’t know. I don’t know. I have— like this year I thought about a lot of

110

Voices of Reason stuff and I’ve grown a lot and I guess I have like a more realistic view of my life, you know, and what I’ll be, you know what I’m saying?…It’s like, I don’t know. You will just have to be around when I graduate and stuff ’cause for me to know exactly what, you know, I don’t know what I’m thinking. And I always thought I had to have that plan...You know? ’Cause they ask you, What do you want to be when you grow up? And it’s like I said that I wanted to be a doctor. But it was like that’s what I have to be, you know? But it’s like if I don’t become that, it’ll be okay. So, that’s kind of like my mentality now. It’ll be okay if I don’t become, you know, the orthopedic surgeon. Like, you know?

GERALDO: GRADES 8–11 Geraldo is Hispanic, the middle of three boys, living with his parents in an urban setting near a park and impending major highway construction. He speaks with an accent, native to Puerto Rico. At our first interview he described himself as “short, Hispanic, a good friend, funny” and likes to play basketball. While most of the other children in this study related in some personal way to social issues of violence, drugs, gangs, and racism, Geraldo was the closest to belonging to a part of that world, although on the “good” side of these cultural patterns. In other words, he exhibited mannerisms and speech patterns, and an interest in the dance and music of that world, but condemned strongly the drugs and violence aspect of it. We will also see in his talk “old world” views about whom he wants to work for when he enters the work world which, interestingly, does not change much throughout these interview years although his career goal changes over time. He begins his high school education at a vocational technical school with the goal of becoming an electrician because it will make a lot of money for him but quickly his training met with difficulties and he transferred at mid-year to Marion High Community School. There he announced that he would take classes in electronics/computers (“I’ll become an electrical technician”). He refined his career selection in his tenth grade to that of electronics computer programmer but also taking automobile

A Balancing Act

111

mechanics so he could repair his automobile as a hobby, not a vocational endeavor. But by eleventh grade, having failed math, he is faced with reality that he’d have to look in another direction, possibly work as a physical therapist. Geraldo: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Interviewer: What do you hope to learn . . . what do you want to be trained to do? Geraldo: Electrician.

Geraldo came to Brayton three years earlier with his parents and two brothers. He briefly describes himself:

5

Interviewer: Well, we’ll get to that part later. I’ll ask you that later on. But try to speak up a little, so it will come on the camera. How do you think your friends would describe you? Geraldo: Short. Hispanic. A good friend. I: What about your personality? G: I’m funny. I: Okay. You like to joke around? G: Yeah.

We’ll see, especially in this first interview, very little substance in response to my questions. I get the basic information about his sports interests, H-Team experience, etc., but only quick one-sentence responses usually. After establishing that he thinks the H-Team experience was fine but probably didn’t improve his academic performance, and that he considers himself track college (this is questionable), Geraldo talks about his desire to attend the city’s vocational technical high school for electrician training and tells me why:

10

15

20

Interviewer: Okay. Now, what do you hope to learn at the voc [vocational technical high school]? What do you want to be trained to do? Geraldo: Electrician. I: Electrician. All right. Do you know people who are electricians? Anybody in your family? G: (inaudible) I: No? Why do you want to be an electrician? G: To make good money. I: Making good money is important to you? G: (inaudible...) I: How about— G: Like later on in life— I: Okay. But why electrician? There are plenty of other jobs.

112

25

30

Voices of Reason G: I want to do electricity. I like electricity. I: All right. So, it’s interesting to you? G: Yeah. I: So, you’re going to go to—you’re going to go and get trained as an electrician. You’re going to come out of high school—you’re going to finish high school and come out, and then where do you go from there? Tell me what you think might happen, what you hope will happen? G: Get a job, like an electrician job—like Panasonic. I: Okay.

This fast-moving interview (because little is forthcoming from Geraldo) shifts, naturally at my instigation, to the topic of “world problems.” When I asked him how he thinks we are doing as a country, Geraldo replies, “It kind of sucks.” I ask him why and he mentions concern for his safety—too much violence and too many drugs. He admits that he is frightened when he is alone, citing an example of his mother’s request for him to get things at the store, feeling afraid that he may be “jumped” by “the gangs”. He gives evidence of his own gang talk when he says that you need to be sure not to move into their territory or you may be shot. He also talks about the homeless problem, AIDS, and even cancer. He worries about his own health-related safety: Geraldo: Yeah, sometimes like I think about it. Like—if I touch this— something happens to me, if I lost a lot of blood and they give me a blood transfusion and I get AIDS or something like that. Interviewer: It’s pretty frightening.

At the conclusion of our first interview I direct Geraldo back to his vocational goal, and, noting his interest in environmental issues, I ask him if there is anything else that he has an interest in besides work as an electrician. He responds that the electrician work offers a secure future because “everyone needs something with electricity.” Geraldo: 9th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical H.S./Marion Community High School Interviewer: Okay. Now, what about your vocational goals? What do you hope to be doing for a living later on? Geraldo: [I’ll be] an electrical technician.

This is a richer interview than last year’s; Geraldo shares more about his emerging personal interests and he has ways of staying out of trouble. His speech is clearer and his voice is stronger than last year, when quite a few responses to my questions were inaudible.

A Balancing Act

113

Regarding his family arrangement, residence and hobbies/sports, nothing has changed for Geraldo. He doesn’t have much to say about the H-Team experience of the previous year, only that his present classroom experience is similar to it. He tracks himself college. Social studies is his favorite subject at Marion High, where he transferred from Brayton Vocational Technical High School half way through the year. He had tried the electrician trade at the vocational school but found it wasn’t what he wanted; he decided that electronics was more his interest—which the vocational school , he says, doesn’t have. 35

40

45

Interviewer: Okay. Because I remember from last year you said you wanted to be an electrician; is that correct? Geraldo: Yeah. I: And you said you wanted to go to the Brayton Vocational High School. So, you went there for a half a year and now you’re here and, what are you going to do next year? G: I want to stay in the school. I: You’re going to stay here? G: Yeah, because I wanted to do electronics, but up in voc, it’s electrician, like to work with the wires and phones and up in the poles and stuff like that. But, what I want to do is computer work, like— I: Oh, I see. All right.

When asked about his educational/vocational projections, Geraldo said he would stay with the electronics training at Marion High and then attend a two-year college, ITT Technical Institute, or a four-year college. As he said the previous year, Geraldo said he would then go to work for Panasonic or Sony, repairing computers. I asked him why he wants to work in electronics:

50

Interviewer: Okay. And then—We’ll just talk about five more minutes. Now, what is the reason that you want to do electronics? Geraldo: It’s like what I look at it it’s like a fun job, like you’re never going to be bored because—like (trying) programs, you can— and stuff and you’ll be—. Like it’s not going to be like boring computer work or files and stuff, you know? It sounds like fun stuff (to do).

Geraldo later admitted that he had academic difficulties at the vocational school “because I’m used to like the teachers going up to the boards—and teaching.” At the vocational school it was book reading and testing. World problems, according to Geraldo, focus chiefly on increase in gangs, inside and outside of school. He feels that “juveniles” join gangs because they “just don’t care.” When I ask him what we can do to correct the problem, Geraldo tells me what he does personally to stay out of

114

Voices of Reason

trouble; he attends a youth center for “free pool, ping-pong, you got Genesis, and table hockey and soccer.” Additionally, he offers an interesting explanation for why he chooses not to be a gang member:

55

60

Interviewer: Do some of the kids from the school here hang out at the youth center? Geraldo: Yeah. Most of them. Like some don’t go because there’s a certain gang that hangs down there and then you move up the street, there’s another gang that hangs down there. So, that’s why I’m not in a gang. Because you join a gang, you’re only supposed to be over here. I: Oh, I see. Okay. G: The smart thing to do is be out of a gang. You’re out of the gang, you go here, you go there with no problem, you know?

As the interview draws to a close, Geraldo asks what these interviews are for and if they are being shown in a classroom setting. I offer my assurance that these are confidential to which he replies, “That’s good.” Geraldo: 10th Grade—Marion Community High School Interviewer: Now, okay, so your vocational goal—if I ask you today, what do you think you’re gonna be doing later on for work, what would you tell me this year? Geraldo: Computer programming.

This year’s interview was dramatically different from our previous two, primarily due to Geraldo’s much more elaborate responses to questions on several different topics. In the video/audiotape of this interview it is evident that Geraldo has become more confident about himself and more socially aware in areas outside of the gang talk of last year. He wasted no time telling me, as the interview unfolded, that he was failing his electronics computer programming class because the teacher failed to teach him in ways that he could understand. I put that topic aside for a moment to ask him about his family and sports. He said that his family is the same but that they may have to move because a highway construction project was expected to result in demolishing his home, but that help would be provided to relocate. He is doing weight lifting and I comment that he appears heavier than previous years. Regarding the H-Team experience of two years previous, Geraldo was much more vocal about its positive impact, comparing it to his current program. I had wondered before if he understood and appreciated the H-Team format, but this passage clearly indicates the affirmative on both counts:

A Balancing Act

65

70

115

Interviewer: What is your feeling about it now—two years later? Geraldo: I liked it better. The way they did it back in seventh and eighth grade—because the teachers were organized. They were together. Like, you go into Math—the Math class had something to do with the Math— like part of—or geography. They all like work in the same subject. Over here, like when there’s 4 plus 2—but it’s not like the same team. Because you have Math and English and Electronics and Computer Program— that they’re not open—maybe—some of the teachers don’t even know each other. They don’t work together. And back in Jasper, they did work together. Like—all the groups together—We had a video—We watch a movie, and then part of the movie we did in Math class, with the other group. They had another part of the movie. I liked it.

Returning to the topic of his electronics training, Geraldo explains that he is having difficulty with it because the teacher is skipping around to unrelated topics. He said he complained to the teacher but “He doesn’t care.” Given his difficulty with it, I asked Geraldo if he plans to continue it as his vocational direction and he said he didn’t know and has chosen automotive training next year. However, not ready to throw in the towel, Geraldo added that the automotive interest is personal and will be treated as a hobby, whereas he’ll stay with the computer programming training. The distinction here is for him to drop the electronics aspect and stay with the programming. He reaffirms this later when I ask him what his favorite subject is. At odds with his computer programming interest is his admission that math is his worst subject. He is a bit contradictory when he says, “Like I’m doing good but I don’t understand it that much.” And, removed from his vocational interest entirely, Geraldo says he likes biology and finds it easy to understand. He explains that he is college bound in a program named “4 plus 2”: 75

80

85

Geraldo: Yeah, the team I’m in—the group is like a 4 plus 2 program. Interviewer: Okay, what is that? G: That’s like college level material. Like, you go through 4 years of high school, putting your credits all together, you get like two extra years of college added to it, ‘cause they give you college material to do. So, it’s four years of high school plus two of college. Like, for the credits, you got those mixed in, like two years of college credits by the time you’re a senior. I: So, what you’re saying is, when you finish these 4 years, you’ll have two years of college credit on top of your high school diploma? G: Yeah.

Geraldo displays either a new awareness of authority-related issues or is able to be more articulate about them, or both. He has much to say

116

Voices of Reason

about why he didn’t like his vocational technical school experience 18 months earlier, choosing to focus on the “rules” instead of his academic difficulties (“They had too many rules”). He talked about the dress code, appearance requirements, for instance no beard, and I.D.’s that are strictly utilized to track students’ movements. “World problems” for Geraldo mean rules enforcement/uniforms and gangs: Geraldo: Big problems? Probably like people that got an opinion about how everything should be. Like, instead of going with the flow, and you know, with getting with the program. They always have to give their opinion of how things should be right and whatnot. That messes everything up. Like, let’s see. That’s the main problem, like, in the school. Like, they’re always try to enforce like—uniforms. I think we’re supposed to get uniforms by this year. I think Jasper was and, like, the kids didn’t like it, and they’re not wearing uniforms right now. Another problem is, like, there being like more gangs. It’s true—like where I live and here in the school, like, just the other day, down the street. I don’t know if you read it in the newspaper. A kid got shot in the eye with a b-b gun.

90

95

Geraldo: 11th Grade—Marion Community High School Geraldo:—I’m thinking of going to like a medical technical school to study on physical therapist.

Geraldo’s report from last year that his home would be demolished to make room for a new highway is now about to happen. His father has selected a triple-decker home to purchase with considerable help from the government (“so—it’s going to be better for us—like moneywise”). In addition to his complete change of vocational direction, the big talk for Geraldo this year involves his newly discovered love for break dancing which has resulted in participating in public performances with a dance crew of eleven (none attend Geraldo’s school) named “Top Rock” which hopes to gain recognition:

100

105

Interviewer: Where do you go to do the dancing? Where do you go to perform? Geraldo: Like last week, we were at Brayton State. Like in the story center, we put like linoleum, and a friend of mine has like—he’s a DJ. And he put up the speakers and microphone and everything ’cause there was another group that was gonna rap and we was gonna do the break dancing. We did that last week and, not this time but the one before, they were showing (Haywood Gunnery) and they did this on Winter Street. We did our show there. I: Do you get paid to do it?

A Balancing Act

110

115

117

G: Well, the crew gets paid. On our money, it’s like we’re gonna save it up, ‘cause we’re gonna get like uniforms. I: Oh, all right. So you’re building yourself up and moving to different areas and perform different places. How long have you been doing that? G: I’ve been in there for about 5 or 6 months. I: Okay. You sound like you’re very excited about it. G: Yeah, it’s fun. I: How many people perform in your group? G: It’s like eleven of us.

Geraldo has come to realize that he is not going to succeed at the computer programming goal he has been attempting for the past two years. Here is what he has to say about this and about his father’s intervention and a new direction:

120

125

Interviewer: Okay. Good. Now, do you remember last year what you said you were hoping to do with the classes you’re taking—what kind of a vocational goal you had? Geraldo: Yeah. I was taking computer programming. I: Right. That’s what you said. G: It’s getting complicated. Like, it don’t stick to my head. It don’t stick, you know. I was talking with my father the other day ‘cause he asked me what I wanted to be. And I started thinking—I was like, I don’t know. I can’t picture myself behind a desk, you know, working with a computer or files or whatever. I’ll probably—I don’t know—I’m thinking of going to like a medical technical school to study on physical therapist.

I asked him about training options related to his new vocational goal and Geraldo names Umass (University of Massachusetts), telling me that they have a summer program for high school students to learn some things about it and be paid as well but he doesn’t think he has made the application deadline. When asked, Geraldo says he is also thinking about becoming a history teacher because he enjoys the subject and “I’m good at explaining stuff.” He discovered his teaching talent recently when he was teaching break dancing to a friend and saw how quickly the friend caught on. He adds, “It’s like that all the time—like, if I know something real good, and I could teach it to somebody else, and they pick it up like that.” He goes on to say also that he has the capacity to motivate lazy people (“I’m on ’em, just do this”). Geraldo said he would get his teacher training at Brayton State, adding that his friend’s mom is connected to the school. But he said he would also look at other colleges. Math is better for Geraldo this year because the teacher engages in group learning. He said if it is a lecture format, with lots of note taking

118

Voices of Reason

he gets bored and falls asleep. History is good for Geraldo for the same reason—group interaction (compares to the H-Team approach). He is having difficulty with physics.

130

135

140

145

Interviewer: Those are some of the same kinds of things you said back in Jasper when you were in the H-Team. You liked the way the teaching was done. Do you remember your H-Team experience? Do you remember the kids and the program and the way it was set up? Geraldo: It was like three years ago. I: It was seventh and eighth grade you were involved in that. G: You and me been doing this since seventh grade, right? I: Well, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh. Four years, you and I have been together. But you started in seventh grade with the H-Team, and I began to see you in the eighth grade, early on. Do you feel that the way you’re being taught there is different from the way you were taught in the H-Team? G: Nah, it’s about the same, ‘cause they did a lot of group projects. I remember they would do related work, like they were studying something in history, the math teacher would do the math, like, using the history class kind of a— I: They were tied in together. G: Yeah, and the English too.

Interestingly, after I revoice Geraldo’s educational plans, he reveals that he does not plan to attend college right away. Instead he will work full time to save money for college. But with the next breath he says he and a friend (“He’s like my best friend—We’re more like brothers, you know.”) may travel:

150

155

Interviewer: Okay. Are you taking like a year off? Geraldo: Yeah. I: What would you do during that year? G: I don’t know, just, like getting like a full-time job and save up money. I: What would you do with the money? G: Save it for college. I: Okay. All right. G: I don’t know. Me and my friend was thinking of like making trip around the United States. Like we rent like a camper, like a small camper, and like go California. ‘Cause we haven’t been—we been in Brayton for all this time, and we haven’t seen— I: So you’re gonna take a year off and discover the world. G: Yeah. For like two months.

World problems for Geraldo always includes talk about gangs. He thinks the gang activity has quieted down due to the cold weather but that when summer approaches there should be an increase. He talks

A Balancing Act

119

about new ones forming with kids his age who are “dealing with things” and talks for the first time about his own gang involvement and an incident in which he suffered a broken nose and chipped tooth. That was enough for him to give it up and begin the dancing (“They broke my nose because of some stupid stuff I did. I left that and started dancing.”). The Community Youth Center, which had been a very significant part of his social life last year, is much less so now. It served to help him deal with potentially bad influences. With the break dancing crew he continues to derive support and direction. He makes the point of telling me that they are trying to bring out the good side of rap, not the music with violence. 160

165

170

Geraldo: Yeah, I like the dancing ‘cause the guy, the (leader) of the crew, he gets us the shows and stuff. He’s doing it because he likes a lot of hip hop. And like nowadays you turn on the radio, and you hear the rap, it’s too wild. It’s violent. They talk a lot about sex and drugs and killing each other, or like early in the late 70s or the early 80s, rap was just like, I don’t know, it was fun. It wasn’t violent. It was like you rap, you’re like, oh, I’m like Superman, I fly over buildings and stuff like that. It’s now, I’m gonna shoot you or drugs, and like, that’s why we’re doing it. Like break dancing came out when rap came out, you know. It was part of the hip-hop culture. So, when people were rapping, you know, not so violent, they were break dancing. So like we’re trying to bring it back to show that it’s still good. It’s not all negative, you know.

At the end of our interview, Geraldo asks if I will still come to interview him if he goes to college. When I said yes, he replied, “Cool.”

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: GERALDO “Had I been asked to predict the types of vocational avenues these students may take I would have not included teaching as one for Geraldo.... In Geraldo’s case he seemed to have found some directions with his life stemming from his own new view about the importance of education and from experiencing teacher support.”

Geraldo, by his own admission, has been all over the place regarding his future plans but this year he seems to have found something that he is quite passionate about: teaching. Had I been asked to predict the types of vocational avenues these students may take I would not have thought of teaching as one for Geraldo. With this interview there is evidence of significant overall maturity that leads me to believe, again, that it is the conviction and the passion/interest that motivate

120

Voices of Reason

change and direction as nothing else can. In Geraldo’s case he seemed to have found some direction with his life stemming from his own new view about the importance of education and from experiencing teacher support. He proudly states that all of his teachers know him and he’s made lots more friends this year. When viewing the videotape of our interview there is evidence of heightened interest when he talks about his teaching interest through both his increased voice level and facial expressions. He talks about wanting to do something that will make him happy, not something that simply will “make a lot of money.” Teaching, he says, will bring satisfaction and time for himself in the summer months. At this point questions remain about his capacity to successfully obtain teacher training. He said he plans to attend Brayton Community College after he has taken some time off after high school to return to Puerto Rico to visit family and then begin college the following January. When I asked him, Geraldo said he has still more application work to do for the community college enrollment. He said he did not take the SAT’s because they are not required. When I asked Geraldo to rate his school experience success, he gave it a 7.5–8.0.

POWERFUL QUOTES Geraldo

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

Goes With The Wind

Electrician

Societal Problems

(How do you think we’re doing as a country?) It kind of sucks. (Why?) too many violence, too many drugs… Sometimes when you go out on the street, you got to be careful where you go. Like, —just scared that you don’t get jumped or something. (Are you scared when you go out? Do you feel frightened?) Yeah, when I’m alone…My mom sends me to the store and I got (...) buy the stuff and come back, (...) getting jumped. That’s why — the gangs (...). Like if they jump you. ( Is that a problem where you live and at school?) Because right now on Main Street, there’s a whole bunch of gangs down there. (Do you stay away from there?)—make sure you don’t move into that territory, because sometimes they’ll have drive-by shoot-outs and stuff. . . . (What else, besides the violence, do you think about?) I think about the homeless and stuff.

A Balancing Act Geraldo

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

Goes With The Wind

Electronics

Societal Problems

I don’t know. There’s a lot more gangs now than last year. (Here at the school?) And outside in the communities, too…Like they’re starting to separate now, like the hoods and stuff—like it’s not good…I’m not going to join a gang. (Well, why are there more gangs, do you think?) I don’t know. Because (it’s getting) worse. Like the juveniles, they’re (getting worse) like they don’t care, so they just join a gang to— with their friends and stuff. (Is there anything we can do to correct that problem?) Yeah, like where I go to, I go to the youth center. I like the youth center idea because right there you got free pool, pingpong, you got Genesis and table hockey and soccer. Like the kids go there. They play everything for free— and they listen to music, they dance, they do everything that keeps them off the street…That’s why I like it there. (Do some of the kids from the school here hang out at the youth center?) Yeah. Most of them. Like some don’t go because there’s a certain gang that hangs down there and then you move up the street, there’s another gang that hangs down there. So, that’s why I’m not in a gang. Because you join a gang, you’re only supposed to be over here...The smart thing to do is be out of a gang. You’re out of the gang, you go here, you go there with no problem, you know?

Geraldo

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

10th Grade

A Balancing Act (Some portions) & Getting The Job Done

Computer Programming

School Fights and Gangs

121

(Regarding a shooting incident) It was a gang problem down the street, and they’re like—They make Marion Community High School look bad. Like, they put blame on Marion Community High School, like it’s a gang infested high school, but it didn’t happen in Marion Community High School. It happened down the street. Just because the kid went to Marion Community High School, it was like, Oh, Marion Community High School’s a bad school....(How is it here at Marion Community High School?) It’s pretty cool. Like, you mind your own

122

Voices of Reason business, and if you’re not in a gang, ??? the other one. Just like, I don’t know, like, two or three weeks ago, there was another big fight in the cafeteria. Like, I think it was four kids against four other kids. Like, I don’t know, some business thing.

Geraldo

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

A Balancing Act

Physical Therapy or Teaching

Societal Problems

(What are some of the big problems?) I don’t know— like this year—with things happening? No, it would be cooled down, you know, like, with the gangs and stuff in Brayton. I remember last year there was a lot of (beef) going on, like, everybody was in a gang. Now, like, everybody is like more quiet down. I think it’s because of the winter time. I think more close to summertime they’ll go—(But still you think the gangs are not as much of a problem as they were last year? You’re thinking in the summer, when it warms up, it’ll—) Yeah, it’s gonna, ’cause there are new ones out—a couple of new ones, you know. And like, young kids my age, starting out dealing with things. They want to see how far they could make it. I was like, in the beginning of the year, I got into a fight because of a gang that I got a chipped tooth. They broke my nose ‘cause of some stupid stuff I did. I left that and started dancing.

Geraldo

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

A Balancing Act

Science or History Teacher

Rating Educational Experience

(How would you rate your educational experience?) I think I would rate it a 7 or 8 because it wasn’t until like this year that I really applied myself. Like the other years I did the work. I wasn’t thinking much about the future. You know, I just did the work in the school. I couldn’t wait to go out and hang out outside. And now my Junior year and Senior year I really applied myself, did all the work, bring all my grades up, took leadership class, you know, in my English class I’m at the top reader ’cause Iike to read. You know, all my teachers know me now because I dance. I did—It’s been awsome, like this last year.

7 Getting the Job Done

Getting the Job Done

DEFINING “GETTING THE JOB DONE” Two prominent characteristics of this style are occasional mildly elaborate responses and some interest in the interview process by the interviewee. It differs from “Pulling Teeth” in this regard. It is similar to “Pulling Teeth” in minimal use of humor, laughter, and the like; in some cases, the interviewee may exhibit occasional eye contact. Turn taking analysis indicates interviewer dominance but there are occasional to frequent medium-turn lengths from the interviewee (25–50 words per turn). As one of the interviewer ’s primary objectives is to gather pertinent information, this style achieves that goal quite adequately but lacks the deeper connections seen in “The Great Orator” and “The Balancing Act” interview styles. However it does reach further than the “Pulling Teeth” or the “Goes with the Wind” interviews.

DAN: GRADES 8–11 Dan is white, an only child living with his mother and her boyfriend in a suburban Brayton middle class neighborhood. His father lives just down the road and he sees him almost daily. He began working on weekends and vacations for his father in his construction business at the latter end of his tenth grade. Dan presents as quiet and polite. His interview response style has changed little over these interview years, with concise answers to my questions and very few turns of more than several sentences. The exchange between us has almost a military-like discourse, as though he

124

Voices of Reason

is expected to give the answer to the particular question and offer nothing more until asked, and yet when asked he always responds with an air of cooperation. And so, we have a scaffolding, a vertical structure of information about Dan over numerous turns, much as we had with Angela, especially in her earlier interviews. He considers himself college track and suggests later, after saying that he does not know what he wants to do for a career, that he would like to attend Darby College, possibly to train as a physical therapist (this comes after some strong, earlier statements about other career choices). Dan has split his education between two years at St. John’s Catholic High and Johnson High, where he is now. There had been no indication that he had a problem at St. John’s that brought about the change, until he said so at our fourth-year interview at Johnson High. He has less to say about his H-team experience than any of the other students from this study.

Dan: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Interviewer: Now, connected to this whole idea of college and your future, interest in history and all of that, what kinds of vocational things are you interested in, thinking about work later on? Dan: I don’t know. Maybe a carpenter.

Dan describes himself as having black hair, hazel eyes, friendly and enjoys organized baseball a lot, since age six or seven. He states that his schooling is his first priority. He feels that the H-Team is good because the students can work at their own pace. He particularly likes that everyone on the team does the same work although “Some people aren’t as smart as everybody.” He considers himself college track and enjoys turning to others in the group for help (“There’s a lot of smart kids in our group”). He likes English and science, feels history is his favorite but is a “little shaky on math.” Dan, in one of his infrequent longer stretches of talk, in response to how the decision was made for him to attend St. John’s the following year, says:

5

Interviewer: Now, as far as where you’re going to go next year, where will you be going? Dan: St. John’s. I: Where? D: St. John’s. I: Okay. All right. And how did you make that decision? D: Well, that’s where most of my friends go to; plus, my parents wanted me like to go to a better college. They’re like—they want me to do this and that.

Getting the Job Done

125

And so plans are already underway to prepare himself, at his parent’s direction, for strong college admissions. Although he obviously (as expected) didn’t have a clear college choice, when pressed to name considerations, Dan said “Maybe one of the Boston colleges, not far away...”). I shift that topic into questions about his vocational future, and he suggests possibly carpentry because his father is a carpenter and teaches him the trade. He doesn’t really see how college relates to this vocational direction. In fact, he acknowledges that he could learn the trade as he is now doing and by taking courses. I asked him, given his parents’ desire for him to attend a good college, how he thinks they would feel if he didn’t go to college: 10

15

Interviewer: How would your—You say that your family wants you to go to a good college. How would they feel about you deciding that you were going to do carpentry and maybe not go to a college, per se, but maybe some kind of training program with carpentry? Dan: I think it would be like just as good, maybe, to them, but—I don’t know.

Dan feels that ultimately the choices are his to make regarding both his school selection next year and his vocational direction. I ask him about other vocational considerations and he suggested plumbing. But then I ask him to imagine himself ten years later, what he thinks he would be doing in his life. Dan said, “If I work at it, maybe a professional ball player…That’s one of my goals.” When asked, “What else?” Dan said “I like writing, maybe be a writer, because I use my imagination a lot, so that helps.” He reveals that he writes about war and violence. Opening the topic of “world problems” with that response, I asked Dan to tell me what are the problems we are having in our society today. He gave a list, none of which he says affect him personally, which include, vandalism, air pollution and drugs. Dan: 9th Grade—St. John’s Catholic High School Interviewer: Okay. What about if I asked you to think today about what it is you might want to do for work later on, just based on your interests in school? What do you think you might become? Dan: Well, I like to work with computers.

Nothing has changed about Dan’s family situation. He continues with his baseball interest and has added hockey. He now has hobbies including model making and collecting sports cards. He is now in a Catholic school, a short distance from his home, after a very brief start at Marion Community High School. He had applied, taken the exams

126

Voices of Reason

but apparently there was a delay in notifying him. I had learned about the change only after I came to Marion High to interview him and was told he was no longer there. To get permission and make arrangements at the Catholic school to interview Dan was a bit of an effort but in the end they were very supportive. He says the school is fine. His memory of the H-team is admittedly vague and he sees his current learning situation about the same as the H-team approach. Dan struggled with math the previous year but says now that it is actually his favorite subject along with Spanish. In response to that statement, I asked him where his math interest may lead him vocationally. He first said he wanted to go to college, close to home.

20

25

Interviewer: Okay. What about if I asked you to think today about what it is you might want to do for work later on, just based on your interests in school? What do you think you might become? Dan: Well, I like to work with computers. I: Okay. D: So, I have that kind of background, because in the beginning of the year I took a class, basic programming, in this school. So, I like to work with the computers and stuff. And teach students how to work with them and how to program all of them. I: So, do you think you might want to do something as far as work later on goes with programming computers? D: Yeah, maybe.

When I asked Dan about “world problems” again this year he repeated his concerns about pollution (“It’s really not clean”). He talks about “all that stuff” that enters the air from smokestacks. He also worries about forest fires. Even when I attempt to direct him to other social issues, Dan talks only about these environmental problems, nothing to do with violence, drugs, racism, etc. I suggest, “I guess you’re not exposed to that at all?”

Dan: 10th Grade—St. John’s Catholic High School Interviewer: What is it about sports medicine that attracts you? What is it about it that you think you would like? Dan: Oh, I really want to be a chiropractor.

Dan continues at Catholic High for a second year, saying he likes the school a lot (“It’s a good school”). His family arrangement has not changed. He still participates in hockey and baseball. His best subject is Spanish with a B grade. His most difficult subject continues to be biology. Math, he says he is doing “pretty good” in.

Getting the Job Done

127

Dan still talks about his computer interest but clearly it has taken a back seat to a new career consideration. His first response to my question about his vocational interest is that he wants to do sports medicine. When I asked him to tell me more specifically what he means by sports medicine, Dan says a chiropractor. When I press further for more about his connection between his interests and vocational goal, Dan is really not quite sure, only that he has interest in sports and the injury aspect resulting from sports activities. He says he has done some reading on the subject (“I read a couple of books on sports medicine and therapy”). He tells me, when asked, that his baseball coach serves also as his guidance counselor:

30

35

Interviewer: Okay. Do you guys talk in class about the different kinds of jobs that are out there in the world? Do you have a guidance counselor that asks you what it is you want to be when you “grow up”? Do you have people that talk about these questions? Dan: Yeah. My baseball coach, Mr. (Potter), he’s the guidance counselor too and I talk to him relating to sports and outside life. And he asked me what I want to do and I told him Sports Medicine or therapy. I told him that.

Dan affirms that his father is very involved in his education and his educational/vocational future and has obtained college brochures for Dan to review. Dan says that his grades are “pretty good” although we’ll learn from his interview next year that problems with his school performance resulted in leaving St. John’s for Johnson Memorial High School. “World problems” that Dan identifies include violence, drugs and racism, none of which he says personally affects him. He leaves out the prominent one from his previous two years—pollution. I ask him to tell me why he thinks we have these problems:

40

45

Interviewer: Do you feel that it’s, just from what you read, do you feel it’s getting worse or better? Do you think we’re solving these problems? Why do you think we have these problems? What’s your own opinion about this? Dan: I don’t know. Some other races. I don’t know. Treating the faith isn’t making it any better. ‘Cause I haven’t seen it. Just reading about it, just hearing about it. It’s not nice. I: So, in your life, any of these problems really don’t touch you. I mean they’re just not part of your life. D: No, they don’t affect me.

Later I revisit Dan’s interest in sports medicine to see if he can tell me more about why he is interested in it and indeed I get a fuller picture of its origin and influencers.

128

50

Voices of Reason Interviewer: What is it about sports medicine that attracts you? What is it about it that you think you would like? Dan: Oh, I really want to be a chiropractor. I: Okay. D: Because—injuries and stuff—I learn about them every day from my sports. And like, if I can help, I help as much as I can.

Dan tells me, only when asked, that a couple of his uncle’s friends are chiropractors whom he has spoken to a couple of times about his interest (“I know them real well”). And he’s already thinking they’ll be there to help him out, “When I get more into it.” Dan: 11th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School Interviewer: Do you know what you want to do for work? Dan: No I don’t. Not yet. No. I: No idea? D: If I go to college I’d be studying physical therapy, something in that field.

Before I could conduct this interview I had to find Dan. I learned earlier that he transferred to Johnson, so that wasn’t a problem. But when it came time to see him on the interview day the school’s office could not immediately locate him. Their attendance record indicated that he was present at the school that day but he was not in class as he should have been. After a 30–40 minute search he was found, obviously having decided to skip that class and not remembering that I would be seeing him that day. Once seated in an enclosed room within the school’s library, the interview began with finding out why Dan left Catholic High where he had spent the previous two years, during which time he had said he was doing well and liked it. He said he left because he was uncomfortable there and didn’t have many friends, adding that most of his friends are at Johnson, his current school. Later in the interview he revealed that he was having some difficulty with his academic performance at St. John’s Catholic High. Dan is working weekends and vacations for his father in his residential construction business. His home situation has not changed. He is driving now and owns a car. Dan is taking college-tracked courses and says he is not doing too badly with his academic performance with the exception of math, with which he is struggling but thinks he’ll pass. When I ask him what he wants to do for work, Dan first says he does not yet know and then adds, “If I go to college I’d be studying physical therapy, something in that field.” I pick up on the way he phrased his college consideration and asked, “You’re not sure about that yet?” Dan replies that he wants

Getting the Job Done

129

to go and then says yes he will be going, in response to my question, “You plan on going to college?” Dan obviously is ambivalent about his educational and vocational futures. We see, looking at what he has said about his vocational goals the previous three years, that he really is quite uncertain about it all. However, it seems to me that he knows he is expected to attend college (father’s influence) and so has taken some steps in that direction by visiting Brayton State and Assumption College, with the latter his first choice, and has taken the PSAT. He plans to take the SAT in June.

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: DAN I could not get Dan to sit down for an interview this year in spite of considerable effort by the school personnel, students and myself. On that Tuesday morning, the last day of school for the seniors, when Sarah and Mona showed up after being paged, Dan came in. He stood at the far end of the counter flanked by two friends, seemingly not sure why he was called to the office. I came over to him and asked if we could conduct our interview. He said he could do it at 11:30 A.M. (It was 9:30 A.M. at the time) I said okay and told him how much I looked forward to seeing to it that I interviewed all ten of the students again for this fifth year, keeping a perfect record of participation. He said he’d be there. I had my doubts. I remember the previous interviews were often uncomfortable for him, as though he’d bow out if he could, although these students were reminded often that their participation was voluntary. I also observed at that brief encounter a deep black eye but never had a chance to ask him about it. It could have been from a baseball injury because I learned that he was “Dan , the baseball player,” so named by school personnel, an obvious reference to his strong involvement in the school’s baseball program. I returned as planned and waited. Dan was paged on the intercom several times and no fewer than five students were asked to conduct a school-wide search for him but he managed to elude them and our interview. It was the last day and so I could do nothing else except leave my telephone number with a request that he call me.

POWERFUL QUOTES Dan

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

Pulling Teeth/Getting The Job Done

Carpenter/Plumber/ Writer

130

Voices of Reason

H-Team Experience

You get to do all the work that everybody does, so everybody does—because some people aren’t as smart as everybody, but they all do the same work, that’s like at the level for everybody….So, what about—(Where would you track yourself) College level. (Okay. And so do you feel that different level—different kids from different levels coming into the program has helped or made it better or worse?) Yeah, there’s a lot of smart kids in our group. You learn from them, the people that (aren’t) as smart as them. (And you don’t mind turning to your friends and learning from them?) No, I like to.

Dan

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

Getting The Job Done

Computer Programmer

Societal Problems

(World problems) Well, first of all, the environment, we need to work on all the—like all the pollution and all the stuff outside in the world. It’s real—It’s like—It’s really not clean. It’s sort of like—(What? The air you’re talking about?) Yeah, the air pollution. (And what are some of the ways that we can be improving the air?) Oh, I don’t know. I mean, like, stop like—You know how the smoke— the smoke comes out and all that stuff it gets into the air?...And it spreads. So, it’s the smoke stacks?...So, try to make something that can slow the smoke down...(What other environmental problems do we have besides the air?) Maybe the forest fires....People, like they do clumsy things. They throw lighters into the woods, it catches.

KELLY: GRADES 8–11 Kelly, who is white, lives with her working parents and three sisters in a single-family home in the Brayton area. Her interviews, I think, illustrate nicely the kind of “reactive behaviors” that are often seen with young people who are learning new things, experimenting and adjusting/changing, particularly as it relates here to educational and vocational choices. She talked about her feelings/thoughts and what others say or do and how those things influenced her decisions. For example, early on (eighth grade) she stated that she wanted to go to Tufts University to study veterinary Medicine, “Because I love animals . . . every time my parents (. . .) go there with a lot of animals in the house, so—.” One year later it was nursing: “Well, my grandfather just died of

Getting the Job Done

131

cancer and my grandmother just died of everything else. And they were like always complaining that there wasn’t, you know, a nurse that really cared, you know? They’d just go and give them whatever and just walk out of the room. And so I was like, I want to be a nurse that will care and stuff, so—.” In our interviews, Kelly was soft-spoken, notably polite and intense, with strong, sometimes unremitting, eye contact. Her responses to my questions became fuller in later interviews but she maintained a crisp response style, rarely with any hint of sarcasm or impatience. I always sensed that she was eager to make these “good interviews” but, nonetheless, her responses were always sincere.

Kelly: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Interviewer: What do you see yourself doing after high school? Kelly: Yeah. I’m going to Tufts University…Because I love animals and I want to go on to be a veterinarian.

Unlike several of the other H-Team students, Kelly had no problem responding to my request for information about herself. Simply asking her to tell me about herself elicited a full range of pertinent information, from her age and birth date, to number of siblings, the fact that her parents live together, even about their work and her favorite sport. And she gave a brief physical description of her personality:

5

10

15

20

Interviewer: Kelly, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself , about who you are where you’re from, just so that I know a little bit about you? Kelly: Okay. I’m 13 years old. My birthday’s July 10th. I: Okay. K: I have three sisters, a brother-in-law and a nephew. My parents both live together and they both work. I: What do your parents do? K: My father’s a supervisor for James Industries and my mother ’s a——. I: You know, one way to get people to talk a bit more about themselves is to think if you were writing a pen pal in another part of the world; never saw you, had no photograph, no idea who you are. And you are writing to describe yourself. What would you say about you? K: My favorite sport’s wrestling. Everything that I usually do is about wrestling. I: Okay. What about how you would describe yourself to someone who never saw you? K: I’m tall, skinny, brown hair and blue eyes. I wear glasses. I: What about your personality? How would you describe yourself?

132

Voices of Reason K: Some people call me crazy. I’m just— I: Why—. K:—a little crazy and talkative.

In whatever Kelly decides to engage she commits to it fully and often for an extended period of time such as was the case with her wrestling interest, which had begun four years earlier. Also, as will become increasingly evident as we examine her five years of transcripts, Kelly’s concern or compassion for “living things” is the overarching attribute that influences many of her decisions, particularly as it relates to her vocational aspirations. Because I didn’t know her well at this first interview, I made what I now know was an incorrect interpretation—as follows:

25

Kelly: I care for a lot of things. Whatever I do, I care for. Interviewer: Okay. Care for doing them well, do you mean? K: Yeah.

Kelly really means here that she cares for things (usually living things) not in the context that I gave it when I was referring to doing well in her activities. Kelly was one of very few girls, and the only girl from the 10 H-Team students, who elected to attend the vocational technical high school in the coming year. Here we have the first of many examples of influencers shaping her decisions (her sister, her parents, its location):

30

35

40

45

Kelly: If I’m accepted, to the voc—(vocational high school) to the voc. Interviewer: Okay. All right. is there a particular area—a particular reason why you would like to go to school? K: Well, my sister went there. She was on the honor society and everything, I just want to follow in her footsteps. I: How many years ago? Is she much older than you are? K: She’s graduating this year. I: What did she get involved in? K: Business. I: Is that what you want? K: Yeah. I: So, the vo-tech school gives you the opportunity to focus on something like this? K: Yeah. I: You don’t get that in high school? You don’t have that opportunity in a regular like—high? K: Well, the vocational is closer and the closest high school I have is East High, towards me, I don’t like that school. I: Now, is there anyone else who influenced you—going to a vo-tech program, besides your sister? K: My parents like that school, too.

Getting the Job Done

133

We establish that Kelly wants to attend the vocational technical high school because it was good for her sister (so good, in fact, that she made it in the honor society), has her parent’s blessing, likes the location and offers business training, i.e. secretarial. But Kelly reveals that, although she’ll do the business training, her vocational future is not to be a secretary but rather a veterinarian. She is so sure of it that she comfortably states that she will be going to Tufts University to study veterinary medicine:

50

55

60

Kelly: Well, I want to take secretary, but I want to really take veterinarian, but they don’t have no courses down there. Interviewer: So, you can always do that later on? K: Yeah. I: So, when you get out of school, you’re going to go on to the ninth grade. What do you see yourself doing high school? K: Yeah. I’m going to Tufts University. I: Oh, okay. So, you already have in mind? K: Yeah. I: Why? Why there? K: Because I love animals and I want to go (. . .) veterinarian. I: So, you want to be a veterinarian? But go to vo-tech for business—. K: Yeah.

Kelly sees business training as a precautionary second occupational consideration. She goes on to tell how she came about her interest in animals:

65

70

Interviewer: All right. Where do you get the interest in animals? Do you know? It’s just been there or— Kelly: Every time my parents—go there with a lot of animals—house, so — I: You care for them? K: Yeah, a lot. I: If they were hurt or sick, K: Yeah, I don’t like to see that. I: All right. So, how long have you been interested? K: For—I don’t know. For a long time.

Kelly says she sees herself ten years from now as married, with children. When asked if there is anything else that she hopes will happen in her future, she says she wishes she could become involved in wrestling more. When I asked her in what way, she replied, “Like a journalist or an interviewer.” So here, clearly, again, Kelly has a coherent argument for yet another vocational possibility. The secretarial consideration is influenced by her sister’s own schooling success; the

134

Voices of Reason

veterinarian consideration relates to her love of animals and not wanting to see suffering animals; and her strong, sustained (four years) interest in the sport of wrestling may lead to a career as a journalist or an interviewer. The veterinary medicine consideration is the only one of the three which may not be supported inside her educational setting, given her choice of schooling and her earlier statement that English and history are her favorite subjects. We will see, however, through the next three years of interviews that Kelly maintains a strong connection between passion about, knowledge for and application of her evolving vocational interests. The issue is not what her choice is at any given time but rather the coherence of the argument for her choices.

Kelly: 9th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School Interviewer: Okay. All right. And what do you think that’s going to do for you? What are you thinking of doing when you— Kelly: Registered—R.N.

My second-year interview with Kelly takes place at her new school (Brayton Vocational Technical High). Her training and vocational choices have changed radically from the previous year:

75

80

85

90

Interviewer: What are you taking? What is it that you’re focusing on? K: In trade? I: Yeah. K: My nursing assistant. I: Your what? K: Nursing assistant. I: Oh, good. K: Health assistant. I: Okay. All right. What do you think that’s going to (build) for you? What are you thinking of doing when you— K: A registered—R.N. I: Oh, all right. So, that’s definitely what you want to do; you want to become a nurse? K: Yeah. I: So, when you’re here for four years, what will happen after that? Will you be completely trained for that then? K: Trained for— I: For an R.N.? K:—nursing assistant. I: Okay. Nursing assistant. K: Then I’ve got to go two more years of college and then will be registered nurse.

Getting the Job Done

135

I: Okay. All right, good. So, it would be an associate degree in nursing as an R.N.? K: Uh-huh.

95

Kelly has abandoned her previous three interests (secretarial, veterinary medicine, wrestling) but certainly has thought out what she needs to do to complete her training for her new direction. Again she offers a clear connection between her vocational interest and some substantial outside influence, a significant life event, and her own strong attraction to situations where compassion is needed:

100

105

110

Interviewer: All right. What did you say last year about your vocational goals? I don’t remember what it was. Kelly: I think I said veterinarian. I: That’s right. Veterinarian. You talked about animals. You talked about how your family really cared about animals and you cared about them (inaudible)? K: Yeah. I: So, you’ve shifted away from that to the nursing. What—what has happened? K: Well, my grandfather just died of cancer and my grandmother just died of everything else. they were like always complaining that there wasn’t, you know, a nurse that really cared, you know? They’d just go and give them whatever just walk out of the room. so I was like, I want to be a nurse that will care stuff, so— I: Were you very involved in their dying part of—that area—that time when they were dying, your Grandfather— K: Yeah. I was always with them at the hospital and everything.

We’ll learn in the coming year that Kelly again changes direction. But this time it is because, through direct experience, she is learning negative aspects of nursing that adversely affect her. Kelly: 10th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School Kelly: I worked in a hospital—volunteering—that’s part of our program here. I don’t like—I’ve seen what the RNs do—I don’t like it. . . . Cleaning up people—giving needles. I like the physical therapy, but I don’t really want to spend that much time going to school in this.

By this year, Kelly, like many of the H-Team students, is beginning to evaluate a wider set of issues dealing with time commitment, quality of life and her own capabilities. This maturation of social awareness on several fronts (reality checks) directly impacts decisions, particularly as

136

Voices of Reason

it relates to educational and vocational choices. Kelly gets into nursing motivated by a desire to care about and for people (it was first animals) but she now sees that it requires, at least in the early stages of that career, using needles and cleaning patients, neither of which she has the stomach for. In the converse of her strong commitment/interest and passion for people and things (things in this case previously being wrestling) she takes a strong stand against things she simply can’t or believes she can’t overcome. We’ll see even in the next year that she continues to stay away from R.N. work because “I can’t do needles.”

115

120

125

Interviewer: Your preparation? What are you preparing for? Kelly: To be somewhere in the health facility. I: Okay. Something in the health area, but you’re not sure exactly what it will be yet? K: No, not yet. I: Do you remember what you said last year about what— K: Yeah, an RN. I: Okay. Now, what are your feelings now about that? K: I worked in a hospital—volunteering—That’s part of our program here. I don’t like—I’ve seen what the RNs do—I don’t like it. I: Okay. What part of it don’t you like? K: Cleaning up people—giving needles. I: Yeah. Okay. So, now that you’ve had the actual experience and have seen what it’s like, you’re having second thoughts about doing the RN work—the LPN would be—you have LPN you have RN—but still either of those you don’t think you’d be interested in. K: I might. I might still, but I’m just thinking it all over now.

Kelly now is mulling over her career direction in light of her “discovery” about what nurses really do (“I’m just—I’m really just looking at each job and seeing what they do. I haven’t found—”). She states that she likes physical therapy but she doesn’t want to take on the extensive training requirements (“Yeah, they said it’s like 6 years—up to 6 years”). In spite of her uncertainty Kelly says she will graduate from high school as a certified nurse’s aide and then go on to college. Given that she will have specific training for a job upon leaving high school, I asked Kelly what she saw college doing for her: 130

135

Interviewer: Okay, and then would you go onto college? Kelly: Yeah, I’m gonna go onto college and work as a CNA. I: Okay, so you’re definitely gonna go to college. When you say CNA— certified nurse’s aide? K: Yep. I: All right. So, you wouldn’t have to go to college in order to work as a CNA. But you want to go to College. What would be the reason for going? Is there any particular area that you want to focus on?

Getting the Job Done

137

K: Yeah. I want to further my education in health and just find a career in that.

Kelly quickly explains why college is still relevant even though she expects to have her CNA work in that field, by saying that she expects to further her career in something in the health field. Kelly also has begun a job after school as a dietary aide in a nursing home at 20 hours per week. What does she do with her earnings? 140

Kelly: Pay my phone bill. I have my own phone line. I have my own dog. I pay to get my dog, and then I just bought a car.

Kelly: 11th Grade—Brayton Vocational Technical High School Interviewer: And then you’ll graduate as a health—what did you say—a health assistant? Kelly: Health assistant. I: And then what happens after that? K: I’ll probably go back to college to be an occupational therapist.

Kelly now is working as a certified nurse’s aide at a nursing home and is saving her money to buy a new car, a Grand Prix, “The new wide-track car. They’re nice.” She is doing well in her courses at school with the take-it-or-leave-it attitude she has evinced throughout the four years that I’ve interviewed her, although after a pause she said she liked chemistry.

145

150

155

Interviewer: You’re too busy. I guess not. So let’s talk about your schooling here. What are you taking for courses? Kelly: Chemistry I, Chemistry II, Social Studies, Geography or whatever it is, U.S. History, courses like that. I: How about Math? Are you taking any Math? K: Geometry, Geometry II and Algebra II. I: Okay. All right. How are you doing in the courses? K: Fine. I: No problems at all? K: No problems. I: Which one do you like the most? K: None of them. But I just deal with them. I: But you work at them. K: I like Chemistry. I: Okay. Which one do you hate the most? K: Probably History. I have no interest in History. I: Okay. But, again, you do the work and you make the grade. K: I just do the work. I get A’s in that class. I just don’t like it.

138

Voices of Reason

Kelly, although a CNA, will be graduating as a health assistant and now says she will be going to college for training as an occupational therapist. I comment that she appears to be moving out of the nursing field but she sees it related or as an adjunct to what the nurses do and she is right about that. Here she’s found a way around her dilemma about having to “clean patients” and still be able to utilize her “caring” skills. She knows the length of training and has begun to consider area colleges: 160

165

170

175

180

Interviewer: And then you’ll graduate as a health—what did you say—a health assistant? Kelly: Health assistant. I: And then what happens after that? K: I’ll probably go back to college to be an occupational therapist. I: Oh, all right. So, you’re gonna just shift out of nursing itself, altogether. K: Well, it’s sort of—because the nurses you do activities of daily living, an occupational therapist—It’s showing the people how to do the activities of daily living. But it’s just a cleaner job. I: Well, that’s true, it is—it pays more. K: It pays more. I: All right. So you’re—What would that involve? Where are you going to go to college? You have to start making decisions now. K: Brayton State is one. Maybe (Brayton Community College), I’m not sure. I’m gonna stay in this area for the free room and board at my parents’ house. That way I can go to college and everything. I: Okay. So when do you have to know? Are you going apply in the fall? K: Yeah. In the fall. I: And deadlines are usually around January and then you will know where you’re going. Have you looked into what it takes to become an occupational therapist? K: Four years.

Later in the interview, I recap Kelly’s comments from a couple of years earlier about the birth of her nursing interest. At that time her grandparents died and I asked her if there was anything else now that she is considering for her career and she came back to the R.N. interest but again mentioned the problem with administering needles. This is not just a case of not liking needles as I had suggested, but rather heightened anxiety about them. She cites an example:

185

Interviewer: Right. Is there anything else besides the nursing and occupational therapy that you had thoughts about? Kelly: RN. But I can’t do needles. I: You just don’t like doing needles. K: I can’t do them. I mean, today one of my residents was getting blood

Getting the Job Done

139

drawn, and I just had to turn away. I can’t do that. K: Yeah. You gotta learn and I can’t even learn.

Kelly shares her frustration about seeing some of her friends now using drugs and others getting pregnant (“There’s always somebody pregnant”):

190

195

200

205

Interviewer: Okay. What about—I was just asking about school problems. You said things are pretty good at school here in terms of kids getting along. Every year I ask about world problems—problems outside of school. Problems you read about. Do you see any problems in the world that we need to work on? Kelly: Just really the drugs. Drugs bother me because I see some of my friends—they are just starting to do it. And it gets me so frustrated, we used to be so close, I’m like—come on guys, you don’t need them right now; you know, I’m trying to talk them out of it. But, you know, it’s their life. I can’t really do anything about it. I just— I: You just stay away from it. K: Yeah—Drugs and pregnancy. There’s always somebody pregnant. I: Yeah, what happens when they get pregnant? K: It just seems like they just grow up too quick. I: Yeah. K: Too quick. They gotta take care of somebody when they’re still growing up themselves. I: I know, very young. K: I can’t wait till I’m 21. I can do everything, you know, it’s like, how could you be 16 years old want a baby?

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: KELLY “It was during the work component of her schooling that she discovered occupational therapy by observing others doing the work and having a chance herself to assist…When I asked her to rate her sense of the overall success of her schooling over these past 12 years, Kelly gave it top rating at a 9.0 to 10.0.”

Physically, Kelly has grown considerably since I last saw her. She probably stands 5’9". I remember watching her go by a couple of times, during that hectic period when the students are running around getting their final grades, and noting how she towered over all of the girls who were roaming the corridors with her. Like Evon, Kelly will attend Brayton Community College and then will transfer to Brayton State for completion of training as an occupational therapist, a goal that she identified the previous year after rejecting nursing because she couldn’t “do needles.” She sees the O.T. career as a form of nursing. Her vocational technical training has ended with a co-op program as a certified

140

Voices of Reason

nurse’s aide, which is as close as she is able to get to the O.T. goal at the high school level. It was during the work component of her schooling that she discovered occupational therapy by observing others doing the work and having a chance herself to assist. Kelly plans to live at home during her college experience and continue to work as she has for all of her high school years. She commented that this year has been “kinda tough” working until 10:00 PM and then doing homework but she has completed her schooling in good standing. She is pleased about how her secondary education has concluded. When I asked her to rate her sense of the overall success of her schooling over these past twelve years, Kelly gave it top rating of a 9.0 to 10.0. As with most of the other H-Team students, Kelly asked again this year what will happen with our five years of interviews and whether I would see her again next year. The answer to the latter is yes.

8 The (Com)passionate Communicator

The(Com)passionateCommunicator

DEFINING “THE (COM)PASSIONATE COMMUNICATOR” This type of interview is easily identified by evidence of disproportionately long segments of talk that are about social issues, particularly social injustices, although not limited to that. Certainly video review of the co-constructed talk reveals the intensity of the talk through gestures and voice tone, but even reading the interview transcripts one can “hear” the passion in their voices. They are crusaders for justice. They speak with intensity about things that they see, read, hear and experience. Unlike the “Great Orator,” this style of talk is not dependent on a strong command of grammar or mainstream discourse construction (Sarah). Even in the occasional absence of good articulation skills their messages are delivered to the hearer.

TRACY: GRADES 8–11 My introduction to Tracy remains clear in my memory because she was the only one of the original fourteen students I interviewed who was very reluctant to be interviewed. The H-Team English teacher had made that initial selection of the students. When I came to the classroom that first morning years ago, Tracy was called to the desk and informed that she would now be seeing me for an interview. She said she did not want to do it. I suggested that we go to the interview room, talk off camera about what will happen and then see if she still felt that way. When we reached the interview room down the hall from her classroom

142

Voices of Reason

I explained what she could expect from the interview and that I would stop it at any point if she so desired. She agreed to the interview but asked that it not be videotaped. We talked some more, explaining to her why I wanted videotape recordings. She again reluctantly agreed and we went ahead with what became a good interview. Tracy, by her own admission, as we will see, is sensitive, soft-spoken and shy. Over these interview years that never really changed but she has stayed with it and has been forthcoming with responses to my questions. She is right up there with John and Sarah in terms of providing powerful passages, especially from our first interview. Tracy is white, and lives with her parents and younger brother in Brayton. Her grandparents came from Lithuania and her great grandmother “from the other side” is French Canadian. She is passionate about lots of social issues, including the usual ones, drugs, violence, etc. She speaks often about feeling good when she helps others and about her own accomplishments and about her own acceptance of students from different ethnic backgrounds. She considers herself college/honors track. Her vocational interests change or become more cohesive over the years as she reflects on her own sense of her strengths and interests. And we will see that she reaches out for leadership roles inside and outside of school in spite of her shyness. Tracy: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Interviewer: We’ll see what happens with that. What are your goals for your future? You talk about English. You talk about creative writing and poetry. Is there a future in that for you? Tracy: Maybe. I think—I’ve been writing short stories and I think I could maybe publish them. I was thinking about getting my business degree and starting—and going to cosmetology.

Tracy’s hobbies include watching hockey (“I know everything there is to know about hockey”), collecting key chains from around the world and porcelain dolls. She describes herself as follows:

5

Interviewer: Okay. What I’ve been asking people is to try to describe yourself. If you were to write to a pen pal that you’ve never seen and they don’t know you, how would you describe yourself? Tracy: Sensitive, trustworthy, a nice person. If you ask all my friends, I think they’d say that. I’m easy to talk to. Most of my friends come to me with their problems. Fun to be around.

Tracy’s H-Team experience was very positive in large part due to her English teacher, Ms. Goldstein (who was one of the central figures in the development and implementation of that special program). She left

The (Com)passionate Communicator

143

a lasting mark on Tracy, and others as well, in the way that she inspired them to push the limits of their creativity by believing in themselves, taking chances, and reaching out to help others and to ask for help themselves. (“She made it really fun and really good to be in her class.”) Tracy said that she turned from hating English to developing such a passion for it that her creative writings, in and outside of the classroom, could reach publication quality. Tracy noted that the H-Team made local television news:

10

Tracy: And then we’ve just been—we’ve been in the news, even on TV and in the newspaper. Interviewer: I haven’t seen that, because I don’t live in Brayton, but what are they reporting in the news about the H-Team? T: They said it was a new experience for Sullivan Middle School, the first city to do it, and they said they really liked it. They thought it was a good idea.

Tracy’s choice for attending high school next year is Marion High, a choice she made alone. I ask her what, given her strong interest in English, she thinks about her vocational future. She replies that creative writing and publishing is a possibility. But other considerations include obtaining a business degree, training in cosmetology and then establishing her own salon. Her cosmetology interest comes directly from her aunt who does that kind of work. Her college consideration is Umass (University of Massachusetts) at Amherst. This choice, this early in their interviews, was given by a number of the students, unsurprisingly, because they had taken a field trip to that campus earlier in the year. For many of these students this was probably their first visit to a college. We will see with Tracy, as was the case with most of the other students, that their college selections changed from year to year as they learned how other colleges related to their financial situation and their career interests. I asked Tracy what she thought she would be doing at age 24:

15

20

Tracy: I want to be married. I want to have about two—maybe two kids, at the most. I want to stay with—in the range of my family, because I know my—family lives in like Wisconsin and I don’t want to be like them, because of the distance, and we never see them. So, I want to be close to my parents because I really enjoy them. Yeah, unless I move like to Oxford or something, just like ten minutes away. Because I don’t—Because they’ve influenced my life, as well, my parents. I want to stay close to them.

In all of the interview years with Tracy, she had lots to say about “world problems,” resulting in some very powerful personal narra-

144

Voices of Reason

tives. She gives a one-word response, “Violence” and then goes into a powerful account of violence in her world:

25

30

35

Tracy: Violence—My friend—my best friend, her brother—her cousin was killed because of violence and she was there when he died. I was like, what is wrong with this? People are killing people for no reason. He looked at me the wrong way, so I shoot your head off. And people are committing suicide. It doesn’t make sense. And then the wars—We get in wars that we don’t even need to be in. Like the—I don’t know much about what’s happening in Bosnia right now, but I don’t know if they should—like few days ago, that was not necessary. Interviewer: What do you think we can do to solve the violence? I agree we have a serious problem. How do you think we can solve it? T: People have got to stop buying the guns. They’ve got to stop using drugs. We’ve got to put—. And I don’t like that people—like if they kill somebody, they’re going to be put to death. But, if like someone has killed seven or eight people, they’re in jail. But if someone kills one person, they’re put to death. I don’t understand that one. That’s what I tell my father every night. He doesn’t have the answer for me. I try to understand what people are going through, but I don’t understand why they do what they did.

Although not directed at her personally (and she wonders why) Tracy talks about an incident in which her only brother was nearly taken from the streets: 40

45

50

Interviewer: How has it effected you, in your own way? Tracy: I try to stay away from the neighborhoods. And there’s another— The people that are snatching kids on the streets. My brother almost was one of them. My mom is seriously monitoring him and sometimes I even have to walk with him, but I don’t want to. I think he’s big enough. But when this happened, I could have said—I wouldn’t have a brother anymore. So, I was really upset about what the guy tried to do. He got out of his car and ran after my brother and my brother just ran and ran into the house. And it’s freaked me out that when I walk to the bus stop every day, something like that could happen to me, but it never does. I don’t know why.

Tracy: 9th Grade—Marion Community High School Interviewer: Okay—You’re thinking now about becoming a lawyer and last year it was more cosmetology and business major. So, you’re still—you know, you’re still feeling your way around? Tracy: Uh-hum. I: But the lawyer thing is really what’s on your mind right now? T: Yeah.

The (Com)passionate Communicator

145

Tracy remembers less about what she told me in her previous year’s interview than most of the other students in this interview group. Last year she was firmly interested in hockey but did not recall that. Now it is softball, dancing and bowling. Her home situation is unchanged. Her transition from the H-Team program to this tracked high school setting has been working out for her and she said she likes the change. She is tracking at college and honors depending on her subjects. In addition to a complete change in sports interest, about which she had such strong interest last year, she has also pulled way back from her creative writing activities. I asked Tracy to recall her vocational goal from the previous year and she said she thought she had said “lawyer.” She said her interest in this stems from participation in a mock trial. She later recalls her earlier interest in cosmetology “because of my aunt” and says she may still get her license but not “pursue a career in it.” She’s considering Brayton state or Umass at Amherst but doesn’t know if she can afford it. She feels that her grades are good, having made “second honors.” When I asked her again this year about world problems, Tracy had the same style of response, beginning again with, “Violence,” and then going right into a personal anecdote:

55

60

Interviewer: Now, the final topic that we talked about and I want to talk about again today is world problems. And I had asked you what were some of the problems that we need to work on here in the schools in Brayton and also just throughout the world. T: Violence. People—my jacket was stolen at the beginning of this year. I: Okay, yeah. Here? T: Yeah. And it’s because my locker didn’t have a lock on it because it wasn’t fixed and I put it in my friend’s locker and it still—and hers had a lock and it still got stolen. So, someone knew her combination and then when they asked, no one said anything. I: Oh, I see. T: It really—because I bought the jacket with my own money and it really kind of hurt, someone that would steal and I don’t like that very much.

Tracy has strong views about racism (“Everyone’s against everyone. It’s like every race is against anybody else”). She sees it through school fights, and writings on the blackboard. I wrongly assume that she does not experience it. Here she talks about how she handles racial comments directed at her: 65

Interviewer: You’re not a victim of it, I guess? Tracy: Well, sort of. People like—They’ll talk about like my race and they’ll go, oh, but no offense. And it gets me mad because they know

146

70

75

Voices of Reason it’s offensive to me, but then they say no offense, because they think it of everyone else but me, and it’s not true. I: What do you try to do to handle that? T: I don’t— I: How do you handle it? T: I don’t do anything right now. I just—I go yeah, okay, whatever. Because I don’t want to end up getting in a fight. Because if you look at someone the wrong way, they’ll ask you what your problem is, and you say nothing. They’ll say do you want to take it—I just don’t get involved.

The school has a multicultural club that brings students together to do shows which Tracy feels helps some to reduce racial tensions. Tracy: 10th Grade—Marion Community High School Interviewer: And how do you think that might—is that something that might play into some kind of vocational goals you might have? Tracy: Not really. I still want to be a lawyer.

Tracy’s family situation is stable. She has a much stronger statement about her H-Team experience from two years earlier, than she did the first year away from the program:

80

85

Interviewer: Now that you’ve been here for a couple years, and you think back on the H-Team, do you—what are your memories of the H-Team? What are your thoughts about the way it was compared to now? Tracy: Just the way everyone was closer. I liked having the same people in your class every single time ‘cause I made friends and then we just stuck together. But now it’s different. You pray to have one of your friends in your class so you don’t have to sit there by yourself. And the teachers—I mean—I like the teachers here. They’re really nice and everything but some of them don’t care. They’re just compare you—you know you’re done so they give you a grade. Everyone else on the H-Team—they really cared.

Beyond the classroom setting, Tracy says the changes include the racial tensions leading to fights, and the resulting “lock down” where they are locked in their classrooms during outbreaks. “Here there’s a lot of racism, prejudice, people don’t like each other.” She says she tries to get along with everyone, that she doesn’t hate many people and even dislikes the use of the word “hate.” I ask for an example of an incident that may lead to a fight:

90

Interviewer: What are the things they seem to fight about the most? Give me an example.

The (Com)passionate Communicator

95

147

Tracy: They’re stupid little things. You said something to me. You looked at me. Why are you looking at my girlfriend? You know, it’s really stupid little things and they escalate and they get in a real big fight. And then sometimes the police have to be involved. And there’s police stationed here now ‘cause of what happened a couple weeks ago.

Interestingly, Tracy points out that no one can accuse her of being a racist because “I have a variety of friends.” In fact, her best friend is Puerto Rican (“You know, I go over to his house almost every day”). Her approach to the problem, if she is confronted, is to ignore it. In spite of these strong comments at the start of our interview this year, Tracy says that it has not adversely affected her education at Marion High. Her grades have been good this year. Her earlier struggles with math have subsided about which she is very pleased: Tracy: I get happy when I understand what I’m doing and I can do it really fast and give him the answer before anybody else. And I did that today. He looked at me and I went “18.” He’s like very good. I’m like—Yes.

I ask Tracy to talk about whether her improving math skills may play a role in her vocational considerations and she answered no, that she continues to have interest in law. I suggest then that her English/writing interest relates to her vocational direction. She reiterates, “I love writing,” an indication that she is back at it with passion after abandoning it last year. She attributes it again to the teacher, who, like Mrs. Goldstein two years earlier, encourages the writing. (“I like to write stories dealing with everything from just a regular old high school to, you know, rape, and abuse and all that stuff”). I suggest that it’s much like a diary and she replies that she keeps a nightly journal. Later I ask her why she wants to be a lawyer: 100

105

110

Interviewer: So in eleventh and twelfth grade you’re gonna be thinking about what courses will help you go into college and then your goals. Why is it you want to be a lawyer? Can you think back when it happened when you said, That’s what I want to do? And it just all clicked together or is it just kind of gradual? Tracy: I watched my aunt. And I saw what my mother went through. And she needed a good lawyer. I: What about your aunt? What happened to her? T: She was in an accident. It wasn’t really that bad of an accident but she did sustain life things now because of it. So her lawyer would put it off and put it off and finally they settled but it wasn’t as much as she wanted. And I was like, well, if I had been on that case I would’ve went further. A lot of movies have influenced me a lot too.

148

115

Voices of Reason I: And when you watch how it’s being done, you say, well if I were in their shoes this is how I would do it. And you like that. You like the thought of being in that kind of a role. T: Yep.

Tracy is thinking at this point about going to St. Joseph’s College because her aunt is head of the Criminal Justice Program, “So, hopefully I will be able to get in there.” Related to the topic of world problems, Tracy talks about the Oklahoma City bombing with the same style as her talk in the previous interview years:

120

125

130

135

Interviewer: Oh. Good. So you’ve had a very good, busy year, I think. I mean, it sounds like you’ve really done very well. We were talking earlier about racial problems. Are there any other problems that you see in the school or out of school? What I call world problems—big problems that need to be worked on besides racism? Tracy: Terrorists. I: Okay. T: I still think about the Oklahoma bombing and then that with that guy rushed into that kindergarten room. I cried about that one. These little kids died for nothing just because he had a point to make. You know, he had to kill, what is it certain teeny little kids for no reason. The media is way into everything right now. They just, you know, make it worse than it is sometimes with that plane that went down, you know, I don’t understand how that could happen. I mean, it’s gone. A huge plane gone and the people probably were eaten by like alligators and stuff. But they should be able to find the plane at least. I: So you’re really affected when you hear the news about these terrible things that happen. You ask yourself, why? T: Yeah, all the time. I: I’ve noticed that. When we talk about those things, you often will ask yourself why and that makes a reflection of your concern about it.

Tracy: 11th Grade—Marion Community High School Interviewer: So, what is it that you’re shooting for vocationally? Tracy: Umm—Law, in the early childhood field.

This is Tracy’s third year at the high school. Her home situation has not changed. She is driving now and working at Bradlee’s as a cashier on Sundays and holidays and she is co-president of the Community Service Center at her church. We also learn later that she is a cheerleader and Vice President of her Junior Class. Last year she talked about her friend Bobby. This year she has a friend, James, who helps with the church work, and a friend, Mike, who gives her rides home.

The (Com)passionate Communicator

149

I ask her if her H-Team memories are fading and she says no because her brother is now in one. That is the only related talk in this interview. Math is still giving Tracy problems but she’ll pass and she will not need to take it next year, pointing out that she will not need math for her intended career (“I don’t need to [take math] because I’m gonna do the Law”). Not surprisingly, then, given what Tracy has been saying these past several years, her favorite school subjects are Law, Early Childhood and English. I return to the question about her vocational goal and simply ask her what she wants to do vocationally and she demonstrates a logical connection between her interests and vocational goal:

140

145

Interviewer: So, what is it that you’re shooting for vocationally? Tracy: Umm—Law in the early childhood field. I was gonna—I spent quite a while for a little while, so I took Early Childhood and I really love to work with students. So I figured I worked so hard at the Law lately, you know, getting all the information, so I’m gonna tie it in together. I: And how would that happen? T: I would probably work in the Law field dealing with students—like either family affairs or students’ rights or something like that. I: So, you’re planning on going on to become a lawyer? T: Yeah.

Tracy’s senior-year elective courses relate closely to her vocational goal as she plans to take Early Childhood II and Psychology. She is dedicated enough to this vocational direction to consider a Washington, D.C. trip as part of her Law course, at a cost of $900.00, with financial aid available. She has taken PSATs twice and has signed up to take the SATs in June. She has added to her list of possible colleges which now includes St. Joseph’s, Brayton State and Trinity College and maybe Umass at Amherst (“But I don’t know if they have anything that I’d be interested in—like the Law.”) She says she has been receiving lots of informational mail from Trinity College since last year. She seems to be leaning strongly towards St. Joseph’s, saying again that her aunt (who really is a cousin) is the head of the Criminal Justice Department. But she says she doesn’t want any special considerations for admissions, “Because that would make me feel, you know, if I didn’t get in with myself, and then that means that I’m not bright enough to go there.” She has the application from St. Joseph’s. If Tracy cannot pursue the law direction, for whatever reason, she says she would like to consider early childhood teaching. A good friend’s mother is a kindergarten teacher so “I could always go to her for help.”

150

Voices of Reason

I asked her about school, world problems, and Tracy started by defending her school, saying that an incident at the school has people thinking it’s a bad place when “It’s not that bad.” She cites a long-ago example that still marks the school’s reputation, and ends with a strong statement about her own excellent education:

150

155

160

Interviewer: So they take one incident and make it seem like it’s happening every minute. Tracy: Yeah, there was a stabbing like five, six years ago, they always still bring it up, and it’s not fair. Like, one of my friends is like, oh, I’m not going to that school. And I go, well, why don’t you visit with me and shadow me and see what it is like. My cousin is the exact same way. My cousin Brian goes to St. Mary’s. I go, why don’t you—He goes, oh, no, no, I’m afraid. I’m like, why are you afraid? I go, it’s fine. I go, I love this school. I: And you’ve been here for three years, you should know. T: I know. I’m fine. Look at me, you know? I have the best education that I can.

But outside of school, she talks about violence, drinking and killings about which she keeps informed by reading the newspaper daily and watching television news with her father.

165

170

Interviewer: What about out in the world, at large, outside the schools? Tracy: Just the violence and the fighting. I: Yeah. T: I mean, it’s just (awful), like, I think, I mean, I just have to go visit one of my friends in the hospital ‘cause he was in a car accident on Friday night. He has a fractured skull and a collapsed lung just because he was having fun and speeding. His brother was driving the car. It crashed, you know, and he might have brain damage because he wanted to have what—a drink? They shouldn’t—oh, I hate drinking. I don’t—I just—That’s one of the things that hurts me the most. ‘Cause it’s stupid.

As the interview concludes, Tracy asked the often-asked question—if I will continue to see her through college. She also suggests, as others have done increasingly, that I bring together the ten H-Team students for a group discussion about their experiences since they split up after eighth grade.

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: TRACY “The evolution of her educational and vocational directions has been steady and coherent, more so than with some of the other students. . . . she

The (Com)passionate Communicator

151

has selected St. Joseph’s College because she wants to become a first grade teacher and so will major in early or elementary education.”

Tracy has changed the least of any of the ten H-Team students both in terms of physical appearance and verbal presentation. Although she has come to be a bit less shy, she still exhibited an uneasiness, especially with her eyes that frequently darted about. But Tracy was always pleasant and, given the very uncertain first interview five years ago when she wanted to bow out, I’m pleased that she agreed to stay with it. The evolution of her educational and vocational directions has been steady and coherent, more so than with some of the other students. She kept her ear close to the ground all of these middle school and high school years, paying attention to both her interests and abilities and what appropriate (i.e., realistic) training options were available to her. Friendships and accompanying loyalty have always been important to her; even in her decision-making about college she has taken that into account along with to selecting what she considers a good college for her vocational goal. Tracy will attend St. Joseph’s, a Catholic, liberal arts college. Unlike some of the other students who tell me that they will attend a particular college but have not been formally accepted (Angela, Evon, Geraldo), Tracy has been accepted and has been awarded a substantial scholarship of $10,000.00 per year. She has selected St. Joseph’s because she wants to become a first grade teacher and so will major in early or elementary education. She leaves open the possibility that she may go on to graduate school to further her teaching career. We talked about her varied interests through the years, including a law career and that she now has found something she feels strongly about. We talked about her earlier interest in writing and the powerful influence by her English teacher during her H-Team experience and she tells me that she writes much less now. This led to my closing question about how she would rate the success of her 12 years of schooling: she rates it as an 8.0, adding that milestones for her were in fourth and eighth grades, both due to powerful and lasting influence of teachers who believed in her.

POWERFUL QUOTES: TRACY Tracy

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

A Balancing Act/ The (Com)passionate Communicator

Cosmetologist

152

Voices of Reason

H-Team Experience

Societal Problems

(H-Team) It was a really good idea. I think my favorite teacher, Ms. Goldstein, has really pushed me to do what I wanted to do, because I didn’t think in the beginning that I’d do it, but I write stories now. I write poems. I write in journals every night. And it’s all because of her. She is like the person who motivates me the most. If I could go— if someone told me right now if I could give an award or something, I would give it to her, because she has influenced my life, really. . . . She’s made it really fun and really good to be in her class. (Do you talk about it with your friends? When you guys get together, do you talk about these sort of things at all, that you hear about? What do you talk about?) Me and my best friend in biomath . . .we were talking about the suicide of the Nirvana lead singer . . . she was a very good part of—she loved Nirvana. And wrote his name on a paper and I wrote all the things that came to mind, to me. It was just a way for me to express my feelings . . . and she read it and she said, I know, I was thinking the exact same thing. And she said why did he do it? And I said—she told me he was depressed and I mean, get some help. Don’t end your life. He had a little baby and he had a wife that he loved and he just did that for no reason. And his stomach illness could have been treated. I don’t know why he did it . . . and then another fan of his killed themself because of him . . . and I said, they loved him so much that they’d do that for him? He must have—he loved people, but not the way they loved him. So, he said, I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I’m going to do this to myself. And that’s it.

Tracy

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

A Balancing Act/ The (Com)passionate Communicator

Lawyer

What Brings Happiness

Enjoys Writing

I get happy when I understand what I’m doing and I can do it really fast and give him the answer before anybody else. And I did that today. He looked at me and I went “18.” He’s like, very good. I’m like—Yes! English. I love writing. And Mr. Baines usually lets us do journal entries a lot. And I like his class but I

The (Com)passionate Communicator

Goal

153

just wish we could do more activities but I do like English a lot. That was my favorite down at Jasper ’cause it was with Mrs. Goldstein. I like to write stories dealing with everything from just a regular old high school to, you know, rape and abuse and all that stuff. (Why a lawyer) I watched my aunt. And I saw what my mother went through. And she needed a good lawyer . . . She was in an accident. It wasn’t really that bad of an accident but she did sustain life things now because of it. So her lawyer would put it off and put it off and finally they settled but it wasn’t as much as she wanted. And I was like, well, if I had been on that case I would’ve went further. A lot of movies have influenced me a lot, too.

SARAH: GRADES 8–11 Sarah is an African American girl, originally from Boston, where her father resides. At the time of our first interview she had been living in Brayton for five years with her mother and grandmother. She has no siblings. From the opening moments of our first interview I found her to be dynamic, very passionate about social issues and full of hope about her educational and vocational future, until a dramatic shift in our fourth year interview. She has had her share of family-related disruptions (which were not apparent in her earlier interviews) which have had a significant impact on her school performance (she says now it is because she is socializing too much). She went from being in an exciting and supportive program in the eighth grade (the experimental heterogeneous program, H-Team) to a short stay at Johnson Memorial until eye surgery kept her out of school for several months. And then she found herself living in Cambridge with her father and attending a Catholic high school. It took some persistent inquiries with school administration to locate her but when I did I was rewarded with a powerful and wide-ranging interview that far exceeded the length of any previous interview of any of the other nine students. She returned to Johnson after “I sort of got kicked out of my house over there. So I wanted to come here.” But that was only to last one year as she moved on to another Catholic school. In fact it was at our third-year interview that she announced to me that she had just decided that day that she did not wish to return to Johnson High. Through her statements about her educational and vocational goals it was disheartening to see her pull away from her earlier steadfast desire to become a meteorologist as she

154

Voices of Reason

came to believe (or was told by her grandmother) that her aspirations were unrealistic. Sarah: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School “I was thinking about being a meteorologist.”

When asked to imagine that she was describing herself to a pen pal whom she had never met, Sarah said: Sarah: I would say—Let’s see. I’m the type that thinks a lot about things, you know? I worry, maybe sometimes too much. I’m just—you know, I just like to—I like to have fun, you know. But, you know, but not too much. I like to be like on the—like serious sometimes, but not too much fun, but I like to have a lot of fun, go to parties. That’s about it. I like school and stuff like that, you know.

Sarah was perhaps less enthusiastic about her H-Team experience than some of the other students in this study but nonetheless said she felt it was good and liked the idea of people with different academic abilities helping each other. She said she would track herself “college.” She enjoyed the field trips associated with that program and complained that more should have been planned but understood that budget limits precluded that. She felt that her math subject performance benefited from the H-Team pedagogy, a subject that, we will see, she has struggled with all of these interview years. History has been her favorite subject. When I asked her to tell me about her career thoughts, Sarah had this to say about it and the origin of her interest:

5

Interviewer: Okay. And so history is your favorite subject. Do you think of it as being something you’ll carry on in some way? I’m not sure how, but do you think about your future and college and then go on and work in something relating to history? Do you know? Sarah: Maybe. I was thinking about being a meteorologist. I: Oh, okay. All right. Why do you think of that? S: I’m always wondering what it’s going to be like outside the next day. I: Okay.

When I asked her what the training requirements are for preparing for work as a meteorologist, Sarah said she had no idea but quickly added that she plans to go to Howard University. She goes on to say that she thinks she’ll still be in school in ten years, in a master’s degree program. There is obviously some uncertainty about how all of this will work out for her, as she admits, but she reiterates her strong interest in

The (Com)passionate Communicator

155

meteorology when she says “I even have dreams about it.” Her knowledge source is an after school television program:

10

15

Sarah: They have a show at four o’clock and they tell you—What are the—They tell you like something about like hurricanes, like they teach you—really do. They teach you like when a—like how you know when a hurricane is going to come or how it happens. And ask you questions like—like things about the clouds. They ask you all kinds of questions. They have that at the nighttime, when I turn it on sometimes and they’re asking questions.

Sarah has always had a lot to say about issues related to my question to these students about “world problems”. While her speech is at time halting and replete with “You know” she stays with her discourse until she has made her point(s). Watching the exchanges of our interview on videotape gives a much more natural sense of our talk than what we see from the written text. The following is a powerful example of her passionate voice about these “world problems” which flows from an earlier talk about why she moved away from the Boston schools, i.e., to escape violence.

20

25

30

35

40

Interviewer: Thinking along those lines, what do you think some of the problems are we’ve got in our country today? Sarah: There’s not enough jobs out there. The black community, the Hispanic community, they’re not educated enough—you know, so they could get jobs. I: Yeah. S: And things like that. They need better jobs. They/we need better housing. We need everything. I mean—they just—you know, they just like don’t want—they’re like—one day I was watching on the—one of these—and they was talking about a strip—a strip place. They was—the community that it was in wasn’t there and they said—oh, well, this shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be in a residential—this should be— what did they say? This shouldn’t be in a residential area. So, I was like—well, where do you want it to be? They want it to be out in the ghetto, which they don’t consider a residential area. They just put them there. They just consider it something, you know? They don’t consider it—they don’t consider the people residents. They consider them—you know, bums, you know, things like that. That’s not true, because there’s a lot of people in the ghetto that work. They work and they work very hard. And you know—I know a lot of people who work there and they have parents who work and—you know, they still have to live there because they don’t make enough money to get out. I: How do you feel about that? I mean, how do you feel about hearing that? S: That’s—it makes me mad because—I mean, you work so hard, you know, and you pay taxes and everything else. Why can’t you—why

156

45

Voices of Reason shouldn’t you be able to get what you want, if you work hard enough for it? You know. You should be able to. I: So, the biggest problem is not enough education? S: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Sarah talks about social injustices with respect to jobs, education, and housing, that are very much part of her world. She affirms my reiteration that education is a major factor in this injustice. And then she responds to my question as to why kids aren’t getting the education; she returns for another series of strong views about these things, ending with an example from observations at her own school regarding classroom isolation of certain Hispanic students:

50

55

60

65

70

75

Interviewer: And so why aren’t the kids getting the education? Because the schools aren’t good or because they don’t want to do it or—what’s going on? Why not? Sarah: Well, definitely the schools aren’t good. I mean, public school systems. I mean, it’s just all gone. They just need to have something— somebody come in from—I don’t know. Maybe an angel come down and tell them what—I don’t know, because I really don’t know what—I know what’s wrong with it. There’s not—I don’t know. It’s like—you know, there’s violence in the schools, too. It doesn’t really help. You know? The teachers are scared. Everybody’s scared. You know? But it’s like they don’t—their education is very—it’s terrible, especially for African-Americans and for some Hispanics. I: Do you think that these kids would want a better education if they could be in the right place? S: Yeah. If they were in a better environment. And also what I noticed is—one day we was down in the computer room with that other team and the team was—I think it was a standard team. And the one thing I didn’t like about it was that there was a lot of—mostly all the people there were Spanish. They put them all in a standard group and then they’re all bad. I mean, it’s like—why are you going to put all bad kids in the same class, knowing that they’re all going to be bad? You know? If you put them in like—if we had heterogeneous—like if I was down there, I would be bad, too, because—you know, from where I grew up and everything. But because I’m here and like most of the kids are calm and everything, it keeps me more calm and it keeps everybody else more calm. I: That’s a very good point. S: Yeah. Because I noticed that. And mostly—they don’t have to put all the Spanish people together. If they know English enough—if they know enough English to be outside of bilingual, they should be able to go other places, you know? But they treat—they treat the black people and the Spanish people like they’re not the same—as they’re not equal. I: So, they keep them in groups and they just keep on— S: Yeah.

The (Com)passionate Communicator

157

I suggest that the H-Team environment “takes care of that” referring to mixing students of various academic and ethnic background and Sarah replies, “Definitely.” But Sarah doesn’t stop there. She moves from school problems to the lunacy of our government sending large amount of financial aid to places like Russia when . . . “We can’t feed our own people and—you know, we have people here starving, but they sit out there giving two billion dollars to Russia. I think it’s a shame.” Sarah: 9th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School and Catholic High School Sarah: A meteorologist.

Sarah began her freshman year at Johnson in Brayton but I later learned, after considerable effort, that she transferred to a Catholic high school in Cambridge. We met a week or so before the end of the school year in what came to be a very lengthy interview in the school’s library. The librarian was present most of the interview, appearing to busy herself in the far corner of the room. As open as Sarah was about lots of things she never revealed why she came to Cambridge to live with her father. I sensed it was off limits and so I didn’t pursue it. She didn’t have much to say about her H-Team experience of the previous two years until we neared the end of our interview when she seemed to re-hatch forgotten feelings about the teams’ closeness as she asked about others I?am interviewing as well. She said a reunion would be wonderful: 80

85

Sarah: We should all have like, the people that you interviewed—we should all have, like, a reunion thing. Interviewer: I think so. S: I think so we could all get together and— I: Yeah. S:—talk, because that would be, like, a real good, interesting thing.

About the H-Team:

90

95

S: I kind of miss the H-Team. I mean, when I was there I was, like, I didn’t like it, but now that I’m here it’s, like, I miss it. I: Sure. S: I—I would rather have the H-Team, now. I: You appreciate what it—what it did— S: Yeah. I:—and what it was? S: I do. Because like—like you said. Like, you just made it up, you know? You made me think about how much I missed it, because it was, like, oh, well, you don’t talk about things like that here.

158

Voices of Reason I: Right. S: You know? That’s the fun thing about it, you know? We didn’t talk about things like that here, but I liked the H-Team a lot.

Sarah has stayed with her vocational goal of becoming a meteorologist but now has even more of sense of what she needs to do to achieve that goal, beginning with her courses in high school. She went to her guidance counselor and told her that she needs to take science “because I want to be a meteorologist.” Furthermore she is contemplating yet another school change, hoping for something like Milton Academy to give her more opportunities. Then the interview shifts to a very lengthy discussion about a series of social problems about which Sarah has both examples and solutions. She begins with “jealousy,” at first reluctant to say more until I assure her it is confidential:

100

Sarah: Like jealousy, for like—because like—all right. There was an experience here that I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about this or not. But— Interviewer: This is confidential.

Sarah talks about her light-skinned, red haired, black cousin as a victim of jealousy among her “own,” saying that she feels this is mostly a black issue, one that she results from “this mentality” and lack of “respect for their self.”

105

110

115

120

Sarah: All right. There was an exp—. When my cousin came to this school—and my cousin, she’s—she’s black, but she’s light-skinned and she has red hair, and all these girls over here—they jumped my cousin because they—all the guys over here was like, yeah, she looks good and—you know, they were saying all that stuff. Interviewer: Oh, that’s interesting. S: And they got mad and I guess they got mad and jealous, or whatever. I don’t know. And then wanted to jump my cousin—and they jumped my cousin. And so, I think there—a lot of people are jealous. I think it’s mostly black—I’m not trying to, you know, jump on us, but do you know what I’m saying? I’m just saying, I think it’s mostly black people, because every single time—we can’t just get along. We always have to fight about something. And it’s just—they’re like, they have this mentality, oh, they’re taking my man, you know? This, that, and the other, it’s—you know? They always want to fight over a boy, or a guy. They don’t—like, they don’t have anything else better to do. Now, I know people, there—all they—and I know girls that all they do is they talk about sex. I hate that. It’s—It’s like, what’s the big deal, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, you don’t have to do that all the time. You know what I’m saying? You could do other things. There’s better things to

The (Com)passionate Communicator

125

159

talk about than talk about that. I’m not saying you can’t talk about it, I’m just saying, not twenty-four, seven, you know? I: Right. S: I—I hate that. But people like, I guess now they—they—they just— they have no respect for their self, or something. I don’t know. But I think people need to get together and look inside their self, and then you just – be nice and kinder to other people.

Sarah distances herself from some of these problems personally but giving voice to what she sees as problems by talking about her cousin, friends or other family members. But, in addition to the self-respect issue and obsession about sex she goes on to talk about the lack of respect for others. She reports a personal incident: 130

135

140

145

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Like people being kind to each other. Nowadays, people are not kind to each other, you know? They’re all—you know, they just—they’re not kind. They—they—they—You walk down their street, they’re like, oh, you’re on my block, this, that, and the other. You can’t walk the streets anymore, because, you know, it’s—it’s theirs, this, that, and the other, you know? It’s like, it’s everybody’s, like, we all live here, you know? People should be kind to each other. And another thing, too, like, one day I was standing in Chestnut Hill, and I was waiting for a bus, and I didn’t have a watch on, and I saw all these Asian people at the bus stop. Now, there was at least twenty of them. You can’t sit up there and tell me there’s twenty people sitting there and not one of them have a watch when you ask what the time is. Interviewer: And they didn’t— S: Oh, they jumped to say no. I was do you—no, we don’t have the time. It was like, yo—you don’t—it’s like, you don’t have to be all rude about it, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, all I asked you for was the time, it’s not like I’m going to invade your space. Do you know what I’m saying? People are not kind to each other. We all live here. We should all be kind. I don’t understand it.

Sarah talks about “men abusing women” and tells about an incident she witnessed:

150

155

Interviewer: What about other problems that you—that you want to mention besides those that you brought up? Besides jealousy and being kind or a lack of kindness? Sarah: Now, like what I see a lot is men abusing women. I see that a lot and that needs to stop because that’s wrong. Nobody—people shouldn’t be touching any—you know what I’m saying? You shouldn’t be touching—you know? You don’t have to put your hands on somebody, you know? If you have a problem just walk away, you know? You don’t have to fight over it. And they—guys—they just fight. I seen one guy take this girl into the middle of the street and just punch her.

160

160

165

Voices of Reason I: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Okay. S: And then he says—and then he says to her, get up. And when she gets up, he punched her back down. I: You saw that happen? S: Yeah. It was like—it was dumb. I: Very disturbing. S: Yeah.

Given what Sarah has said so far, it isn’t surprising that she has strong comments about the “O.J. Simpson” and “Oklahoma City bombing” tragedies. She relates them to situations closer to home, particularly regarding black-on-black violence. Dramatically she exclaims that there won’t be any more black people left if the killings continue. The whites don’t care as long as their neighborhoods aren’t involved. The government is at fault for not seeing to it that there are enough jobs “especially for blacks” and so affirmative action should not be done away with, advising that to do so could increase violence and drug use on the streets. Sarah ties this back to slavery:

170

Sarah: There’s not enough like—yeah. There’s not enough black people working anyway. You know what I’m saying? Why are you going to take it away? It’s like, I—I—I don’t agree with it, because if you think about it, it is unfair to other people, but I—if—you know—if—it wouldn’t have to be like this if white people didn’t bring slaves over here. If they didn’t bring them over here, we wouldn’t have this problem, okay?

Sarah goes on to talk about adolescent depression and pregnancy, AIDS, and repeats the need for self-responsibility:

175

Sarah: But they don’t want to take responsibility for the sex, you know? Make babies, you know? Get all kind of diseases, you know? I know— somebody told me about this lady, she had like, five different diseases and she had a baby, you know? It was like, that’s crazy.

Sarah: 10th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School Interviewer: Okay. Now, let’s take all of that and pull it together. What are you thinking about your career goals? Sarah: I still want to be a meteorologist.

This year Sarah is back at Johnson Memorial after being “sort of kicked out of my house over there.” She is living with her grandmother and working at Taco Bell nearly seven hours per day after school, leaving me to wonder how she gets her homework completed. She admits that she is not really happy back at Johnson, where she feels she

The (Com)passionate Communicator

161

has less freedom. She says she hopes next year to go to St. Andrew’s, an affluent Catholic high school outside the city. She is enjoying her light course load at school (4 instead of a usual 6 courses due to the lateness of her transfer from Catholic High) and especially enjoys biology. She continues to struggle with her math and acknowledges that to accomplish her goal to become a meteorologist she will need math tutoring. When asked about other career choices, Sarah said she considers lawyer work because she likes to help people and she likes to argue:

180

185

Interviewer: So, there’s nothing else besides meteorology that you’ve added to your list of career possibilities? Sarah: I wouldn’t mind being a lawyer. I: Okay. Is there anything in your life that makes you think you might want to do that? Do you know somebody who is a lawyer? S: Umm—I don’t know. It’s just like, you know, it’s a good job. It’s good, like, you know, ‘cause like I like to do things like that. I like to like help people. So, you know, I would be helping my clients out. So, I like to help them. I like to argue, so—that’s about all they do is argue.

For her meteorology interest Sarah would like to attend Penn State “Cause that’s number one for meteorology. That’s like the number one school for that.” She would like to go to MIT but doesn’t feel she could be admitted because “You know, that’s like—you have to be a brainiac to go there.” I ask the students each year to share their H-Team memories. Sarah says: Sarah: I remember it. It was okay. It was fine. It was nice. ’Cause like you see the same people, you know. As a matter of fact, I still talk to a lot of people, like Mona and Evon I still talk to those two, so, I still talk to a lot of people. That’s how I know a lot of people from that team.

As with our interviews in the previous years, Sarah’s amount of talk per turn and the intensity of her talk change substantially when she shifts to topics about social injustice, authority, racism, etc. These important passages from the interview offer powerful insight into Sarah’s own struggle with her school/social and home life. She is particularly angry about what she perceives as unfair control of students’ lives simply to keep them off the streets and presumably out of trouble and to reduce the dropout rate. She questions why they can’t have time just to be out there, unattended, with their friends, whose freedoms are being restricted when they are not the bad ones: 190

Sarah: You know, it’s like, what about people they really do need some—people that aren’t bad and, you know, just want to have some

162

195

Voices of Reason time just to go chill with their friends and stuff. They can’t even do that, I mean, we’re already getting out June 26th. I mean, it’s almost July, and we’re gonna have two months off. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Sarah says we don’t have to look to the society at large to see difficult social problems; we have them right in the schools, particularly drugs and their considerable income producing potential, considering that breakdown in families has much to do with it:

200

205

Sarah: Drop-out rates going down because of all these problems, you know, you can make money selling drugs, you know, but you can’t get a job, you know what I’m saying? You can make any—Even if you do get a job, it’s only gonna be like $5.00 an hour. You know what I’m saying? It’s not like it’s gonna be as much money as you make selling drugs. There’s drug dealers in this school and they make miles of money. They’re always coming to school with a lot of money. It’s just like you can make more money doing other things, you know, and they got family problems too, you know. Most likely they got family problems too. It’s just like, you know, that’s probably why they drop out or they don’t care. Interviewer: What happened— S: If your parents don’t care, then they don’t care.

Sarah: 11th Grade—A Saint Andrew’s Catholic High School Interviewer: Alright. So, where does this all lead for you? Do you know? I mean, you’re coming down to your final year and big decisions are being made. What’s your thinking right now about where you’re going after next year? Sarah: I have no clue.

Sarah moved yet again, for a fourth time to a new school, an affluent Catholic school, attending with financial aid from the school. I had no difficulty this time locating her and I found the school administration office very accommodating. Thinking about my previous three interview years with Sarah I walked into this one expecting a smiling, energetic girl ready to fire away with her opinions and enthusiasm about her future as a meteorologist. Instead she was full of self-doubt and appeared depressed. Her response style in this interview was very different from all of her others, with only several turns more than a few sentences. We’ll see why as I illuminate segments of the interview. In fact, I had to ask her why the change:

The (Com)passionate Communicator

210

215

220

163

Interviewer: You seem to be quieter now than you were when you were younger. Sarah: Yeah. I: You were very talkative when I first met you. Are you just quiet because you’re talking to me or are you just kind of a quieter person than you were a couple years ago. S: Yeah, I’m a lot more quiet now. I: Yeah, it seems that way. Is that just ’cause it’s the way you are or are you, you know— S: I think it’s just the way I am. I just changed like, I know I did change a lot from when I was little. But like a lot of things happened to me, so it made me want to change.

When I asked Sarah about her plans after she graduates she says she has no idea (“I have no clue”). I expressed alarm given that she had been laying out her plans for college over the previous three years beginning with talk in eighth grade about attending Howard University. I asked her if she planned to attend college and she hesitantly said yes. She mentioned Penn State again but when I inquired further she talked about her weak grades (“My grades this year haven’t been that great”). I offered that maybe the slip in her grades was due to all the moving around and the adjustment to this new school. She agrees that maybe it is a little of that, but that really it is about not “applying myself.” She said she has been thinking about things other than school, i.e. social life, friends. After she talks about Arizona State as a second option that also eludes her due to her grades, Sarah considers that she’ll probably start off at a community college and then transfer to Penn State. Sarah reports on a conversation with her grandmother about her career options that further added to her confusion and undermined her self-esteem:

225

230

235

Interviewer: Nothing else besides meteorology that you have an interest in? Sarah: A lawyer maybe. I don’t know. Like, I was talking to my grandmother the other day, and they didn’t think that that was a great idea. So, I don’t know. I: Well, why did they say that wasn’t a great idea? S: I don’t know. They said that, like, I’m not smart enough for that. I: They told you that? S: Yeah. They were like, well, you know, you’re not really that smart. So, you should do something you can do like, I don’t know. Meteorology’s kind of hard too ‘cause it has math in it too. I: It does. But who said that you weren’t very smart? S: My grandmother was saying it, you know, like, she didn’t say that I wasn’t smart, but she would like, you know, maybe that’s not a good career—.

164

240

Voices of Reason I: So, you read it that way. I mean, when she was saying it, you interpreted it that way, well, what you’re really saying to my mother is that I’m not smart enough to be a lawyer. S: Well, basically she said that ‘cause she was like, well, you know, you should do something else that you can do. That might not be a great idea. So, you know, I’m thinking like, yeah, that’s probably true.

As further testimony to her self depreciation, Sarah, in response to my question about her grandmother’s daily comments that she’ll become a bum, says basically she doesn’t care, but when I advise that it is up to her what happens, she admits she isn’t going to just give up:

245

Interviewer: Are you worried about that? Sarah: That I’m gonna be a bum? I: Yeah. S: I’m not worried about it. If I’m a bum, I am a bum, you know. I mean—You know if I become one then that’s what I become. But—. I: Well, you have control of that. S: Yeah, I know. I know. But I’m gonna definitely work, you know, no matter what. I’m not gonna be like—you know.

We learn that Sarah continues to work at Taco Bell from the previous year but now 20 hours per week instead of 35. She says she’ll be 18 in November and plans to use the money to move into an apartment. She says this has become necessary because she doesn’t get along with her mother (“I’m only leaving because my mom, you know, me and my mom always have problems and stuff like that so I’m just gonna leave when I turn 18.”) Sarah’s “world problems” talk is significantly less than in previous years, touching only briefly on usual topics as homelessness, drugs, and violence. She notes that there isn’t much to be concerned with in her school: 250

255

Interviewer: So, in this school here, in this environment, do they have any problems with violence or drugs or have the usual kinds of problems that they have out in the world? Sarah: We have it here, I mean, but it’s like, well, most of the people here are like rich. They don’t have that much—If they have problems, it’s easier for them to cover it up. I: Okay. So, there’s affluent people in this school mostly? S: Yeah.

As the interview came to a close we talked about the H-Team experience, which Sarah now remembers fondly, she seems to feel she could use that kind of support now.

The (Com)passionate Communicator

165

In the closing moments of the interview when I always asked the students if they had questions for me, I was struck by Sarah’s questions about me and my students (“How are you, Steve?”) and her invitation to return next year and she’ll be ready to answer any of my questions (“That’s cool. Come visit me. I’ll tell you anything you ask”).

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: SARAH “Sarah has completely abandoned her long-held goal of becoming a meteorologist, and now plans to attend Mercy College in Boston for an Associate in Science for work as a dietary technician and hopes that will be sufficient to not require further schooling . . . . When I commented that she has been doing a lot of thinking this year, Sarah replied, “Yeah, I want to make a future for myself.”

Finding Sarah again this year required some investigative work. When I called Saint Andrew’s Catholic high, where she attended last year, they told me she no longer attended the school and they did not know to where she transferred. I asked around and learned that she returned to Johnson Memorial High School. Sarah was pleasant but lacked that energy and enthusiasm that I still remembered from our interviews in the early years. My sense was that she has resigned herself to accepting compromises about her educational and vocational future. But I was pleased to see that she managed to pull together enough this year, after a very rocky start, to graduate with her class and to complete college enrollment activities. Sarah left Catholic High to save her education, which was in serious jeopardy when she failed Algebra and Chemistry and then failed them again in summer school. Johnson High was willing to accept her as a senior student whereas Catholic high would have had her repeat eleventh grade. She said she was disappointed that she would not be graduating from Catholic High. Nonetheless, later in our interview, when asked her how she would rate her educational experience, Sarah talked very positively about the Brayton Public Schools, saying that she would give it a “10” rating (“Brayton public schools are excellent”). She felt that her teachers were excellent. Sarah has completely abandoned her long-held goal of becoming a meteorologist, and now plans to attend Mercy College in Boston for an Associate in Science for work as a dietary technician and hopes that will be sufficient to not require further schooling. She was pleased that I had heard of the school, an independent, Roman Catholic community college that specializes in health care training (89% of the students are women, 22 percent African American). I asked her how she decided on that vocational direction and she simply replied, “I needed to do something, so I decided I could do that.” She plans to move to Arizona after

166

Voices of Reason

she completes her schooling because she hates the cold New England weather. She said, “I want to go someplace where I don’t know anybody so I can meet all new people, to have a new life.” When I commented that she has been doing a lot of thinking this year, Sarah replied, “Yeah, I want to make a future for myself.”

POWERFUL QUOTES Sarah

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

8th Grade

The (Com)passionate Communicator

Meterologist

Unjust Ethnic Grouping

Need to Help Others

Oh, yeah. Because they want to hide—the problem. See, because when they go telling you, oh, this is a wonderful school. This is a wonderful school. Yeah, because most of the white people— you know, I’m not trying to be racist, but they put all the white people together and the white people are all calmer and they have more—their parents teach them more morals and everything. Well, you know—I mean, even the Hispanic people, they have morals and they’re taught them, but they don’t get them enforced because when they come to the school—you know, then—you know, they’re all bad. You know? They don’t learn. (So, the HTeam takes care of that problem?) Yeah, definitely. (You guys all come together from all different backgrounds?) Definitely. (And it’s great, because then you all help each other?) Yeah. (You break out of that—that label?) Yeah, definitely. You know? I mean, I don’t—I’m saying you could help people, but if you don’t—I mean, if you don’t help yourself, you know, you can’t help other people. You know? You’re just putting—you’re just bringing yourself down more.

Sarah

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

The (Com)passionate Communicator

Meterologist

Racial Issue

Well, mainly it’s a black issue, like, on the streets. I mean, it is a black issue on the streets, but—see, white people don’t think about it until it comes into their neighborhood. When it comes into their neighborhood, oh, it’s bad, it’s wrong. They want to try

The (Com)passionate Communicator

Slavery

Depression

167

and help somebody. But when it’s all—when the black people are killing each other, they—they don’t care. They’re like, I don’t live there, I don’t care what they do, you know? But when—when it starts invading their privacy, invading their property, oh, they get mad. You know, it’s like—It’s like, why didn’t you care about it before, you know? And I don’t understand it. It’s just—I think it—I think a lot of that has to do with the government, too, because there’s not enough jobs out there, you know, especially for black people. And now they want to take away affirmative action. That’s going to make it—if they do—if they do that, that’s going to make it even worse. There will really not be any black people left, because if they take away affirmative—affirmative action, they’re just going to go crazy and they’re going to start— (So, what you’re saying is, it’s not—it’s not the color, it’s the fact that—that black people were enslaved at one point?) Yeah. (And so there needs to be a correction made?) Yeah. (If it had been black people living here, and white people—) Yeah.(—were brought in as slaves, then you’d be doing the same)—yeah, it would be the same way, of course. Because if—you know, they—the black people would treat the white people bad and the white people would be mad and you know—of course. It would be just the same way. It’s just that the slaves came over here. But if they didn’t want all this to happen—if they didn’t want this, they should have never brought us over here in the first place. I know a lot of people. I think like this—I think like this generation—like the generation before us, the ones that are like, twenty-four, twenty-five, this— that generation and this generation, I think a lot of us are depressed. I think it’s like—you know, because the world is the way the world is today, it’s just—it’s depressing. I know people—I know so many crazy people that are like, twenty-four, twenty-five years old. It’s crazy. I don’t—I don’t even know—(So, why—Why are they depressed? Because they look at the world and—) Yeah, they look at the—they have nothing. I mean, they don’t—They can’t do anything. They have no job skills. They have no education. They have this, they have that. They—They don’t have nothing. They don’t have—they have nothing. They have no education. You know, I know a lady, she has no

168

Voices of Reason education. She has three kids. She has no house. Her mother sent her out to live in a homeless shelter. Her baby had ringworms on her when she came to our house, you know, she had it. That’s crazy. You know what I’m saying? It’s—it’s just like, crazy. The girl, she sits up in our house all—she sits up in her mother’s house all day long and she just—she just sits there. She goes out and gets— My father lifted up her jacket, the crack pipe fell out…Yeah, she’s just given up, because she doesn’t even try, you know, like, I should go back to school and—you know, do this and do that...She should—she should—well, if she—If she really wants to help herself, the first thing she should do is—you know, there’s programs where she can ask her social worker how can she—how can she go about going to school—so she can further her education and then get a job....You know, it’s going to take awhile, but she should still do it. It might take her three years, but at least I won’t sit up there and dog her and say, oh, she’s not doing anything for herself. She’s got three kids by three different guys—.

Sarah

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

10th Grade

Getting The Job Done/ The (Com)passionate Communicator

Meterologist/Lawyer

Why Rules?

With all these new rules that the public schools are giving and everything, you can’t sneeze the wrong way. You know what I’m saying? They’re not gonna let you open up the window and breathe. I swear, come September, they’re gonna tell us we can’t open up the windows. I mean, they’re telling us, all these rules they give us—rules to do this, rules to do that. It’s all rules. It’s just—(And do you know why the rules are necessary? What’s happening that requires the rules now?) Well, you know, they say they want to—there’s too high of a drop-out rate. We wanna keep kids in school. We have to do this. You know, it’s like, if you don’t want to stay in school, don’t come. You know what I’m saying? If you don’t want to stay in school, don’t, you know. And then they’re saying, you know, like now, they’re doing all these things, like, in the final exam, they’re gonna make us stay afterwards for

The (Com)passionate Communicator

169

our classes in the final exams. That’s ridiculous just so we can stay in school so we don’t have to go on the streets. If people want to be on the streets and make trouble for themselves, then they’ll just be arrested and they’ll be arrested and they’ll be in jail for the rest of their lives, but don’t worry about—you know what I’m saying? And they’re sitting up there worrying about these people. You know, it’s like, what about people they really do need some—people that aren’t bad and, you know, just want to have some time just to go chill with their friends and stuff. They can’t even do that, I mean, we’re already getting out June 26th. I mean, it’s almost July, and we’re gonna have two months off. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous. Sarah

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

Getting The Job Done

Meterology/Lawyer?

Friends Talk about Goals

(Are your friends talking about where they’re going? Do you guys talk about what you’re going to do after you graduate?) Most of my friends are gonna, Wow, we need like, I don’t know, they’re not gonna go. don’t think that they—Well, I’m not trying to say, I’m dreaming, you know. My friends, they’re still my friends and everything, but I don’t know. Some of them say they’re gonna go to the Army. Some of them say they’re gonna do this or, you know, I re really gonna do it all, you know. I don’t know. But I encourage them. They should do it, you know, but I don’t know.or, you know, I don’t think that they’re really gonna do it all, you know. I don’t know. But I encourage them. They should do it, you know, but I don’t know.

Sarah

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

Getting The Job Done

Dietician

Want A New Life Far Away

I want to go to LA. Even though LA is not my type of place. Like I wouldn’t dream of going there. I can only go do that. I can always just get in my car and go to LA, you know. So I don’t actually want to live in LA. I just go to visit and everything and that would be fun. But I wouldn’t want to live there…I want to go someplace where I’m not gonna know

170

Voices of Reason anybody so I can just like meet all the people. (Why is that? Is it some kind of bad experience for you or you just want to have a new life?) Yeah. I just want to have a new life. I mean, everything’s okay now, but I want to have like just a whole new life.

9 Two Voices

TwoVoices

DEFINING “TWO VOICES” Of the interview styles explicated in these chapters, this is among the more colorful in terms of the delivery of the interviewee’s responses. I call it “Two Voices” because this interview style really illuminates that disparity of two communication styles coming together in an attempt to create a sensible dialogue, i.e. the interviewer ’s white, middle class approach to questions and comments and the interviewee’s black discourse style. This is a very different discourse style where early interpretation can lead one to conclude that the interviewee’s talk is fragmented and sloppy. But a closer examination of the powerful ways that the interviewee responds reaches a contrary conclusion; the talk is often both a particular answer to the interviewer ’s questions and a richer response through relevant anecdotes. In spite of the ill fit (at least initially) of the two in the interview, it makes for a lively, interesting, pleasant and certainly an illuminating time. The interview gets completed quite adequately—in that way it is much like the “Getting the Job Done” interview styles, but, in addition to the characteristics noted earlier, the “Two Voices” talk style is starkly different with regards to eye contact, humor and level of enjoyment derived from it.

EVON: GRADES 8–11 Evon’s interviews were among the most colorful and unpredictable (and sometimes confusing), with a discourse style that she probably uses in most settings. Many of her comments were “off the beaten path.”

172

Voices of Reason

She displayed a relaxed sense of humor, often smiling, laughing—making it enjoyable to interview her. Besides Sarah’s early interviews, Evon was the most animated, with lots of display of emotions. Her family situation is as interesting as Evon herself. When we first met she told me that she was originally from Boston and living with her mother and her brother. She spoke about a half-brother and two halfsisters as well. She was never explicit about her mother’s situation; Evon describes her as not coming home at times, or coming home late at night, doing what was necessary to bring food home. Later we will see that her grandmother intervenes and sends her to Florida when Evon’s mother’s behavior becomes problematic. Through all of this, her fine year at Johnson, her year in Florida—she speaks descriptively about that very different world—and her pleasure at returning to Brayton (though nearly heartbroken not to be back with her friends at Johnson). She talks about the violence she has seen, about the racism and about her residence, an apartment in an undesirable neighborhood where she describes a “gang” house with kids walking around with ski masks. And through all of this she displays both a sense of humor (at appropriate times) and a passionate concern for world problems such as hunger, teen pregnancy, homelessness, drugs, and violence. After listening to her you walk away with the impression that she is sincere in her talk, honest with herself, and really trying to make sense of her life and her goals. Her H-Team experience was positive, powerful, and long-lasting. She talked about it as a family, with closeness so intimate that it frightened her and leaves her wondering if she could put herself in that setting again. Her vocational goals are ever changing but continue to relate to the medical field (physician, biochemist, lab technician, microbiology). Evon: 8th Grade—Jasper Middle School Interviewer: Okay. Now, think about ten years from now. . . . What are your dreams, your hopes? Evon: To be a doctor.

Evon is originally from Boston. She lives with a younger brother and her mother and has a half-brother and two half-sisters living elsewhere. She describes herself as nice, friendly, likes to joke around; but cautions that she takes her school work seriously and that others should do the same. She enjoys various kinds of music, including rap and R & B, and likes to listen to slow songs “When I’m sad.” The H-Team experience for Evon has been generally positive. She saw lots of involvement from the teachers. But she did complain about what she perceived as longer class periods. Although they weren’t, there was

Two Voices

173

the linkage between subjects and teachers sharing their subjects with each other. She feels that science was the hardest for her, and math initially was but has since improved. Her favorite subject is history and I ask her if that goes by quickly and she replied “Yeah.” She found English not boring because “she teaches you in a fun way.” Evon has decided to go to Johnson next year for the start of her high school years. She tracks herself college and I asked her if she thinks she’ll go to college. She said she’s not sure but that she wants to go, adding that she never gets Ds and Fs. “I always get A, B, or C.” I ask her again if she wants to go to college, trying to get a sense of her own commitment to that goal. In addition to a statement about her academic performance, she says, “If I get the money.” We go back and forth with this. I again say, then it’s possible she won’t go, but she counters that her grandmother will pay, but probably only for a two-year program, and she wants a bachelor ’s degree. I sum it up: Interviewer: So, the money is the thing you’re worried about? You’re not worried about the grades. You get good enough grades to go to college. You’re worried about the money?

I ask Evon to imagine her life ten years from now, at age 24. She says she wants to be a doctor or a veterinarian because “I like animals and I always want to help them or something.” Her doctor interest has more to do with making lots of money. “Is money important?” I ask her. She replies, “Not really, but my grandmother wants me to do something in the medical field.” I ask her what she wants to do, if there is anything else. She introduces a second source of influence, a teacher who suggests that she be an architect “because he says I do real well at drawing things.” I offer a recap again: Interviewer: Okay. All right. So, there’s something that you do well, but 5 you don’t have any interest in. And then the medical one is probably because of the money. The veterinarian’s the one that you think about. What do you think you have to do to become a veterinarian?

Evon does know that veterinarian training is very protracted and offers that this could be a problem for her as well, again, as the cost (“Too old to be anything, plus afford it”). Regarding world problems, Evon quickly listed, “Homeless, the hungry, high school drop-outs, everything.” And she is willing to offer some solutions or at least some intervention: Interviewer: What are some of the problems you think we have, all of us together in this country?

174 10

15

20

25

30

Voices of Reason Evon: Homeless, the hungry, drugs, high school drop-outs, everything. I: What do you think we can do about solving these problems? What about the high school drop-outs. Let’s start with that one. How do you think we can—? E: Probably make a special school so they can go back to high school. I: Okay. E: And for the homeless people, maybe get them a job, get them started on apartments, and once they have enough money so they can own their housing and all that. I: Sounds good. What about drugs? E: That will never—. I: Why not? E: Because there’s too many people coming in here from other countries bringing all that stuff up here. They’re selling it on the streets. I: So you don’t feel very positive about solving that problem; but you think we can probably solve the problems with drop-outs and homeless people. Are there other problems that we have that we need to work on, that you can think of? E: We have we go and help other countries out, but not help our own out. I: That bothers you? E: Yeah.

Evon: 9th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School Interviewer: Well, some of the things that you hope to do later on for work. What is your vocational goal? Evon: Oh. Well, I want to—well, I started looking and I wanted to be like, a biochemist or biomedical. And I want to work with diseases and all that.

Evon says that her family situation is the same but that may change because her mother is thinking about having her brother sent to live with his father because “he’s getting a little too bad and I guess, he’s like, a father figure.” She says her after school activities still include, first, her homework, and then lots of television because her friend has moved away. She’s one of only a few students that I asked to describe themselves a second time, after having put that question to all of them during the first-year interviews: Evon: Well, I’m very independent and I like to do stuff on my own and do it like, firsthand. And I’m nice and I’m friendly. I’m easy to get—to get to know. I’m very open, only to some people and I guess that’s it.

Evon compares the H-Team program last year to her current tracked program (college) and says that the former could accommodate those having trouble by teaching one another, while the latter “Are here for

Two Voices

175

themselves.” I like the way she describes the unique H-Team arrangement: 35

40

Evon: On the H-Team you got to get mixed with different kinds of people, because you get to get mixed with the smart ones, the sort of smart, and the not so smart. And—and when we were with the H-Team, you’d be in one group and you could just teach one another what you know in. And if somebody’s having trouble with something, you just teach them how to do it. That’s it.

Evon’s favorite subject is an elective, graphic arts. Algebra I was a problem until she changed to a smaller class. Neither of these relate closely to her current vocational goal, which has changed from last year’s physician/veterinarian choice. She now says she would like to “Find cures for diseases” and so is considering something in the area of biomedical or biochemistry. She does remember what she said last year, “But I realize those take a long time just to achieve.” She reflects further: “Yeah. All them years and then and what if you don’t even like it? You spend like, half your life, just learning about that.” She thinks she knows for sure that she wants to do something in the medical field but admits that she is not sure what her options are. I’m not sure yet how much of this is her own interest or her grandmother’s (“Who is a nurse and wants me to do something in the medical field”). I ask her this and she replies that she likes helping people. I ask her to imagine where she’ll be at age 25: Evon: Probably still in school just—just wondering what I’m going to do with my life and how am I going to make enough money to support myself. I really don’t know until it happens

Evon’s talk really comes alive when I ask her about “world problems”. She immediately goes to the immigration controversy, particularly the Haitian problem and talks about “that guy” President Clinton: 45

50

Evon: I think now—I think now (they’re going to throw out)—What’s that guy? Clinton. Because now he’s—Now I was with—Hearing on the news—watching the news—He—The refugees from Haiti, they come over here and the stay in the refugee camp and he only allows like—he brung only twenty-two—twenty-three into the United States and—he’d be—and then he leaves back—he brings back a hundred back into—a hundred students back into the country without their parents and that’s kind of sad.

Evon sees the difficult choices and consequences entailed by this problem, saying if we allow the immigrants in then the country of Haiti

176

Voices of Reason

will cease to exist (obviously not likely) and we may have overcrowding in our country. She is able to see the complexities of this issue. Next we share in a discussion about problems of today’s youths, as Evon sees them. The discussion opens with my question about school or neighborhood problems. She hears from her television that there is only one youth center and suggests that to have more would help to reduce the school dropout rate by curtailing the drug use (“Half of them use drugs”). She sees these also as information centers where they could “Get jobs and get them motivated.” She offers supporting evidence for her theory by talking about a kid that got suspended:

55

60

65

70

Interviewer: And you think that youth centers would help to help them? Evon: Yeah. It would help them get jobs and get them motivated. I: Yeah? So, you think they’re dropping out because they get involved in drugs? E: I think, yeah. Because like this kid I know—and I say no names. I: Uh-huh. E: He—Well, I guess—Oh, he got suspended and—He got suspended and they—they kicked him out of school. They—He got suspended so, he went home and now he hasn’t come back since. I: Oh. So, he decided not to come back? E: No. He— I: Okay. E: I guess not. I: How long has he been out? E: He’s been out for like—he got suspended the ninth of this month. I: Oh, yeah. E: And he been out since. And this other kid I know, some teacher did something to him, so he just didn’t—he didn’t decide to come to school. And that was way back in December—in January and all that. I’m like, you’re stupid. I: So, when they get—they get angry and they don’t want to come back?

Violence and racism are also concerns to Evon (“Too many people are getting shot, and racism is still going on today”). When she is confronted with it personally, Evon tries to turn away but says she never escapes it. Sometimes she gets pulled into racist talk and finds herself angrier as a result:

75

Interviewer: So, what do you do when—when you see it, when you experience it? Evon: I just try to turn the other way, try to walk away. You don’t want to yell something racism back. Well, some people do, but— I: But you don’t? E: Sometimes I do when I get real mad, but—

Two Voices 80

85

177

I: What happens when you do that? Do you feel better or you just— E: It just makes me even madder, because that’s kind of childish. They be calling you nigger this and nigger that. Look at that nigger over there. And it’s okay if—I don’t know. (Inaudible) okay if your own race calls you that, but I think it’s okay. It doesn’t—I don’t even think about it, but somebody of another race calls you that, I’d be like, All right, a throw-down, or something. Because that ain’t right. You wouldn’t like me calling you something else like that.

As we near the end of the interview Evon reflects on her fond memories of the H-Team and reveals her difficulty in separating from the group, enough so that she wonders if it were offered at the high school if she would participate. I didn’t learn until the last moments of our interview why she selected Johnson Memorial and why now she wants to go somewhere else but is undecided (“I went here because I thought it was—because they said it’s the best school in Brayton, and—and if you go here you learn all this stuff. And most of the people who graduate (do) good and all that”). She finds most of that to be true but she concludes that she doesn’t like the school. In closing, I was surprised for Evon to say yes to my standard closing question, “Any questions for me?” And then asked me to talk about how long I’ve been in college. And then, considering it “fair game,” I guess, she asked me, “What do you think the problems of today are?”

90

Evon: What do you think the problems of today are? Interviewer: The what? E: Problems of—today are? I: Yeah. The problems you have? What—You’re asking me what I think the problems are? Oh, I don’t—I don’t, I don’t know—I agree with you. I think that the things you were talking about, the violence and the drugs and the drop-outs, I think are problems.

Evon: 10th Grade—Johnson Memorial High School Interviewer: So, how do you think that’s all going to—Where do you think that would all take you? What kind of interests do you have now that you think would become work later on for you? A career? Evon: For work I wanted—My career was supposed to be a lab technician but—I don’t know.

Evon’s home situation is not satisfactory. “It’s like, everybody’s distant from each other. Like, everybody went on their separate ways at my house.” She goes on to talk about her mom coming home late or not coming home at all. And this includes her brother. I’m immediately

178

Voices of Reason

mulling what could be the reasons for her mother ’s absences, and even more so when Evon says she doesn’t know, only that her mother tells her that since there is no income “she tries to get food and all that stuff so we can eat and have money.” And lateness to school in the morning is resulting in poor performance in English and fewer credits to graduate, although she’ll probably pass it. She says her other classes are fine, with biology continuing to be one of her most enjoyable subjects. Connected to that is her tentative interest in work as a lab technician, though about that she isn’t too sure. She talks about the need to be thinking about her career interests but concedes that it is difficult (“There’s so many things I’m good at but what’s gonna keep me happy”). She at least keeps the lab technician as one consideration. She remembers her earlier interest in becoming a doctor and why she has abandoned it: 95

100

105

Interviewer: Anything else? Give me an idea of what kinds of things you’ve been thinking about. Evon: Like—a long time ago—like—okay the 6th grade. It was—Then it was to a doctor and I know those—you know—those professions take a long time to achieve. A lot of years and a lot of hard work. I: They do. Yes. E: And I just don’t know. A nurse. That’s—It’s not such more the time but you take the four years—you have to go a separate college—that too—and get, you know, your papers. I just don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not—I’m sure what I want to do but I’m not really sure what I want to do. I could do so many things.

In passing Evon says she’ll take a television course at school because, “I like working with the camera.” Another year further removed from the H-Team experience, Evon still has memories. In fact she admits that she has dreams about it and “I have nightmares,” referring to the significant difference between the learning and setting of that H-Team and what she experiences now at Johnson. Evon’s world problems list now includes alcohol abuse among the usual drugs, violence and hate, and more about competition. She talks about what she sees as this absurd tolerance for letting Johnson kids get together on weekend nights to drink (“They’re like—yo—you know where the keg’s at tonight?). And then there’s the interesting distinction Evon makes between violence and hate, explaining that the school doesn’t have much violence, i.e. fights, but there is that anger, that hate that permeates the school environment, much stemming from competition: Interviewer: So besides the drugs and alcohol, what other problems do you see in the school and out of school?

Two Voices

110

115

120

179

Evon: Violence. Not in school. Johnson. There haven’t been a lot of fights but you know that there’s a lot of hate. I: What do you mean by that? E: I mean a lot of hate with the students and like, if there’s rumors going around about somebody, and another person hears it, adds a little onto that, and spreads it around again. That could start a fight. Just talking about it probably could, you know, start a fight right there. If they said, Did you hear what so-and-so said about you? Why are you going to do and like that. I: Well, the hate that you’re talking about is because somebody said something bad about somebody and they get angry. What are usually the kinds of things that people are fighting about up here? E: Some are, you know, boys, drugs, you know, ‘cause like a lot of teenagers are in that situation that evolves around sex and all that, like, I could get that girl or I could get that boy. I: So they compete with each other? E: Yeah. They compete to see who could get, you know, whatever.

Evon: 11th Grade—Urban High School, Florida Interviewer: Yeah, you did say that last year. Those were the, the, things you said. Now what are your thoughts now at the end of eleventh grade? Evon: At the end of eleventh grade? In English we did this paper on career goals. You get all this information about that and I kind of liked that. My career pick was microbiology.

My efforts to keep all ten of the students in this research project together through at least the twelfth grade nearly failed; I arranged to interview Evon and two others at Johnson High School, where she had been the two previous years. I did not learn until I came to interview her that she was no long there. After considerable effort, I located her at a high school in Florida. The principal and later the guidance counselor were very reluctant to talk to me on the telephone. I sent the usual letters of introduction and information noting that Evon has been with this project for some time but all they would give me was their word that they would pass on my message to Evon’s family that I called. They would not inform Evon directly that I called. I had at least hoped to learn from her if she was staying in Florida. If so, we could do a telephone interview or if she was planning to return to Brayton at any point during the summer I could meet with there. But, in spite of numerous follow-up calls I didn’t hear from the school. Then the school year came to a close in May. I waited until September and again contacted them, explaining the urgency of keeping this project going with 100% participation. Finally I was told that she was no longer there but would not tell me where she transferred. I called Johnson and

180

Voices of Reason

learned that she was not there and was advised to try Marion High. And so, I came to see Evon at Marion High in October of her senior year. I told her I wanted to relate our talk, as much as she could, to her 11th grade experience. Our opening talk naturally begins with why Evon spent an academic year in Florida. I learn that her mother was having some problems and her grandmother felt she should be taken out of that situation. (“She was like on this little binge thing . . . .”). She returns to Brayton chiefly because the Florida high school told her they would keep her back a year, in other words, repeat eleventh grade and so by coming to Marion High, where apparently the credit requirements are different, she can graduate on time. Our talk about the courses she took in Florida reveals that Evon likes English, math and science and finds health somewhat difficult. From there I ask her what her vocational considerations are, still mentioning the doctor-interest of some time ago: 125

130

135

Interviewer: So what’s going to happen? What are you going to do for your vocational goal? What have you said in the past? Do you remember? Evon: I said I wanted to be a doctor. I: Uh-hum, yeah. E: And then I wasn’t too sure about that because to become a doctor costs money and all those hour I: Yeah, you did say that last year. Those were the, the, things you said. Now what are your thoughts now at the end of eleventh grade? E: At the end of eleventh grade? In English we did this paper on career goals. You get all this information about that and I kind of liked that. My career pick was microbiology. I: Okay.

But her grandmother is still there offering guidance, suggesting then that the microbiology doesn’t seem to offer much of a job future. Evon countered by saying that she has researched it and found you could work in a medical setting employing that knowledge for such work as a medical assistant (“You take people’s blood count and stuff like that.”) Next, I suggest, given that she wants to do something in microbiology now that she has satisfied herself that a work future does exist, she’ll have to look at college choices. Evon later suggests that she doesn’t want to completely give up on the doctor option (maybe an obstetrician or a pediatrician) but now, in addition to the training commitment she spoke about these past two years, she says it will depend on how well she does on her SAT’s. She says she has taken her PSAT and “I don’t think I did too good on that.” When I ask her about her college considerations, Evon brings up the financial consideration.

Two Voices

140

145

181

Interviewer: What colleges do you want to apply to? Evon: You see that’s where I don’t know what I’m going to do ’cause I might just go to a two-year school— I: Okay. E: —and transfer over so I won’t be having so much tuition. I: Okay. That’s true, that’s true. So, you’re thinking about going to a two-year college and be in this area. E: And transfer over. I don’t know if I want to go to Howard University and go all the way down there. I don’t know if I would transfer all the way down there.

Evon works in the stock area of a local department store about 20 hours per week. She saves her money to help her mom and for “little things like the yearbook and the prom and all that stuff.”

SYNOPSIS OF 12TH GRADE INTERVIEW: EVON “She told me that she won’t be walking down the aisle at this year ’s graduation, as she described it, because she failed English IV. But she is confident that she will successfully complete it in summer school. In fact she has already made plans for college.”

Evon came into the interview with that perpetual smile that has been an obvious feature all of these interview years. She has a speech impediment and speaks in a black dialect much more so than Sarah who exhibits some and Mona whose speech is essentially absent of it. She returned to Massachusetts this year following a one-year stay in Florida, precipitated by problems with her mother. She had hoped to return to Johnson High School where she had been in her sophomore year but that didn’t work out. She told me that she won’t be walking down the aisle at this year ’s graduation, as she described it, because she failed English IV. But she is confident that she will successfully complete it in summer school. In fact she has already made plans for college. She expects to start with a two-year program at Brayton community college, and then transfer to Rutgers University in New Jersey for study in microbiology. I asked her how she came to select Rutgers and she explained that she had seen television advertisements as well as a CD-ROM presentation and liked what she saw. I asked her also about her microbiology selection and she stated that sees herself working as a clinical lab technician or a medical lab technician. When I suggested that naturally she would have to move to New Jersey to attend Rutgers, Evon, with that wide grin and chuckle, said, “Yeah, that’s a big step.” We talked again about comments a teacher had made some years ago about her art ability and how that may translate into a career, but Evon

182

Voices of Reason

plainly stated “I can’t see myself doing it,” referring to something like graphic arts. She has abandoned her goal of veterinary medicine because, “It’s a lot of time, money and effort.” When I asked Evon to rate the success of her school experience over these past 12 years, she gave it a 7.0.

POWERFUL QUOTES Evon

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

9th Grade

Two Voices

Biochemist or Biomedical

Better Programs For Youths

The youth. They need to get better programs, because I heard on channel three, they only have like one—one—one youth center. And the kid was saying, he—there should be a youth center in every neighborhood, not just one downtown…Well, as I’ve been noticing, a lot of the kids are dropping out now. Too many are dropping out. (Why?) I don’t know. Like, half of them sell drugs. Half of them use drugs. (The youth centers) would help them get jobs and get them motivated.

Evon

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

11th Grade

Two Voices

Medical Assistant

Social Problems

World problems. Too much hunger in the world. Too much violence. There’s too much violence right now. (Where do you see the violence?) I see the violence all the time . . . If I’m walking the street. Like two weeks ago someone got shot on ? Street. And then they go back and shoot again. Conflict between two groups…And I knew some of the kids there and the kid who like got put in the hospital.

Evon

Talk Style

Vocational Goal

12th Grade

Two Voices

Microbiologist

Goal

First I wanted to be a veterinarian…and that’s like 9 years—9,14 years. Well, I could but that’s a lot of time and money and effort. And I wanted to be a doctor. That’s a lot of money. And then like last year I was thinking about being like delivering

Two Voices

183

babies, but you have to specialize in that too. (So now where are you at?) A microbiologist…I want to do like work with diseases, but what I’ve seen is clinical lab technician would be—all they do is analyzing and stuff like that. You work with diseases too but not that much. And mostly medical lab technician is the same thing. About Being (So what’s your feeling about the five years since Interviewed Five Years we’ve met? Did you enjoy meeting with me?) I enjoy—I mean I didn’t figure it was gonna go that long…’Cause I was like, why, out of all them people [classmates] chose me, and then if I’m not doing—write more…I always wondered. I’m like sitting in this little room talking. That’s crazy. It was kind of strange. And when I was in Florida, I was like, hmm, a lot of little friendship coming down here, seeing me…And it seemed like all the people forgot about me. I’m like, okay. The One-Year Florida I had a hard time getting—living somewhere else School Experience starting to go to that school (Florida) ‘cause the other school didn’t want me going ‘cause it was I don’t know dirty and had all these country people— country black people.

III

Discourse Analysis and Conclusion

10 Seeing Beyond the Talk

Seeing Beyond the Talk

RESEARCH DESIGN: SUBJECTS, SITES, AND DATA COLLECTION METHODS In the preceding chapters the reader could get a sense of which students may be the better decision makers; this chapter presents a systematic way of examining how the students measured up with respect to their capacity to make informed decisions about their futures. Discourse analytic tools are offered as a way to get a handle on who are the more grounded students and what features of our co-constructed talk are present in such talk. The reader, who may wish to conduct his/her own qualitative research, will learn much about the need to develop strategy beforehand. That does not mean that the research questions will be fully developed at the start of research but there should be an issue, a dilemma they wish to explore and there ought to be at least some generalized method to the approach. An early and fundamental aspect of doing discourse analysis is coding the data, that is, developing categories or themes to which the talk can be assigned. In the case of this study, we ask: Where is the evidence for who are the more grounded students or which are the more “successful” interviews? The reader has just finished reading the seven previous chapters and can perhaps say, with some degree of confidence, which students seem to be more grounded and which are the more ‘successful’ interviews. But to what degree of certainty are they making their assessments and what features of the talk are they attending to when they make their assessments? This chapter takes the reader through very specific steps to answer those questions and in so doing, it demonstrates how they may

188

Voices of Reason

consider designing their own research. I offer a flowchart outlining the phases and steps that my analysis of my co-constructed talk with the ten students took to answer the questions about groundedness and interview success, entitled D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. (see Figure 10.9 at the end of this chapter). Each of the letters tell the steps in the discourse analysis: Develop the project; Elect the subjects; Code the transcripts; Isolate “future” talk segments; Select educational and vocational goals; Identify grounded references to goals; Obtain objective measures; Numerate rank order resulting in G rating; Summarize, interpret and conclude. The flowchart will help the reader to see the totality of the process as well as a way to follow my systematic analysis of five years of interviews, and finally, as a way to focus on particular aspects of the process they may be interested in examining more closely. Subjects From the initial pool of 82 eighth-grade students from the H-Team, fourteen were selected to participate in interviews. Selections were made by their English teacher (who knew them well), with the goal of offering a representative sample of the larger group, with regards to gender, academic track, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. In part as a result of the selection process, the H-Team participants were already representative of the larger urban school population with respect to socioeconomic status, academic ability, ethnicity and gender. This provided a unique opportunity to obtain a representative sample not only for the H-Team but the entire urban school community. After I completed the initial set of interviews with the fourteen selected students in their eighth grade, I reduced the number of participants to ten on the basis of gender, ethnicity and considered academic track and a best guess about their socioeconomic status based on what they said about their home situation (type of work parents do, neighborhood setting) and stayed with that group through four additional years of interviews. These students were told from the start and again each subsequent year the reason for their participation in this study and the voluntary nature of their involvement. All of the students completed five years of interviews except one who completed four years, met with me briefly during our fifth year, scheduled an interview time, but finally did not show up for the interview. 1 Had they been in a regular tracked program, the H-Team students would have been tracked as follows: 3 in standard, 4 in college and 3 in honors. That later shifted, when actual tracking resumed in high school, to 1 as standard, 6 in the college track and 3 remaining at the honors level, and stayed that way until they graduated from high school.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

189

A summary of the track level, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender and school setting for the ten students, is provided in table 10.1. Research Sites For the four years following the first-year interviews four students stayed at their respective schools through graduation, one moved twice, two moved three times, one left briefly and returned and one enrolled in a special program for expectant mothers for the last two years of high school. All of the students graduated from high school, although two did not do so by June of what would have been their senior years. One required several additional hours of “shop” to complete his vocational training requirements; another had to attend summer school because she failed English. Methods I began my study with the development, administration and analysis of a questionnaire to 82 students from the H-Team. Subsequently, durTABLE 10.1 Demographics of the Students Participating in Study Name Mona John Tony Evon Angela

Ethnicity/Gender African-American Female Saudi and Lithuanian Male Anglo Male African-American Female Hispanic Female

Geraldo Hispanic Male Sarah African-American Female Dan Anglo Male Tracy Anglo Female Kelly Anglo Female

SES Middle

Traditional Track Honors

Lower

Honors

Middle

College

Middle

Honors

High School Setting “Challenging” H.S. no changes “Traditional” H.S. left very briefly Vocational Tech. H.S. no changes “Traditional” H.S. moved three times “Traditional” H.S. last two yrs. in expectant-mother’s program “Traditional” H.S. moved twice Parochial moved three times Parochial moved once “Traditional” H.S.

Working-Middle College

Vocational Tech. H.S.

Working-Middle College Working-Middle College Working-Middle Standard

Working-Middle College Working-Middle College

190

Voices of Reason

ing that same period, I began meeting annually with ten students for 30 to 45 minutes, on average, from eighth grade until graduation five years later. Prior to the annual interviews, I contacted the school principals by telephone, letters, and in person to obtain authorization, arrange the interviews and interview sites which varied significantly from school to school and year to year. I also submitted to the parents of the participants consent letters describing the nature of the interviews, and the assurance of confidentiality. Throughout the long study there were many challenges that, at times, threatened to derail completion of the interviews but the problems were always logistic or bureaucratic, and never (with the exception of one student in 12th grade) because the students did not want to participate. On the contrary, in general, many of the students expressed real interest and engagement in the interviews. All interviews were video and audio taped. Written transcripts were made from the audiotapes for later analysis. The videotapes were used both as backup recordings in the event any of the audio tapes were found to be defective, and were also catalogued for possible future use in other sorts of analysis where body language, etc., could be looked at. The videotapes also allowed for a fuller recapturing of the interviews so that later reviews by me, the students or any other interested (authorized) person would be possible. The Interview The interviews were conducted in May or June of each year. The interview structure was semi-formal; I had a general outline of topics I wanted to cover during the course of each interview with each student. The order of the topic introductions was not important although as I interviewed more and more I developed what appears, in retrospect, to be a logical flow in talk, shifting from the opening topic about their home situation to school and then vocational interests. However, I did not feel bound by any particular structure, only that I wanted to cover certain topics each of the five years. The substantive nature of any of the usual topics and relative importance to each child naturally influenced the amount of time/talk spent on each of those topics. If time was a factor, as was the case occasionally, I made a conscious effort to “cover” particular topics, chief among them their talk about their educational and vocational futures since that topic was at the core of my research interest. Early interviews had more emphasis on talk about their H-Team experience because it was both the initial reason for my study and was a topic about which the students had much to say. To each student, individually, I explained the purpose of the study in some detail, and much of it prior to the recording of the interviews. I

Seeing Beyond the Talk

191

told them that I wanted to learn more about their views about their H-Team experience, using the questionnaire results for some guidance and that I also wanted to learn more about their views on how their schooling was helping them to prepare for their future as adults. After the introduction, I asked each student to tell me if there had been any changes in their family situation and then followed with questions about their school experience that year as compared to previous years, particularly as it compared to their H-Team experience. Then I moved into questions about their educational and vocational goals, comparing them to what they had reported to me in the previous interview years. I ended with questions regarding their views about social problems such as school violence, drugs, and problems in the world at large.2 I ordered my questions and general topic shifts to produce what I thought were logical shifts from one topic to another. Included in my list of topics were questions on their views about the kinds of world problems they felt existed both in their school community and the world at large. I felt that their responses could provide a sense about their awareness of the social issues that impact their lives directly and indirectly. And while what they had to say about those sorts of things was not directly relevant to the purpose of this study, I knew then that there would be other projects that might make these data relevant and interesting. As I transcribed and examined my interviews, themes emerged from which I made notes to consult in my subsequent interviews. These emerging themes became the basis for individual coding categories that helped me to begin organizing the growing large amounts of data. This coding ultimately led to my focus on future talk as a strategic site to explore both students’ and interviewer ’s talk as it relates to guidance counseling.

STEPS IN THE ANALYSIS The transcripts of the interviews were entered into a qualitative software program (Nud*ist)3 for coding and preparation for later analysis. The program, in part, functions like the pre–computer era cut-andpaste methods of coding but obviously with much greater ease in indexing and retrieving coded data. As I read and reread the interview transcripts, general categories, or themes, emerged as identified parts of the co-constructed “story,” which primarily related to the general topic areas that I covered in the interviews. As such, I developed six “parent” categories and themes, each with “off-springs” and “siblings” (each of these categories, called nodes, has its own “address” from which to make easy reference and finer analysis inductively). Next I

192

Voices of Reason

coded the transcripts using these categories. This enabled me to pull out sections and combine them into threads for within- and betweengroup contrasts and comparisons and to see the development of and support for choice-making talk and to create an independent node for “future” talk data. This is what Miles and Huberman (1994) refer to as gaining a “holistic” (systemic, encompassing, integrated) overview of the interview, by examining its explicit and implicit rules, its logic and its arrangement. Initially, these themes were nothing more than categories for holding units of text that have apparently some or much relevance to decisionmaking talk (an index system to lay out the data). Thus, with all of the interview data coded into categories I was able to examine interview text in many ways, from all talk about a particular topic to multiple topics that might connect in some way(s) at one or more levels. The six general coding categories and their definitions (found in Appendix 2) include (1) Interviewees, (2) School, (3) Background, (4) World Problems, (5) Role of Interviewer, (6) Future Talk. Future Talk relates to students’ talk about school and vocational choices as well as numerous separate categories for the vocational goals each of the students have stated in each of their five interview years. Although the focus of this book is on the co-constructed future talk (category 6), the exercise of identifying/defining themes for all talk topics in these interviews has been very beneficial in that I came to know these students much more closely than if I only looked at future talk from the outset. It also provides an opportunity later to conduct other types of analyses. Coding Future Talk Segments (Introducing the Notion of Grounded and Ungrounded References to Goals) It was apparent to me from the start of the interviews with these students that they differed quite strikingly from one another with respect to the quality and amount of talk each provided in describing their educational and vocational goals. Some students appeared to be well grounded in their ideas about the future, their options or likely paths. They seemed to be drawing on first hand experience, personal knowledge, or the experience of people they knew well. Others, in contrast, did not seem well grounded at all, basing their ideas on TV programs or options that seemed “fun” or “cool.” They seemed to have a lofty goal, but no real experience or understanding about what it would take to get there. My own counseling practice has taught me that my primary role is helping people clarify their interests, assessing their strengths and weaknesses and then guiding them in appropriate directions. But in large part, counseling is a discursive process. It is funda-

Seeing Beyond the Talk

193

mentally a process of getting people to communicate a rationale for their choices, to help them understand what their choices entail, to help them assess the reasonableness of their rationales, and then to act on them appropriately. For this study, as both researcher and practitioner: 1. I was interested in assessing the conversations in which students demonstrate their reasoning, their decision-making capabilities as they relate to their educational and vocational choices. For this, I needed to develop systematic ways to look at these students’ talk about their futures, at what they say about their goals, and to look for evidence of groundedness in their talk. 2. It was also crucial to ask what role I played in eliciting their talk and whether I was a factor in how grounded their talk was, that is, whether or not the co-constructed talk produced increasingly more grounded talk or whether I worked more productively with some students than with others. 3. Finally, I wanted to see if there was a relationship between what I call the groundedness of the students’ talk and their actual success in school- or career-related decisions made during the study. A better understanding of adolescents’ future talk thus could have important implications for counselors, as listeners, and as interveners in the lives of the adolescents they listen to. Coding was conducted in seven steps.4 They are: Step 1: Identifying Future Talk Segments and Conducting “Intuitive” Analysis. For the first step, in developing an analysis of the groundedness of students’ future talk, I began by identifying all segments of interviews that included talk about their future (whether prompted by me or unprompted). Indicators of future talk were future tense verbs, talk about career (“What I want to be”) or talk that had a forward-looking thrust. (See “Rules for Coding Future Talk” in Appendix 3). The unit of analysis was the stretch of talk, both interviewer and interviewee, that encompassed beginning and ending talk related to the future. Shifts in topic to future-related talk signaled the start of a future talk segment and a topic shift away from a future talk signaled an end to that particular segment of future talk. The segments of future talk totaled 90 for all students in all years. Each future talk segment could be several turns each in length or many turns, but was usually in the range of 15 to 20 turns each. With respect to identifying future talk segments, two independent coders were given five complete interview transcripts and asked to mark segments of future talk as defined above (See Appendix 4, “Coder Instructions”). Between the coders 100% agreement was reached.

194

Voices of Reason

I also developed four categories of inquiry to gauge my impressionistic sense of who were the more grounded students and which were the more “successful” interviews (see D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. flow chart, Figure 10.9) and then rated each future talk segment. Step 2: Coding Educational and Vocational Goals. Within each segment of future talk, I developed the construct of a “goal oriented Reference,” by which I mean those references made by the student to their stated goal(s). It was possible to characterize and code each student with respect to the number and quality of goal-oriented references. Each reference was coded as either grounded or ungrounded. In so doing, each student received a reference score that represented the degree to which their references were grounded or ungrounded with which to compare across students as well as within the same students over time. The reference score was obtained by locating the number of instances in which the student made references to his/her stated goal throughout each future talk segment. For coding step two, coders were asked to identify educational and vocational goals stated by the interviewee in each of the ten future talk segments identified in step one. Agreement between two coders in locating those instances of vocational and educational goals was 100%. At this step, words that connoted particular educational and vocational considerations, goals, choices, etc., were marked: Example 1: “I really want to be a nurse.” Example 2: “I would have to say biology because I want to be an orthopedic surgeon.” Step 3: Coding Grounded and Ungrounded References to Goals. Following identification of the goals, coding of references to those goals was undertaken. As such, a rough analysis of groundedness was conducted, looking across and within students over time as to the instances of grounded (Rg) vs. ungrounded (Rung) references. I coded a grounded reference as student talk that reflected clear evidence of connection between his/her embodied experiences, personal knowledge of people, places or activities, and the stated educational and/or vocational goal. The unit of analysis was the sentence or groups of connected sentences, spoken by the interviewee, which referenced the goals. A goal could have one or more grounded and/or ungrounded references to it and each of those references could either be grounded or ungrounded but no one reference could be both. Coders were asked, using the units of analysis described above, to locate all instances of grounded and ungrounded references to the educational and vocational goals that were identified in the previous step. Agreement between the coders meant

Seeing Beyond the Talk

195

that they each located the same references to the identified goals. A 92 percent agreement rate was achieved, meaning that, given 100 possible references to goals located by coder B, coder A located 92 out of the same 100 references. See appendix 3 for examples of grounded and ungrounded talk. Step 4: Profiling Students: Coding Six Categories of Grounded “Future” Talk References. From all of the transcripts, I developed six mutually exclusive (independent) categories of grounded references, (see appendix 3). This coding scheme allowed for a more subtle analysis of grounded references (referred to as Rg’s). That is, it was possible not only to examine the degree of groundedness in general for each of these students, but to create a profile of the types of Rg’s that made up the arguments for the choices students made. In other words, some students may have relied substantially on what others told them when selecting their goals, while others may have looked more into their own sense of their abilities to guide their choice, or relied on significant experiences. Of course, it was possible for a student to provide references in a variety of categories and not fit neatly into a profile of reference preferences. This would then allow me to see if particular patterns of references emerged (or not) and if student profiles, as to reference preference, related to more or less successful interviews. The Kappa (as one of several available inter-rater reliability tests) was used here because it is applicable to nominal-type data (codes or labels assigned to six different grounded reference types). Coders A and B compared their labeling for each of the six grounded reference types. Using the Kappa formula (see appendix 6 for elaboration) a Kappa Coefficient of .82 was obtained indicating a strong agreement or relatively high data accuracy. Step 5: Ungrounded Reference Categories. References to goals that stand alone, with no stated rationale, differentiate the ungrounded references from grounded references. They are identified by statements about feelings or the desire for certain goals without any rationale attached to them (“I like”). The unit of analysis is the same as defined earlier under step three grounded references. There was a 92% independent coders’ agreement. “I like” Mentality (URl): The student suggests interest in a goal without rationale for it. (“I just want to be. It looks interesting, you know,” or “I think it would be fun”) and may acknowledge the lack of rationale (“I don’t know”). The central characteristic of this type of ungrounded reference is the lack of reference to any kind of personal knowledge or embodied experience. Additional characteristics, as discourse markers, may include,

196

Voices of Reason

“I don’t know” or hedges such as “just” as in “I just want to be,” or fillers such as “you know?”

Step 6: Coding Interviewer Prompts in Future Talk (frequency). Here I wanted to examine my role as co-constructor of these interviews by looking at questions and comments I made just prior to each student’s turn. In particular, the quality and frequency of my prompts or lead-in questions would reasonably be expected to impact the outcome of the students’ talk. It was apparent early on that these students indeed had different ways of speaking with respect to quantity of their references to goals. How I assisted them with their stories through the use of prompts may have played a role in how effectively they told their stories and ultimately how much they referenced their goals and if the references were grounded or ungrounded. An examination of the use of interviewer prompts was considered important enough to be included in my analysis, in both the “intuitive” and “actual” exercises as they are presented in the next section. In this step (6) I recorded the number of prompts I used. In the next step (7) I note the prompt types (open and closed questions) in addition to other characteristics of my talk. Step six was not subjected to inter-coder reliability testing due to its simple exercise of locating where the interview asked questions or otherwise prompted more information from the interviewee. Step 7: Marking Interviewer Discourse Codes (IDC’s) Including Prompt Types. With respect to examining my role as interviewer, I asked questions like, How or in what ways did I influence, direct, guide or misguide the interviews? Were there similar/different discourse styles (or talk characteristics) that I used for each of the ten students? How are they identified? What were the discourse methods I used and how and how often were they employed? Most importantly, what was it that I did that helped the interviewee tell his/her story (or hindered that process)? I looked at my statements, comments and questions in the five years of future talk segments and identified eight categories,5 which I still discuss later. Step seven was not part of the G-Rating analysis (to follow) and did not undergo inter-rater reliability, something that could be completed later.

THE MEASURES USED IN THE ANALYSIS OF FUTURE TALK The interviews were analyzed using both “intuitive” and actual6 measures. The “intuitive” exercise was carried out as an informal way

Seeing Beyond the Talk

197

to see what my impressionistic sense was of who were the more grounded students and which were the more “successful” interviews, using expertise based on twenty years of experience as a counselor. So that I could make a relatively close comparison of my impressionistic sense to the actual outcomes of these interviews, I set up the “intuitive” categories to generally compare to the three actual measures described below, although obviously noting its subjectivity versus the objective nature of my “actual” measures. In essence, with respect to the actual measures, what I’ve done is to offer a way to qualitatively and quantitatively see which are the more/most productive interviews in terms of number of grounded references to goals by the students (Rg’s) and which were the more/most efficacious interviews with respect to the amount of work (the ratio of Rg’s to interviewer prompts and interviewee post-prompt talk quantity). Three measures were identified to assess interview productivity and efficiency resulting in a composite rating I call the Actual G-rating. The Intuitive G Rating: Rationale and Inter-Rater Reliability Results (Is Groundedness a Property of Students or of the Situation—the Co-constructed Talk Between Interviewer and Interviewee?) My overarching purpose in looking closely at students’ future talk segments (segments in which they talk about their goals, plans, and hopes for the future) is to identify features in the talk of students and in our joint talk that seemed to show evidence of “groundedness.” By groundedness, I was initially working with an intuitive notion, deriving from my 20 years experience as a practitioner, of the degree to which students appear to have a realistic assessment of goals, their interests and abilities, and an understanding of what it would take to achieve their goals. At the same time, I recognize that “groundedness” is not simply a feature in the student. It is, in part, a feature of our joint conversation. So from the start, I was interested in developing reliable and objective measures of “groundedness” and “interviewer-interviewee collaboration.” This dual interest in groundedness and the quality or efficacy of co-constructed talk eventually led to my development of what I term the “Actual G rating.” Shortly I will explain how this measure is arrived at. In order to determine whether my objective measures really did reflect my expert counselor “intuitions” well (that is, could be said to be measuring something real and measuring it reliably), I undertook a comparative “intuitive” coding and analysis of the same future talk data. In this analysis, I coded each future talk segment on the basis of

198

Voices of Reason

my “gut reaction” with respect to student groundedness and interviewer-interviewee quality. Procedure: For each future talk segment, I asked myself three questions: 1. How grounded (realistic, etc.) does this student appear to be? (Category 1) 2. Did the students become more grounded in their talk as the interviewer prompted them, did not improve performance or it did not seem to matter? (Category 2) 3. How successful is this segment of talk as an instance of interviewer/interviewee collaboration (quality of interaction)? (Category 3) For each segment of future talk (there were 90 in total), I rated the segment as a 1 (high), 2 (medium), or 3 (low) on each question. This was a strictly intuitive, “seat of the pants” judgment. I did not count or attend to anything in particular (number of goals mentioned, number of references to those goals, kinds of questions I asked, etc.). I simply gave an intuitive judgment about whether this segment evidenced high, medium, or low quality with respect to groundedness and interactional quality. I then (from these three categories) derived an “Intuitive G” rating for each student (which combined both quality of student groundedness and efficacy of our conversational exchange). With these ratings combined, I ranked each student from high to low based on the Intuitive G and compared this to the rankings of students from high to low based on the “Actual G” (described later). The correlation was not perfect, but close, with a correlation coefficient of .79. (See pages to follow for full explication of Intuitive and Actual G rankings including tables and graphs). This seems, at first glance, to be an indication that my Actual G rating is doing what it was designed to do: provide an objective, quantitative measure of quality and efficacy that relates to my own intuitive concerns with student groundedness and my role as interviewer. However, several objections might be raised. First of all, I am the same coder in both cases, and I am not disinterested in the outcome! Moreover, I know these students and these samples quite well. Indeed, I transcribed them and did the coding and analysis with respect to the Actual G measure. Perhaps my intuitions are biased by all of this previous work with these samples. To address this I asked an independent coder to complete the same exercise, thus measuring inter-rater reliability. Establishing Inter-Rater Reliability. In order to explore the reliability and validity of my intuitive ratings, I had a colleague with comparable

Seeing Beyond the Talk

199

counseling experience serve as a co-coder of all 90 future talk segments. Before he began his coding, I sat down with him and carefully reviewed what I meant by each of the three categories (category 1: degree of groundedness; 2: use/impact of prompts; 3: overall interview quality). I provided him with a large-font prompt—a sort of cue card—of the three categories and the three rating levels to be considered for each category, that he positioned in front of him during the coding exercise. We discussed what I meant by “groundedness” until I felt reasonably satisfied he understood its meaning as I use it. Thus I explicated the concept behind the groundedness term and told him I wanted to tap his expertise in judging the future talk segments. I also discussed with him what I saw as constituting high (1) medium (2) or low (3) ratings for each of the categories. Here, again, we carried the discussion until I felt reasonably comfortable that he understood how to apply each of the rating levels. The pre-coding discussion took 30 to 40 minutes. The coding task by my colleague took just under 5 hours to complete, indicative (in my judgment) of the careful attention he gave to his coding work. I calculated both percent agreement and correlation coefficient results for both the group as a whole (Table 10.2) and by individual students (Table 10.3). Overall results indicate strong percent agreement (.85) and correlation between coders (.73). Given the sample size, (df = 88, .283 1 percent confidence level) we can accept these results as indicative of strong positive agreement between the coders. Percent agreement between coders for each of the three categories separately, as expected given the strong overall results, was high. Correlation results were also good with some weakening in category 3 (.68). Note that percent agreement simply refers to ratio of co-coder’s agreements to mine. For example, in category 1, the co-coder agreed with how I rated each of the 90 future talk segments with respect to level of groundedness in 77 out of 90 instances (77/90 = .86). Evaluating the co-coder agreements by individual students reveal some interesting findings. In terms of percent agreement between codTABLE 10.2 Results of Inter-rater Reliability across All Students: Percent Agreement and Correlation Coefficient (r) Percent Agreement Correlation Coefficient (r) Overall: .85 Percent Agreement Correlation .73 Coefficient

Category 1 .86 .79

Category 2 .89 .74

Category 3 .80 .68

200

Voices of Reason

TABLE 10.3 Results of Inter-rater Reliability by Student: Categories 1, 2 and 3 Combined % Agree r

John Angela .87 .88 .63 .83

Geraldo .85 .80

Tony .81 .61

Evon Mona Sarah Kelly Tracy .94 .79 .76 .89 .94 .81 .40 .33 .73 .89

Dan .89 .72

ers, again, as expected based on overall inter-rater reliability of .85, all students were favorably rated. However, in terms of correlation coefficient results, we find (table 10.3) that there were weak results for Sarah and Mona and weak but acceptable results for Tony and John. The apparent explanation for this varies and/or is a result of a combination of two factors. In Sarah’s case, the co-coders disagreed most often (8) and three out of 4 cases where we disagreed by more than one rating level were with Sarah. In Mona’s case there were 7 disagreements, the second highest of the ten students. Now, taking this to another level (as I had done when I compared the results of my own intuitive ratings to my actual measures and obtained an overall correlation coefficient of .79), the results of co-coder ’s correlation between the rank order of his Intuitive G Rating to rank order of my Actual G Rating was .70. Thus, we can say that coders A and B correlate well with each other and each to the Actual G Rating. It is worth noting here (as I will in more detail later under Rationale for A Composite G Rating) that, while I provide correlation results for each of the three intuitive categories, the focus is on the G rating. The three measures separately (that together make up the G Rating) do not present the full picture of the students’ groundedness and the efficacy of co-constructed talk. It is the composite nature of the three measures that tells the story, in terms of productivity and efficacy. Thus, on the basis of my Intuitive G and the high degree of correlation with the Actual G score (bolstered by the high inter-rater reliability that I was able to establish with the Intuitive G measure), I feel confident in arguing that the Actual G is measuring something real and important with respect to interviewing (and counseling) kids about their future goals. The two measures, intuitive and actual, are not the same; one does not replace the other. Indeed, it might be interesting in looking at transcripts of future talk to begin with an intuitive rating and then see how close it is to the actual G rating. Depending on the counselor’s experience level, they may see a discrepancy between the Intuitive and Actual G ratings. The point is that both the Intuitive and the Actual G Ratings are ones that counselors in training as well as experienced counselors could use to help them reflect on their own practice.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

201

Calculating The Intuitive G Rating. The Intuitive G Rating was calculated using categories one, two and three of the Future Talk Intuitiveness Records. Noting the sample (Table 10.4), each student was rated in each of the categories using the rating format on the record for each segment of “future” talk for each of their five interview years: 1. The Intuitive Rg (Category 1): This measure was developed to gauge preliminary, impressionistic sense of who were the more grounded. It is calculated by adding up the ratings for each of the TABLE 10.4 Future Talk Intuitiveness Record Interviewee Category 1 Grade/Segment Intuitive Notion of Groundedness Tony (Evidence For)

Category 2 Groundedness Autonomy (Amt. of Prompts Needed)

Category 3 Interviewer Technique(s) (Success of)

Category 4

Ratings

1

1

1

1

2

3

2

3

2

8/S1

X

X

X

S2

X

X

X

9/S3

X

X

S4 10/5 11/6

X X X

3

Interviewer Prompts 2 X

X X

X X

3 X X

X

X X

X X

X

S7

X

X

X

12/8

X

X

X

X

X

S9

X

X

X

X

Score Cat1: 18/9 = 2.0

Cat2: 19/9 = 2.11 Cat3: 22/9 = 2.44 see comments below

Category 1 1= Good to strong evidence of groundedness 2= Fair (so-so) evidence of groundedness 3= Weak evidence of groundedness Category 2 1= Student starts and stays grounded 2= Student gets more grounded as interviewer prompts 3= In spite of prompts, student remains relatively ungrounded Category 3 1= Good-great technique: strong interview give-and-take 2= Fair (so-so) techniques: Mixed results, some instances of good exchange 3= Missed opportunities: generally unsatisfactory results, like “pulling teeth” and/or interviewee failed to follow up Category 4 1= Mostly open questions used 2= Mixed open and closed questions 3= Mostly closed questions

202

Voices of Reason

FT segments (ratings are 1, 2 or 3) and dividing by the total number of FT segments over five years. Thus, if a student rated a “1” (highest) on all of her FT segments her Intuitive Rg would be a 1.00 (as was the case with John). Conversely, a student receiving all “3” ratings would obtain a 3.00. 2. The Use of Interviewer Prompts (Category 2): My sense of amount and usefulness of prompts to get the students to talk. Calculations were conducted in the same way as in Category 1. 3. Interviewee Response (Category 3): My sense of how successful the interview exchange was, overall. Included was how much they seem to talk about their goals and grounded references to their goals and how successfully that was carried off as a joint effort. Calculations were conducted in the same way as in Category 1. 4. Interviewer Prompt Types (Category 4). Although this was not included with the three other categories in the Intuitive G-Rating (because it parallels more with my Interviewer Discourse Codes, which I talk about later) I include it in my discussion shortly in an important way. Table 10.5 summarizes the results of the ratings for each of the three “impressionistic” categories and their rank orders, with 10 being the highest and one being the lowest, for the entire five-year period. In the last two columns we find the Intuitive G-Rating and rank order. The Intuitive G-rating is calculated as follows: Intuitive G-Rating = 2 × rank order of CAT 17 + rank order of CAT 2 + rank order of CAT 3

TABLE 10.5 Intuitiveness Rating Results

Name

Cat1: Groundedness

Rank Cat 2: Order: 10 is Interviewer Highest Prompts

Cat 3: Interviewee Response Rank to Interview Order Techniques

John

1.00

10

1.10

10

1.60

9

39

Angela

2.50

1

2.50

1

2.13

5

8

1.5

Geraldo

1.67

7

1.89

7

1.89

7

28

7

Tony

2.00

4.5

2.11

3

2.44

3

15

4

Evon

2.00

4.5

2.00

4.5

2.18

4

17.5

5

Mona Sarah

1.64 1.82

8 6

1.73 1.91

9 6

2.00 1.82

6 8

31 26

8 6

Kelly

2.11

3

2.00

4.5

2.67

1

11.5

3

Tracy

1.17

9

1.83

8

1.33

10

36

9

Dan

2.20

2

2.20

2

2.60

2

8

1.5

Rank Intuitive Rank Order G Rating Order 10

Seeing Beyond the Talk

203

General Quantitative Descriptions. Before I discuss the Actual G-rating some general quantitative descriptions about the interview data are presented. From all of the transcripts of each student, over five consecutive years, I identified ninety segments of future talk, or, as was usually the case, two segments per interview. The amount of future talk per segment, over the five year period, ranged from a high of 692 words (Tracy) to a low of 19 (Mona), with an overall average, per segment, of 300 words.8 The number of turns9 to produce a given future talk segment ranged from a high of 52 (Dan) to a low of 2 (John) with an overall average of 20 turns per segment. The number of grounded references per segment ranged from a high of 11 (John) to a low of zero (on one occasion with Angela), with an overall average of 3 grounded references per segment. Ungrounded references per segment, ranged from a high of 3 (Angela in 3 separate segments and Geraldo in 1 segment) to a low of zero (28 percent of the total number of future talk segments), resulting in an average of one ungrounded reference for every three segments. Taking the ten students over the five-year period, from Grades 8 through 12, they collectively and cumulatively produced 303 grounded references within future talk and 37 ungrounded references, in response to 431 prompts by the interviewer. The range of the amount of talk that followed each prompt, on average, per interview year, was a high of 65 words (John) to a low of 5 (Tony). References to factual information related to their goals were, by far, the most common type (46 percent), with references to experiences placing a distant second (19 percent) and influencer-type references comprising 12 percent of the total references. The remaining three (references to abilities, goal-directed activities and affect) combined only accounted for 23 percent of the total references. If each of these students was typical they’d look something like this over a period of five years: the student makes thirty grounded and 3.7 ungrounded references, with prompts from the interviewer about 43 times. Most commonly far, the student uses factual-type references to support his/her talk about goals, averaging 14 over five years; 5.7 references involve experiences connected to the goals and under 4 are characterized as influencer-type references. Less than 3 times each, during the five years of interviews, the “typical” student makes references to his/her abilities, goal-directed activities or affects when talking about goals. In fact, none of the ten students matches that profile; they differ strikingly from one another, with John’s grounded references to goals at a high of 45 to Tony’s grounded reference count of only 14. Trying to make sense out of these differences is precisely what this chapter on future talk is attempting. As I will illustrate, it appears that academic standing and

204

Voices of Reason

some kind of out-of-school access to knowledge about educational institutions are important factors in the groundedness results.

The Actual G-Rating The Actual G Rating includes the rank orders of the Actual Rg-score, the P-Iver and P-Ivee scores. Each of the measures are defined below: The Actual Rg Score. The Actual Rg score is the total number of the six categories of grounded references to goals that were coded over a five-year period from all FT segments. Note that ungrounded references are not included. 10 The six categories of grounded references are: (1) Experience (Re), (2) Influencer-Person (Ri), (3) Ability-Supported (Rab), (4) Accurate Factual Claim (Rf), (5) Goal-Directed Activity or Planned Activity (Rp) and, (6) Affect with Origin (Ra). The unit of analysis is the series of words that convey the grounded reference. Thus, in one utterance or turn there might be more than one specific grounded reference, either of the same type or of a different type. Or a single reference might be conveyed over the course of several turns. But each reference can only be coded once as the categories for grounded references are mutually exclusive. Definitions follow, but again, examples in actual text for each reference type can be found in appendix 3. 1. Experience (Re): The experience could be recent or distant but it has the quality of drawing the student into thought or action regarding stated goals. The reference encodes embodied knowledge in that the student is, to some degree, speaking from direct, personal, experiential knowledge. The experience offers evidence (to the student) of something important going on as it potentially relates to education and vocational goals. 2. Influencer-Person (Ri): Talk which relates to what the student reports as having been said or done by someone else to or for him/her resulting in some significant degree of influence over their own thoughts or actions about their goals. The influencing person is usually a teacher, family member or friend but not limited to them. 3. Ability-supported (Rab): This refers to any talk about the student’s abilities that is supported by objective measures. For example, a student says he/she does well in math and has been getting high marks on report cards, or says he/she is a strong athlete in some sport supported by placement on varsity team, plays often, high points average, etc. So, in order to code this, there must be a

Seeing Beyond the Talk

205

statement of ability followed by some supporting evidence that can be substantiated. 4. Accurate Factual Claim (Rf): References about facts relating to a goal. Any statement that is plainly a fact that the student has learned and has incorporated into his/her thinking or action related to a stated goal. Facts are different from the “Ability-supported” category in that it stands alone as some objective statement outside of the student’s own reference to or participation in the goal. For example, the SAT requirements for admission to a school of choice, a particular program arrangement that is of interest to the student, i.e. Northeastern’s Co-op program, low socioeconomic status requires financial aide considerations to pay for college. 5. Goal-Directed Activity or Planned Activity (Rp): Making inquiries, researching, making or planning actual visits, i.e. colleges. Anything that the student says he/she plans to do that relates to stated goals. This is different from the “Experience” (Re) category in that it is about ongoing or future activities, not situations that have already taken place. It’s about exploring the goal further in an attempt to validate, discard or modify it. It is essentially the evidence about self-directed search. While these types of references are more statements about steps toward goals as differentiated from the other categories about rationale for goals, this category, nonetheless, is about evidence for rationale through appropriate actions. 6. Affect with Origin (Ra): These are remarks that relate to the feelings connected to the goal(s). As differentiated from the ungrounded talk such as “I like” with no supporting statement(s), these grounded references provide a sense of the students’ state of mind, how they feel about the goal or some aspect of the goal. It is their comment about their own emotional reaction to or about circumstances that relate to the goal or emotional reactions to the goal itself. It offers a sense of the quality and intensity of the interest of their goal; a sense of curiosity about something. It is differentiated from Re (experience) types in that it is more explicit about affects associated with goals. The Actual Rg Score is calculated as follows: Rg = Re + Ri + Rab + Rf + Rp + Ra The P-Iver Score. The P-Iver Score refers to the ratio between the student’s Rg score and interviewer prompts. In other words, the P-Iver score (calculated by dividing the Rg score by the total number of interviewer prompts over five years) is the average number of prompts

206

Voices of Reason

yielding each grounded reference. For example, with John, for each prompt, on average he produced 1.67 grounded references to goals.11 P-Iver Score =

Rg Score Five−Yr. Total InterviewerPrompts

The P-Ivee Score. The P-Ivee score refers to the ratio between post prompt word count and Rg score (calculated by dividing total PPWC by the Rg score). In other words how much talk it took, on average, to produce one grounded reference. For example, for every grounded reference Sarah’s word count (talk amount) was, on average, 37.50. Or said another way, for every 37.50 future talk words that Sarah spoke, on average, she offered one grounded reference to an educational or vocational goal. P-Ivee Score =

Post−Prompt Word Count Total−Five Years Rg Score

Thus, putting it all together, the Actual G-Rating is calculated as follows: Actual G-Rating = 2 × rank order of the Rg-Score + rank order of the P-Iver Score + rank order of the P-Ivee Score The Findings Both the Intuitive G-rating and the Actual G-rating are calculated by adding the rank order values of each of the three measures respectively but note that I’ve given the Rg score a value twice the rank order number for two reasons: 1. The Actual Rg score (and its corresponding Intuitive Rg score) is a significant aspect of the overall “success” of these co-constructed interviews; it is primarily what is being investigated, that is, what the evidence is for these students degree of groundedness. It is the Productivity part of the formula mentioned earlier as a single measure. The Efficacy component of the formula has two measures. Thus, 50% of the overall score should be generated from the Rg score. This is done simply by doubling the value of the rank orders in the Rg score category. For example, John’s G-rating of 38 was calculated by 2(10) + 10 + 8. 2. The P-Ivee score alone says only what the proportionate amount of talk to grounded references is. It does not differentiate between someone who has lots of talk along with lots of grounded refer-

Seeing Beyond the Talk

207

ences and someone who has very little talk and very little grounded references. Thus, as was the case here with Dan, 18.81 and John, 19.47 (where a lower score is better with respect to interview efficiency), we would say, strictly in terms of efficiency, that Dan is the more efficient interview outcome. But that is not the case in the context of who are the more grounded students. If we go back and look at his PPWC (post-prompt word count) and his Rg’s and compare them to John’s clearly John is the more successful interview because he has the much higher talk and grounded references. In order to correct this inequity I’ve given the rank order value of the Rg score 2[x] its value. Otherwise the P-Ivee score would carry one-third of the overall G-rating which would give us a less accurate picture of both who are the more grounded students and which are the more successful interviews. So, one who has high Rg and P-Ivee scores will be out on top, such as John, or, conversely, at the bottom as is the case with Angela. Those who have a mixed result can benefit from either high(er) Rg or P-Ivee score which gives them a higher G-rating. This seems to suggest that a student who is weaker in Rg (productivity) but higher in P-Ivee (efficiency) might have produced more Rg’s if they had been encouraged to talk more, as with Kelly. This also seems to suggest the person (such as Angela) with a low Rg and low P-Ivee is not likely to improve much with more talk. Rationale for a Composite G Rating. Some may suggest that the Rg score or either the P-Iver or the P-Ivee scores could be used as independent measures of groundedness and/or interview success instead of combining them for a composite measure or the G rating as it is termed here. I take the position that neither the Rg score nor the Iver or the Ivee scores separately capture the outcomes of these co-constructed interviews. Here’s why. The reader will recall that I take the position that interview success is based on both productivity and efficacy, that is, not only how grounded the students were to their goals but how efficient the interviews were in revealing their groundedness. One may ask whether or not it is enough to know their groundedness scores (i.e. Rg score), and simply conclude that those with the higher scores were the more grounded students. But, that would take the behavior (co-constructed talk in this case) out of context. In other words, the significance of the groundedness score becomes much clearer when we know how much effort went into the interview discourse to produce that degree of groundedness and what was qualitatively different about the more grounded interviews from the less grounded interviews. You could not get that from the Rg score alone, nor could you learn much from either the P-Iver or the P-Ivee scores alone. But together they become variables

208

Voices of Reason

in an equation that balances three factors of interview success (1) number of grounded references to goals (2) ratio of interviewer prompts to grounded references (3) ratio of post-prompt interviewee talk to grounded references. In doing that, a numerical picture (G Rating) is presented that takes into account a balance between three important elements of interview success. What this mean, simply, is that what the students and the interviewer do in their communication together has weight in judging overall communication competence and overall decision-making capability with respect their own knowledge and reality about their choices (and the interviewer’s role in helping students articulate their positions). Previously, where I talked about my rationale for weighing the rank order values, I made the point about having both the Productivity and the Efficacy components to the success of our co-constructed interviews. Although I was making my case about weighing the three measures to correct inequities, I was also illustrating where, in some cases, one of the measures taken alone in an analysis would lead to inaccurate conclusions. Taking this a bit further, looking at table 10.5, if we look at Sarah’s rank order results for the three Actual measures we see that she ranked eighth from the top out of ten students, obviously indicating strong evidence for grounded references to goals. However, her P-Iver and P-Ivee scores were relatively weak to very weak indicating the need for relatively lots of interviewer prompts and lots of post-prompt talk on her part, respectively, to produce that quantity of grounded references. One might ask why that is a problem as long as the result is that she had lots of support for her goals. As an isolated criterion that would not be a problem, but in reality, where guidance counseling sessions have significant time constraints, this would be a problem. Our interviews together, on average, were the longest of all of the students, in some cases three times longer. On the other hand, at the extremes, you have John who scored consistently high on all three measures and Angela who scored consistently very low on all three measures, indicating that it would be unlikely that their interview outcomes would have changed significantly with more or less interviewing. We would not have known that necessarily to be true by looking at the Rg score alone. Then there are the students for whom more or different talk could have resulted in stronger Rg scores, such as Kelly, who had the highest P-Ivee rank of all ten students but ranked third from the bottom for her Rg score. What this says is that, while she was very efficient in her talk in terms of the ratio between her post-prompt talk and her grounded references, she talked very little. Thus, here, I could have worked harder at getting her to talk more and likely would have had interview success higher than average.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

209

Table 10.6 provides a summary of the results of the three measures and their composite rank order (Actual G-Rating). Figure 10.1 illustrates the Actual G-rating results in chart form, as ranks from 10 to 1, and are provided in descending order from highest to lowest. To summarize, we have: Productivity + Efficacy (e.g. Performance12) = I.P.O. (Interview Performance Outcome) A. (Intuitive Rg score) + ( CAT 2 & CAT 3, see page 285) = (Intuitive G-Rating) B. (Actual Rg Score) + (P-Iver and P-Ivee Scores) = (Actual G-Rating) So, the intuitive interview performance outcome (e.g. Intuitive G Rating) is assessed by calculating interview productivity (from the Rg score, Category 1) plus interview efficacy from categories 2 and 3. The Actual interview performance outcome (e.g. Actual G Rating) is assessed by calculating the actual Rg score plus the P-Iver and P-Ivee scores.

Comparing the Intuitive and Actual G-Ratings. Now we can look at a comparative summary of the Intuitive and Actual G-ratings in descending order from highest (best) to lowest in table 10.7. Using the Spearman Correlation Coefficients,13 we find that the Intuitive and Actual G-Ratings are quite strongly correlated: ACTUAL G-Rating .7866 N (10) Significance .003 INTUITIVE G-Rating TABLE 10.6 Results of the Three Actual Measures and Actual G Rating Name John Angela Geraldo Tony Evon Mona Sarah Kelly Tracy Dan

1. Actual Rg Score /Rank 45 10 16 2 30 5 14 1 32 6 39 7 40 8 18 3 42 9 27 4

2. P-Iver Score /Rank 1.67 10 .33 1 .58 6 .45 2 .94 8 1.50 9 .53 4 .56 5 .81 7 .51 3

3. P-Ivee Score /Rank 19.47 8 44.63 1 31.63 3 25.36 5 20.25 7 25.33 6 37.50 2 15.73 10 30.76 4 18.81 9

4. G-Rating /Rank 38 10 6 1 19 3 9 2 27 7 29 8.5 22 6 21 5 29 8.5 20 4

210

Voices of Reason

Figure 10.1 G Rating Rank Order

This can also be shown by Figure 10.2, which illustrates the match between the rank orders of the Intuitive and Actual G-ratings. Correlation between Actual Rg, P-Iver and P-Iver. Examining the closeness of the relationships between the three measures which make up the Actual G-Rating we find that the P-Iver score and Rg score are quite strongly positively correlated but we find no significant correlation between the P-Ivee and the Rg score which would be expected given what I explicated earlier (that a high rank order for a P-Ivee tells us nothing about how

TABLE 10.7 Comparing Ratings and Rank Orders of Intuitive and Actual G Ratings Name John Tracy Mona Geraldo Sarah Evon Tony Kelly Dan Angela

Intuitive GRating 39 36 31 28 26 17.5 15 11.5 8 8

Intuitive G Rank Order 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 1.5 tied 1.5 tied

Name John Tracy Mona Evon Sarah Kelly Dan Geraldo Tony Angela

Actual GRating 38 29 29 27 22 21 20 19 9 6

Actual G Rank Order 10 8.5 tied 8.5 tied 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Seeing Beyond the Talk

211

Figure 10.2 Comparing Match between Intuitive and Actual G Rating Rank Orders

strongly grounded someone is, only how closely their amount of talk relates to the frequencies of their grounded talk). P-Iver Rank N (10) Sig .004

.7818

P-Ivee Rank N (10) Sig .480

.0182

RG-score Rank And, as expected, given what I’ve just noted, there is no significant correlation between the two “P” measures: P-Ivee Rank N (10) Sig .155

.3576

The results are displayed graphically in Figure 10.3. Given the results presented here, we see in which of three categories these co-constructed interviews belong. Figure 10.4 locates interview success with respect to Actual G Rating. There are fairly clear demarcation s between the high, medium and low groups, with the high group in a 27–38 range, the medium group

212

Voices of Reason

Figure 10.3 Comparing Rank Order of the Three Measures

19–22 and the low group 6–9 with a tight cluster in the medium group. Evon’s placement in the high group may be problematic: I will examine that as I now turn to a closer look at the results and my interpretations of them.

Figure 10.4 Interview Success

Seeing Beyond the Talk

213

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RESULTS: INTERPRETATIONS AND FEATURES OF INTERVIEW SUCCESS Before I proceed I wish to address issues concerning the use of quantitative measures in a qualitative study as is the case here. First some general comments: 1. Qualitative researchers usually work with small samples of people, nested in their context and studied in-depth- unlike quantitative researchers, who aim for larger numbers of context-stripped cases and seek statistical significance. (Miles and Huberman, 1994) 2. Quantification is not an end in itself but rather “a means of making available techniques, which add power and sensitivity to individual judgment when one attempts to detect and describe patterning in a set of observations.” (Weinstein and Tamur, 1978) 3. Studies by Howe (1985, 1988) show that quantitative and qualitative methods are “inextricably intertwined” not only at the level of specific data sets but also at the levels of study design and analysis. 4. My study results are both numerical and textual. The numbers rise out the analysis of the co-constructed talk. Without the latter there would be no quantitative interpretations and vise versa. My findings are not being interpreted by traditional statistical designs where one sets up a null hypothesis and goes about testing it at some level of significance, say .01 or .05, or employs tests to compare case means (T-test); but I did examine relationships between the rank orders of my measures using the Spearman correlation coefficient and for coding inter-reliability, using the Kappa Coefficient.14 And I’ve used here simple descriptive statistics as a way to illustrate characteristics of interview talk that seem to relate to students’ groundedness with respect to their future goals. I then compared these ten students with respect to their relative ranking according to these descriptive measures and statistical tests of correlations. I see this as a conversion process that allows me to graphically illustrate similarities and differences within and between cases (cases being each of the ten students) with respect to features of interview talk. That is all I’m doing here. Without the words there would be no numbers. The evidence is in the text. The reader, assuming similar coding results (reliability) would arrive at (generally) the same outcome as I have if they were to read the transcripts, code the data, and tally the numbers. What I’ve done is set up mathematical ways to convert the coding results into numbers and then to go back and offer a discussion of the findings and implications about

214

Voices of Reason

what they may mean. I am able to say that there are statistically significant correlations between some of my measures, but the strength of this analysis further depends on the meaningfulness of my measures. Am I really indexing groundedness by these indirect means? If I am capturing something real in my measures of groundedness and interview productivity, then I have a way to graphically demonstrate successful versus less successful interviews, and in particular, more or less successful joint productions. The real question is whether these categories and ways of measuring groundedness and productivity are meaningful in the first order, not if they are statistically significant although establishing statistical significance with respect to relationships between the measures is also useful to my analysis. Another key point is that these results, in themselves, are not meant to be generalized. My discussion of the results as it relates to the ten students, is about relative outcomes. In order to suggest the relative importance of the Actual G-Rating of 38, for example, I would have to standardize the methods I used by applying them to many students across different groups for the purpose of developing norms. I’ve not attempted to do that here, obviously. So, with that in mind, sample size and generality issues really do not apply here nor, by not addressing them, have I diminished the value of this study. This ties into the notion of validity (are the findings credible, do they make sense? See appendix 6). Given my earlier comments about generalizing the findings, the results/discussion are, I think, credible, again, in that they relate only to the ten students in this study and are generated by the text that came from our interview talk. But, and I underscore this point, the measures (as tools of discourse analysis) do help locate features of the co-constructed talk that can tell us who are the more grounded students and which were the more efficacious interviews with respect to their future goals. The most useful generalizations from qualitative studies are analytic, not “sample-to-population” (Firestone, 1993) Related to the above discussion, one may ask, as someone has, why/how is one interview per year with each student enough? Are interpretations questionable because of small data amounts? The actual text generated from the annual interviews is voluminous. The future talk segments obviously account for a relatively small percentage of the transcribed talk but for the purposes of this study I believe it is adequate because this was a longitudinal study. The power or value of this study comes from the fact that I saw the students over five consecutive years on their anniversary. I asked the questions to each student for each of those years and received their answers in varying degrees of quality and quantity— that is essentially what was measured and discussed in this book. I could have had a different approach, perhaps seeing them twice annu-

Seeing Beyond the Talk

215

ally or more but I wanted to duplicate a realistic situation, as is the case with guidance counselors who see them infrequently and for short periods of time. On the face of it, one might ask how one interview per year could tell us anything: according to my results, they tell us a lot. Since the quantitative analysis of the results such as the P-Iver and P-Ivee scores and the Actual G-Rating were generated from the Rg score, frequency of interviewer prompts and post-prompt word count the relative outcome would likely be roughly the same if I had seen them more often. A “John” or “Mona” student-type would likely have remained the same with more interviewing relative to the interviews of the other students. In other words, more interviewing, more and better questions over time may have improved interview outcomes but the relative placement of the students likely would have remained about the same; the students would remain in their respective low, middle and high success groups. Again, my goal was to find a way to get at who were the more most grounded students, who were less so, and so on, and what the quantitative and qualitative differences were in our coconstructed interview talk. Another test of credibility and meaningfulness of this analysis is if it shows up important differences among students that might have an important impact on their futures, or important differences in the effectiveness of counselors’ prompts and follow-up responses. That is, is there evidence that certain moves, on the interviewer’s part, promote more “grounding” and more productivity overall, than others? If I can provide tools for counselors (and others who give guidance to adolescents) to use in reflecting on their practice, then the work is educationally significant. Features of Interview Success The results of the measures, collectively, should give us a fairly accurate picture of who are the more grounded students and which are the more efficacious interviews. Now I will examine further the factors or features that seem to be present in each of the three groups as I’ve rated them high, middle, low based on the students’ Actual G-Rating rank orders. The reader will recall that I presented some general differences between John and Angela in Chapter One as an introduction to the research question(s) for this study. In addition to what I’ve presented so far, I have other “measures” that I used to examine features of interview success. They are (1) Interviewer Discourse Codes (IDC’s) (2) Ungrounded References (Rung’s) and (3) The Six Grounded Reference Categories. But, after looking at the FT segments from each of the various perspectives, I concluded that the IDC’s, Rung’s, and the six grounded reference types do not generally offer information which

216

Voices of Reason

would definitively characterize the more successful interviews from the less successful ones, with some exceptions which I will address. In other words, there are no meaningful patterns in my use of the eight interviewer discourse codes that differentiate the more successful from the less successful interviews (although, as I will note when I talk about my use of open and closed questions as prompts, the more successful interviewees handles closed questions much more as though they were open types). There are only obvious differences, with respect to interview success, in terms of frequency of ungrounded references (Rung) at the high and low ends as is the case with John and Angela respectively. In other words, with that exception noted, the frequency of use of ungrounded references alone does not tell us who are the more grounded students and which were the more efficacious interviews. And finally, as I will demonstrate, there were also few apparent patterns, with respect to interview success, in the use of the six grounded reference categories but there are clear preferences, as a group, for the use of certain ones. Having said that, the “evidence” for who are the more grounded students and which were the more efficient interviews lies in the three measures which make up the Actual G-Rating. But before I talk about that, let’s see what the IDC’s and the six grounded references types do tell us. Interviewer Discourse Codes. With respect to my role in the construction of the interviews with these students, I looked at my statements, comments and questions in the five years of “future” talk and identified the following categories: 1. Acknowledgement (ACK): Any response by the interviewer that agrees with the interviewee. A frequently used example is the one-word response, “Okay.” 2. Personal Comment (PC): These are comments I made, usually positive, although could be negative, and usually in the form of praise or support. 3. Revoicing (Re): This code was applied to talk where I repeated, paraphrased, revoiced or in some way reiterated what the interviewee said. 4. Interpretation (Int): These were interpretation-type responses I made, or opinions, inferences, about something the interviewee said. 5. Counseling (Co): Any statements that were the type I’d use in counseling situations, as if wearing my counseling hat (professional judgement, comment). 6. Clarification (Cl): Applied to requests for clarification from the interviewee if I didn’t understand what they said.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

217

The following two relate specifically to question types as prompts: 7. Open Question (OQ): These are questions I asked the interviewee, which generally require more than one- word responses. 8. Closed Question (CQ): Questions that ask for a “yes” or “no” response. I used this code literally. If the question was framed to be answered yes or no then it was a CQ code even though the students varied widely in how they handled the question. My use of the question, even in this way, was handled differently by different students. Some answered with a simple yes or no. Others provided more details. Table 10.8 provides a summary raw score and associated “adjusted” score for each student for five years cumulatively for each of the eight Interviewer Discourse Codes. The scores were adjusted by taking into account the number of turns and words used to produce the frequency of IDC’s. This allowed for an “apples to apples” comparison by proportioning the data to reflect differences in talk amount. For example, my

TABLE 10.8 Quantitative Results of Interviewer Discourse Codes Interviewee Grade/ Segment

Acknowledgement Closed Question Open Questions Raw Score/Adjusted Value

Positive Comment Interpretation

Clarification

John

16/.24

14/.21

21/.31

4/.06

10/.15

9/.13

6/.09

1/.02

Mona

18/.13

17/.14

34/.28

5/.04

7/.06

23/.19

10/.08

1/.01

Tracy

33/.22

27/.18

50/.34

11/.07

10/.07

7/.05

2/.01

4/.03 3/.02

Interviewer Discourse Codes Revoicing

Counseling comment

Evon

21/.13

50/.31

41/.25

0/0

14/.09

16/.10

3/.02

Sarah

47/.14

40/.12

78/.24

13/.04

4/.01

17/.05

11/.03

1/.003

Kelly

27/.36

28/.38

37/.50

5/.07

6/.08

8/.11

2/.03

2/.03

Dan Geraldo

36/.14 38/.24

44/.17 39/.25

76/.30 41/.26

3/.01 5/.03

20/.08 13/.08

14/.05 14/.09

1/.004 4/.03

5/.02 9/.06

Tony

16/.24

18/.27

38/.56

0/0

10/.15

9/.13

7/.10

0/0

Angela

15/.21

25/.35

16/.22

1/.01

4/.06

10/.14

6/.08

0/0

Group Total

267/2.05 302/2.38 432/3.26 51/.33

98/1.12

127/1.04 52/.39

26/.19

Group Avg.

27/.21

10/.11

1/.10

2.6/.02

High Success*

Medium Success

Low Success

30/.24

43/.33

5/.03

5/.04

218

Voices of Reason

talk with Sarah and Dan, over five years, far exceeded any of the other eight students. If I were to only look at the raw scores (i.e., Closed Question [CQ] 78 & 76 respectively), it would not tell an accurate story about my use of that type of discourse. The success categories relate to the Actual G-Rating Outcomes For some general observations, from my perspective as participantresearcher: I was surprised that my use of closed questions (CQ) was as high as it was—a third more, overall, than open questions (OQ). Adjusted for the amount of talk I conducted with Tony (second to the lowest) my relative CQ talk with him was nearly twice the average at .56, with Kelly a close second at .50. However, it is interesting to note that my adjusted CQ with Angela was less than one-half of Tony’s or Kelly’s, yet my talk with Angela was the lowest, over the five-year period, of any of the students (word count: 910). My use of the acknowledgement category (Ack) did not appear to fall into any apparent pattern; comparing the adjusted values, Tony, Geraldo and John all have the same at .24, but different overall patterns for the eight interviewer discourse codes, especially so for John vs. Tony. My combined use of open and closed questions for both Tony and Kelly was significantly greater than for the other students, but for very different reasons. Interviewing Tony was difficult because he offered very little (and often with weak or no substance), thus there was a need for lots of questions in a scaffolding manner. Kelly, on the other hand, was fully engaged in our interview but waited for the questions and then gave the appropriate (and informative) responses thus resulting in a significantly higher “P” rating. I employed positive comments (PC) with significant variability, from no use for any of the five years with Tony and Evon to as many as 11 and 13 occurrences for Sarah and Tracy respectively. Of the eight interviewer discourse codes, this one surprised me the most because of my long counseling career where this is an important characteristic of that discourse. However, the reader should be reminded that these results relate only to the future talk segments of the interviews. I would expect to find PCs in use for all of the students elsewhere in the interviews, yet neither Tony nor Evon received any from me over the five-year period. My adjusted counseling comments (CC) scores generally were split between two groups, with its actual occurrence the second to the lowest of the eight IDCs. John, Angela, Mona and Tony all had three to four times the exposure to that type of comment than the others, with Dan at the bottom with only one occurrence. Since John, Angela, Mona and Tony each represent very different interview styles and represent very different groundedness outcomes as noted earlier (Mona and John high,

Seeing Beyond the Talk

219

Tony and Angela low), there does not appear to be any direct impact from this type of IDC that could correlate with more successful interview outcomes. I note here that I intentionally (as much as was under my control) refrained from bringing in to these interviews the kinds of comments that I use in my everyday practice when I’m counseling people. I saw these interviews as opportunities for the students to tell me what they were thinking and doing with respect to a variety of areas of their lives, in this case about their educational and vocational goals. And I did not want to be faulted for leading their thinking. Of course I understand that, as I tried to stay away from counseling-type questions and comments, I was participating in their formation and telling of their stories by the other questions and comments I used. The point here is that if these were actual counseling situations the talk would have been different. And there were times when I felt I wanted to give guidance beyond what little they received from me. 15 Looking at table 10.8, we see, as I noted before, that there is no apparent pattern to my use of the any of the IDCs with respect to the low, middle and high success groups. The Six Grounded Reference Categories. Earlier I presented results of the six grounded reference types cumulatively as the Rg score. Additional information can be obtained from looking at the frequency of individual grounded reference types with

Figure 10.5 Frequencies of Six Grounded Reference Types

220

Voices of Reason

respect to their use by the students in our future talk. The first of three charts (figure 10.5) shows the frequencies of each type for each student. Figure 10.6 is a classic bar graph displaying the cumulative results of the six grounded references, and the third graph provides a summary of the total frequencies of each grounded reference type for all students over five consecutive years. Figure 10.7 provides a summary of the total frequencies of each grounded reference type for all students over five years. Analysis of the Six Grounded Reference Types. There were some differences with the types of references used, especially when comparing group 3 (low success) to the other two groups. Most notably, group three had very few or no references to goal-directed activities (Rp), and had generally lower frequencies of references in the other categories. Given the relatively low frequency of grounded references for the “low” group we would not have anticipated significantly great numbers in any of the six reference categories. Groups one and two were not markedly different from each other in their use of the reference types. Generally the higher level groups had more references to influencers (Ri). The lower ranked students, with the exception of Tony, had little or no references to affect (Ra).

Figure 10.6 Cumulative Summary of the Six Grounded Reference Types

Seeing Beyond the Talk

221

Figure 10.7 Total Cumulative Count for Each of Six Grounded Reference Types

Overall, I found a surprising lack of references to abilities and less references to influencers than I would have thought. Some, although how much I don’t know, of the “blame” for this seemingly relates to my role as interviewer. It was my conscious effort to conduct these talk exchanges as interviews, not as counseling sessions. Had these been counseling sessions, where we, together, were exploring educational and career options I would have, in the nature of that role, asked lots of questions to get at their sense of connection between interests, abilities and goals. Reflecting back now, after having completed the analyses of our talk, I think I could have probed more in that area without necessarily shifting to a counseling role. I asked questions such as “Why do you think you need to do that?” for example, but I usually didn’t ask straight away, “Are you good at that?” Or, “how do you know that you could do that?” As for the influencer questions, I could have asked more about the important people in their lives, more than just who they are. I could have asked pointedly, why or how is that person influencing your decisions? The students, as a whole, relied on factual references to show evidence for the groundedness of their choices, but that still leaves a lot to be desired with respect to just how connected are the important factors that go into making the best decisions. Thus it seems, contrasting the profiles of the high grounded student with respect to their grounded-reference types, to the low grounded student, one hypothesis is that the more grounded students spontaneously attend to and mention connections between abilities, influencers

222

Voices of Reason

and affect. This suggests that (in actual counseling situations) the students who appear to be ungrounded might benefit from being specifically prodded to think about their abilities, influencers and affect. Focusing on abilities is obvious in decision-making counseling. Focusing on influencers might encourage them to make use of relatives, role models, etc., from their home or community and also be more realistic about their choices. Focusing on affect (passion) might give the counselor more to follow. The Actual G-Rating: Behind the Scenes The Actual G-Rating provides a way to rank order the students’ interview success over five consecutive years. That rating as a number (as operationally defined earlier) only says who are the more successful students with respect to their talk about grounded references to future goals but not about the features that accompany their talk. Now I will talk about what we can learn about the features of our co-constructed talk that characterize interview success. To reiterate, behind the quantitative analysis is/are the discourse(s) that make that possible. What we really want to know now is not just which were the more successful

Figure 10.8 Features of Success

Seeing Beyond the Talk

223

interviews but what the discourses look like; what are the features of the language in use that characterize successful (future) talk. Since the quantitative results (G-Rating) rose out of coding talk in specific ways such as instances of grounded references to future goals, one is able to simply look at the coded discourse to see its origin. We can also look at what preceded the grounded talk, what the interviewer did to elicit students’ talk. Aided by my Intuitive G-Rating exercise, I returned to the 90 FT segments and sorted them out into the high, medium and low success groups based on my earlier intuitive sense of the students’ groundedness to future talk. I suggest here, that was possible because of the strong statistical correlation between the intuitive and actual measures explicated earlier. I also suggest that, in its future applications, it can serve as so-called baseline for counselors to gauge their own intuitive sense of where their students are at with respect to decision-making behavior. After rating each FT segment, I returned to the text and made notes as an exercise in examining features which seem to differentiate more grounded talk from less grounded talk, paying particular attention to my use of prompt types (category 4). I separated out the FT segments based on the Intuitive Rg rating so that all FT segments that were rated 1 were examined separately from all that were rated 2 and so on. “1” Rated Future Talk Segments. From “1” Rated FT Segments (good— strong evidence of groundedness), comments taken directly from my notes after reading each FT segment are provided below along with parenthetical notes about where it locates success, in interviewer, interviewee or both. • Use of “Okay” and “Good” served to promote continuation of talk, as though to say, “Keep going.” (This locates success in the interviewer.) • Strong interview due to relevance of responses to prompts and frequent responses that went beyond the closed question response. (This locates success in the interviewee.) • Here interviewee shows good engagement in the discourse—remaining on target, providing evidence for thinking about what he needs to do to accomplish his goal. I use mostly closed questions but he often goes beyond the yes/no answer to provide additional support for his goal (a value-added sort of thing). In one turn he provided information without prompting. (This locates success in the interviewee.) • What makes this a strong FT segment is his use of detailed examples to support his goal. Usually close questions are answered as open. (This locates success in the interviewee.)

224

Voices of Reason

• Excellent follow-through even with closed questions. Provided solid steps in how he arrived at his goal: why, who, experience, future benefits, even thinks about type of teacher program he’s like to offer. (This locates success in the interviewee.) • Even though I end with a closed question the statements/questions leading up to it appear to provide impetus for the interviewee to respond to all aspects of my turn not just the last questions in the turn. (This locates success in the interviewer.) • A very high number of closed questions and nearly all are handled by the interviewee as though open questions. My use of “Okay,” “Great,” “That’s a great deal,” “Right” and “Oh” all were followed by interviewee’s continuation of topic from previous turn. (This locates success in the interviewee.) • I use open/closed question sequence in same turn quite frequently, resulting in interviewee answering as open question in every instance. (This locates success in the interviewer.) • Interviewee uses “I don’t know” often as a pause mechanism as she thinks over what she’ll say. • Interviewee presents an excellent narrative, full of details and relevant to my question, although the question was closed. (This locates success in the interviewee.) • I use an uncharacteristically different approach here, often making statements or using praise words or acknowledgement words to keep this stretch of talk moving along quite successfully. Had the interviewee not “adapted” to this approach the outcome could have been very different, because none of the closed questions were answered as open questions. (This locates success in both the interviewer and the interviewee.) • In all but one turn, interviewee answers closed questions as such, relying, instead, on my “scaffolding” approach that also included praise words and other signals to continue such as “Okay.” (This locates success in the interviewer.) • One of the few “1” rated FT segments in which open questions predominate, perhaps because closed questions were yielding only yes or no answers. Thus a successful interview both because I recognize the need to shift to more open questions and the interviewee was willing and able to do so. (This locates success in both the interviewer and interviewee.) In summary, the more or most grounded future talk segments generally had in common the use of open-question type responses by the interviewees to closed questions, and so a willingness to answer questions fully as possible. They also, in general, picked up on my request for them to continue their talk by using acknowledgement-type words

Seeing Beyond the Talk

225

such as “Okay.” They were generally able to say more about the hows and whys related to their goals and often cited examples from life experiences that showed evidence of their interest and capacity to pursue their goals. For my part, I generally used closed questions, although occasionally I would start with an open question and end with a closed question in the same turn. My use of closed questions for the FT segments that I reviewed here was twice that of open questions at 121 vs. 60. Going back later and looking at the types of closed questions and seeing how they were handled by the students, I categorized closed questions either as those that could clearly be answered simply with as yes or no, and those that, although syntactically closed questions, could reasonably be understand as open-type questions. For example, a yes or no answer to the question “Will you start in September?” provides an acceptably complete answer. Examples of the kinds of closed questions that really are looking for more than a simple yes or no answer are, “Do you have any idea?” “Do you see yourself having that turn into any kind of career in your life later on?” “Anything else in terms of careers that has crossed your mind besides that—or is that really the one that you focus on?” Have you been thinking about it?” “Do you have any idea what else you might be besides a doctor?” Out of 109 closed questions I reviewed for those future talk segments that were rated 1 for groundedness, 88 were of the simple closed types and 21 were ones that could as well be answered as open. Of the 88 simple closed questions, 53, or 60 percent, went beyond simple yes or no answers. For the closed questions that could be answered as open types all of the 21 responses were treated as such. In other words, all of these types of closed questions for the most grounded future talk segments were treated as open questions. What this data seems to suggest is that the students in these stretches of talk were able to recognize when I wanted more than just the simple yes or no answers. “2” Rated Future Talk Segments. From “2” Rated FT Segments (Fair (so-so) evidence of groundedness), comments taken directly from my notes after reading each FT segment are as follows: • I think I asked good questions that should have elicited more detailed responses than this interviewee gave; but then I petered out as I closed this segment of talk. I used lots of closed questions in an attempt to build a fuller answer over many turns using the scaffolding method. In only one out of thirteen closed questions did the interviewee answer as an open question. (This locates failure in both the interviewer and interviewee.) • Some evidence for what it would take to accomplish her goal but generally a weak interview, bordering on a “3” rating. My use of

226

Voices of Reason

scaffolding is necessary here. (This locates possible failure in the interviewer.) • I feel I didn’t try hard enough to elicit more information; I believe she could have said more but needed more prompting. She provides very little information beyond what I ask her—just answers the question. That is why interview style can be critical. In only one closed question prompt she responded as an open question. (This locates possible failure in both the interviewer and interviewee.) • Some pretty good responses but also lots of simple yes/no responses to closed questions. (This locates possible failure in both the interviewer and interviewee.) In summary, there is a marked difference between FT segments rated at the “2” level to those rated as “1” with respect to how the interviewees handle my closed questions. In the “2” segments that I examined only 23 percent of the closed questions were handled as open questions and even in those cases the response quality and quantity were generally lower than the “1” FT segments. Similarities exist with respect to the proportion of open to closed questions I used, with 33 percent Vs 67 percent for open and closed questions respectively. “3” Rated Future Talk Segments. From “3” Rated FT Segments (Weak evidence of groundedness), comments taken directly from my notes after reading each FT segment: • Lots of open questions so I certainly recognize that she needs this to help promote talk but still she fall short in her responses with respect to grounded references to goals. (This locates failure in the interviewee.) • This FT segment is dominated by me; I provide the answers essentially and she simply affirms. (This locates failure in the interviewer and possibly the interviewee.) • Here I do occasional revoicing, and nearly even exchange of open and closed questions but fail to obtain much information. None of the closed questions were answered as open. (This locates failure in the interviewee.) • The right sorts of questions were presented but the interviewee failed to expand on her answers and none of the closed questions went beyond a simple yes or no. (This locates failure in the interviewee.) • I attempted to elicit information by using lots of open questions (in fact one of the highest OQ count of any of the FT segments I examined in all three categories) but received lots of “I really don’t

Seeing Beyond the Talk

227

know” or “Maybe” type responses. I used a rapid-fire approach in this stretch of talk that I’ve not used often elsewhere. (This locates failure in both the interviewer and interviewee.) In summary, the pattern of less open-question responses to nominally closed questions continued and was even more apparent in these stretches of FT. Without being conscious of it, I apparently attempted to adjust for that by asking more open questions. In fact, where “1” and “2” were identical in the percentage of open to closed questions at 33 percent and 67 percent respectively, the “3” category was nearly equal in the use of open and closed questions (47 percent to 53 percent). Only, as a proportion of the number of closed questions answered as open questions, were “2” and “3” essentially the same at 23 percent and 24 percent respectively. Furthermore, looking at how the closed questions were handled by the least grounded segments of “future” talk in comparison to the results from my “1” rated segments we have a significantly different picture; out of 44 closed questions reviewed, only 9 percent were considered types of closed questions that could really be considered open questions versus 19 percent for the “1” rated segments. But while the percentage of closed questions really meant to be handled as open were twice as likely to be found in the “1” FT segments (19 percent vs. 9 percent as noted before) there was not a significant difference in how they were treated. In other words, the “3” rated students were just as likely to treat those types of questions as open as were the “1” rated students; it’s just that they were less likely to be presented with them. However, what was even more salient, perhaps, was that, for the closed questions that could be answered as closed, the “3” rated FT segments had only 21 percent of those types of questions elaborated on beyond the simple yes or no answer, versus 60 percent for the “1” rated FT segments that were reviewed. Thus, it is no surprise that the talk in which closed questions were predominately treated as such were the least grounded talk. In summary, the more or most grounded FT segments were those in which the interviewees were able to expand their talk beyond simple yes and no answers in spite of my predominant use of closed questions. The lesser grounded FT segments were less able or willing to do that and the weak FT segments failed to provide grounded evidence for goals in spite of my attempt to elicit information by using lots more open questions. What this seems to suggest is that successful talk, with respect to evidence for grounded references to goals, may be more a function of the interviewee’s willingness and/or capacity to say what they are thinking. It does not, however, necessarily mean that some are less capable as decision-makers (although that may be true as well), but

228

Voices of Reason

rather that together we have been less successful or wholly unsuccessful in producing their story.

Exemplars of Students’ Future Talk: Comparing and Contrasting More to Less “Successful” Interview Outcomes Referring again to the two pieces of interview talk (John and Angela) that I presented in chapter 1 that seem to reflect very different (co-constructed) interview styles, before any analysis was completed, the reader would have reasonably expected significant differences in the various measures of groundedness and interview success that I’ve just illustrated, simply by how they appeared different. Now, armed with the methods of discourse analysis I’ve explicated here, the reader can answer the following question: What are discourse features which mark differences between more and less successful talk? What follows are exemplars that will give the reader an appreciation for what constructive interviewing looks like with regards to grounded decision-making. The basic foundation for making sound decisions naturally is breadth of knowledge and experience. And we can only know the degree to which these students possess those things by asking, listening, recording and coding their talk (and our part in its construction). Let’s look at a segment of talk with John: Interviewer: I mean, you obviously are thinking about where you’re going to apply next year. (P) What are your thoughts?

5

Rf John: Well, I’m contemplating Northeastern because it has the Co-op Program (G) Ri and a lot of my relatives went there, and they said it’s excellent because you make connections and you work for—(G) I: And you get a job when you get out.

10

Rf J: It’s pretty easy to get a job when you get out. (G) I: Great. J: I sort of want to go into Computer Programming. I’ve been inquiring to a Rp Rf specific School of the #1 programming school in the total world (G) actually.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

229

Rf Rf It’s called Digiten Institute—Digital Pen—and it’s actually in Vancouver, Canada. (G) But it’s a special kind of school, like, it’s only a two-year

15

Rf program, and you go to school for ten hours a day, and you have to live

Rf there and stuff. (G) It’s pretty hard to get in. (G)

John, in three turns, and only one prompt from me, set out to say what his career goal was, where he was considering training, why he was considering it, a sense of its difficulty and the degree of commitment it would require. He made nine grounded references, including one reference each to influencers and goal-directed activities. This is, I believe, a very compelling piece of discourse, representative of John’s extraordinary decision-making capabilities and his ability to articulate them. As a contrastive piece, although she very much wanted to participate in the interviews, Angela waited for my prompts to proceed with the talk to its completion, which was for me to determine. On the other hand, John rarely waited for my prompts to determine where to take the topic or to wait for me to signal an end to a topic. He stayed with it until he finished what he had to say. Angela, unlike any of the other students, had a relatively high frequency of ungrounded references to her goals, of ten over five years, as compared to less than four as the average for each of the other students over five years.

5

10

15

Interviewer: (P) Okay. Now, what about—What about your vocational goals? Angela: When I finish high school? I: (P) What’s going to happen after high school? A: I want to go to college. I: (P) Okay. And what will you do in college? A: I want to take up something at least, just anything. I don’t know what I want to be yet, so— I: Okay. But that was my question. (P) You don’t know what you want to be yet? A: No. Got a long way, so I can think of a lot of things to be. I: (P) Any ideas at all about what you might want to do for a living someday? A: No, not really. I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen. I: (P) Well, what do you dream? A: Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that I (could) go

230

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

Voices of Reason Rf RF to law school (G) for that. Police academy. (G) Stuff like that, but – I: Police academy did you say? A: Yeah, police officer. I: All right. A: Stuff like that. I: That’s great. Now, what else— (P) What other dreams do you have? A: Like to help little kids, you know, them little Downs syndrome kids and stuff like that, be like a little nurse or something. I have a lot of dreams. I know all of them ain’t going to come true, (UNG) but— I: Well— A: —I hope someday one of them will. I: (P) Let’s pick one just to see how— A: All right. I: (P) Which one do you— A: A lawyer. I: Okay. A: I would say a lawyer. I: (P) And what do you think you need to do to be a lawyer? Rf A: Oh, you need to do a lot of stuff. I know you have to go to school for a long time (G) to be one and you got to read a lot, right? You got to— I: (P) Why do you think you want to be a lawyer? A: I don’t know. I just— I: (P) Do you know anybody that’s a lawyer? A: No, but I just see people on TV acting out their stuff, and I like it, (UNG) so I just— I: Seems like it would be fun— A: Yeah. I: —to do that, but you know it’s hard work to get there? A: Yeah. And you got to work hard to get there, so— I: (P) Where do you think you’ll be going to college? A: I want to go to—I don’t know, but I want to go to U. Mass. Amherst or something like that. (UNG) I think it’s that college. But I went there and looked around and stuff. I: I remember.

With Angela there is a lot of uncertainty, along with a cavalier manner—as though she doesn’t have any real sense of how to get out of the dilemma and isn’t really all that concerned about it. Even in her later interview years, when she conveys a sense that she finally has her calling, a clear goal, and is determined to reach it (after the birth of her daughter before her senior high school year) she still seems to miss the deeper connection between her abilities, her interests and any real in-depth knowledge of what it actually takes to achieve a specific goal, in terms of institutional knowledge.

Seeing Beyond the Talk

231

Although John was the student who spoke most often about his abilities as they relate to his goals in positive ways (Sarah did but almost always in reference to negative comments made by her grandmother), the others who were most grounded such as Mona and Tracy gave other types of evidence to support realistic goals. For Angela it was much about the “I want” and “I like” sorts of talk that, on the surface, appears to be about interests and abilities but turns out to be ungrounded references to popular entertainment media or about nothing at all. Could I have done more to help her develop her story at deeper levels? I will explore that as one of several issues in my final comments as implications for guidance counselors. The students in the “Medium Success” group, which includes Sarah, Kelly, Dan and Geraldo, show a fair amount of evidence for exploration and inquiry in many of their interviews but only Sarah and Kelly seem to have settled on goals immediately workable (dietitian training and OT aide, respectively). While Evon is not included in this group due to her Actual G-Rating of 27, placing her in the high success group, she exhibited features of talk that were more aligned with the medium success group. And, although she did not end her high school year with a working plan she did exhibit lots of active thinking through all of her interview years about her options, resulting in the higher rating. She conveyed a sense that these kinds of explorations were important, that she needed to know, increasingly, what she would do with her life and was asking the right kinds of questions and making some relatively solid connections between abilities and interest until she began talking about microbiology as a goal. Such a goal does not appear well-founded based on my own knowledge of the ability level and training required. Good counseling intervention could have addressed this. Geraldo concluded his twelfth grade with what may be an unrealistic goal (teaching) but he certainly was prepared to give his rationale for it (see talk segment below). Kelly appears to have concluded her twelfth grade with a realistic goal (occupational therapy assistant, associate degree program) but had relatively little to say along the way with respect to her rationale for the selections. Here the point is made (or reiterated) that what we have are either unrealistic goals and/or references to them or not enough evidence for why they were selected or both. Here is a piece of FT interview with Geraldo: Interviewer: (P) So, you said you’re gonna work and save money to pay for your Junior College. Now, when you go to Worcester State College, how are you gonna pay for that? Geraldo: I don’t know. I’m gonna see if I can get financial aid or not. It’s Rf 5 not that expensive. They got plans to pay. (G)

232

Voices of Reason

I: All right. So, you’re not worried about how it’s gonna be paid for. G: I’m more worried about—I’m really gonna apply myself now. ‘Cause, you know, I changed my mind for four years. Man, I changed from wanting to be a physical therapist to a computer programmer. Now I want to be a 10 teacher. I picked teaching because I think it’s one of the best jobs there is. Whatever Rf you say—Whatever you teach it has an effect in their life. (G) So you got a big responsibility on your shoulders. I think that—not anybody that they could relate to with the problems they’ve been through. The pay is good. I

15

20

25

30

Rf think. It’s not the greatest but it’s good. You get the summers off. Vacation is great.(G) Before I wanted to make a lot of money. Now I want to be happy. You know, I’ll teach. Okay, I’m happy teaching. People are learning from me and I got time off for myself. I: So, it’s a good job. You’re still involved in different things that you want. G: Yeah. I took everything into consideration. You know what I’m saying? My time would mean. When I get married, time with my family. You know what I’m saying? I have a couple ideas on special programs for school that I want to do. I want to pack up ideas. I: (P) So, how did all this happen? You said in your Junior year you started to apply yourself and then this year—but you seem to really have gotten very serious and thought about what it is you want to do. You really gave it more thought than what you had done in the past. What happened? Was it that course you took for the jobs? G: I don’t know. I: (P) Was there anybody who talked to you about it or was it just something that you—

Ri G: I kind of figured—My teacher, Mr. Foley, my golf teacher, helped me (G) ’cause you know he talks about how to buy a house. He talked about mortgage laws, and when we was talking about mortgage laws, he always goes into conversations about what kind of good jobs there are. And he would 35 always say, don’t knock teaching out of the question. Don’t knock teaching out of the question ’cause, you know, live happy. You know what I’m saying? I think Re that’s what influenced me the most.(G)

Geraldo’s talk about his teaching goal lacks credibility with respect to ability, in this case, to complete a four-years’ teacher’s training program but it appears genuine and appears to be the start of more mature thinking about his future. What this suggests with respect to the measures I’ve used is that pushing the analysis further we can see that it is not enough to have relatively lots of grounded references but more

Seeing Beyond the Talk

233

of the “right” type (abilities, interests, etc.) and evidence that are logically linked together in their talk. Geraldo and Evon both had respectable G scores suggesting that they were in the game of career exploration in a serious way; where they differ qualitatively from John and Tracy is in their capacity to link their goals to self-assessment (abilities), activities that could help direct them (influencers/experiences) or evidence of plans (goal-directed), each of which could clarify their goals. They are the kinds of students who would have benefited significantly from good counseling. Again, the relative frequencies of the six grounded reference types do not suggest a significant difference between the Evon and Geraldo types and the John and Tracy types- it is how and how effectively they articulate connections between their goals and supporting references to them and the quality of knowledge they possess that relates to their goals. John and Tracy were able to offer realistic goals because they had good self assessments, good knowledge of what it takes to achieve those goals and plans to carry them out.

NOTES 1. Dan did not offer an explanation for his decision not to sit for our fifth year interview. He had said he would, but did not appear for the interview. I attempted to contact him in the days following that attempted meeting but I was unsuccessful. 2. I note here that, while qualitative analysis is both inductive and grounded, the degree of pre-structuring should have its basis in the type of analysis one is to undertake. In my case some structuring of the questions was necessary to ensure that there was consistency across interviews and across time with each of the respondents (see Maxwell, 1996, p 64). 3. Nud*ist (Nonnumerical unstructured data indexing searching and theorybuilding) is currently the most widely used software for qualitative data analysis projects. It was developed and first published in Melbourne, Australia by Qualitative Solutions & Research Pty., Ltd. It is currently available through Sage Publications. 4. See appendix 6 for an expanded discussion of the results of inter-rater reliability. 5. The reader will find examples, from actual interview texts, for each of the IDC’s in appendix 5. 6. “Actual” is used to mean the objective results derived from systematic measures used to analyze the future talk data. 7. See explanation under Actual G-Rating for why this was weighted as twice the rank order value. 8. Content words were counted for this analysis. Excluded were filler-type words, defined as words that fill pauses but do not add to the content of talk, such as you know, if you see what I mean, like, and others. Utterances such as “ah, “um” were also not counted. Their use of fillers could provide additional analytical consideration but will not be included here. 9. Each movement in talk between the interviewer and the interviewee was counted as a turn. In other words, each shift in talk between speaker and listener

234

Voices of Reason

counts as a turn. The total turns per segment provided above includes both the interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns. 10. The reader is provided here with a rationale for why the ungrounded references, although counted and included in the statistical records, was not made a part of the Actual measures used in this study. There are no accurate measures that reflect what impact the ungrounded references have on the overall assessment of who are the more/most grounded students. In other words, there do not seem to be (based on my intuitive results and all other actual measures) any accurate ways to demonstrate the importance of students’ ungrounded references with respect to their overall interview performance. For example if we use a proportion formula such as Rung/Rg + Rung you would get the following results: John .02, Angela .62, Mona .09, Tony .07, Evon .14, Kelly no ungrounded references, Tracy .13, Geraldo .12, Sarah .09 and Dan .07. John works out fine with .02 but then it is not reasonable to consider Dan and Tony next in the ranking. Even with a simple percentage formula Rung/Rg the results are the same. Thus the problem is that, the number of ungrounded references alone is not an accurate indicator of groundedness. Some of the students, such as Tracy, had more than a few ungrounded references but they also had relatively lots of grounded references, while others had relatively lots of grounded references, while still others had relatively few ungrounded references as well as relatively few grounded references. We can’t say that a student who has that combination is just as grounded as a Tracy who by all other accounts was strongly grounded in spite of her ungrounded comments. What is meant here is that the real story about who are the more grounded students has to do with focusing on grounded talk. Certainly it is worth noting, as I do in this book, the students who are significantly ungrounded and have little in the way of grounded references— such as Angela; just as I make note of John at the other end who has high groundedness and low ungroundedness. But to try to arrive at an RG score that takes into account the frequencies of both grounded and ungrounded references will simply not work in this analysis. 11. The reader is reminded that the variables used in all of the measures for this study are from the future talk segments of the interviews only. 12. My use of “Performance” here refers to productivity (Rg score) in context; that is, production of grounded references in the context of Interviewer Prompts and Interviewee post prompt word count 13. The Spearman is used as a non-parametric version of the Pearson Correlation Coefficient since I’m using ordinal data that does not need to satisfy the normality assumption and is based on the ranks of the data rather than the actual numbers. 14. See appendix 6 for a detailed explication of the use of reliability and validity measures for this study. 15. I make note of this interesting point, that some students were indeed receiving more “counseling” than others unintentionally. It would be interesting to look at the students’ talk which prompted the counseling response to gain insight into why this was the case.

Figure 10.9 D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. Flow Chart, Part 1 of 3

236

Figure 10.9 D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. Flow Chart, Part 2 of 3

237

Figure 10.9 D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. Flow Chart, Part 3 of 3

11 Conclusion: Implications for Research and Practice

Conclusion: Implications for Research and Practice

A WORD FOR GUIDANCE COUNSELORS Guided by the premise that effective decision-making is fundamental to human success both as individuals and as members of a society, I hold that students in their formative years should have access to sustained and effective guidance services. Without intervention, career guidance will continue to come to them in all sorts of ways, out there in their communities, at home, among peers and in their schools. This book attempts to suggest new ways to improve school-based guidance counseling by examining closely what students and I did in co-constructed interview sessions over a five-year period. In addition to case studies of ten students, I propose that practicing counselors can use similar tools and methods to develop a systematic way of looking at the discourse they co-construct with their students. To that end, a variety of tools of discourse analysis were presented here which analyzed both students’ degree of “groundedness” to their educational and vocational goals and the degree to which our co-constructed talk was successful. My findings suggest that counseling talk, particularly where “gatekeeping” decisions are underway, is very much a co-constructed endeavor, much like a dance, where interviewer prompt types and interviewee’s willingness and/or capacity to engage in the expected sort of discourse determines its outcome. In effect, there are two primary issues at work in these exchanges that first, determine how it will proceed and second, what the student ultimately has in store for him/herself: (1) The degree to which they are able to articulate their

240

Voices of Reason

groundedness, that is the degree to which they are able to identify a goal and then give their reasons for it; and (2) the degree to which they are able to see the reasoning behind their goals. In that light, these ten students varied significantly with respect to the degree to which they were able to explicate their reasons for selecting one kind of career over another and their ability to explicate a linkage among their interests, abilities and knowledge of what they’d have to do to achieve their career goals. If you compare John and Angela, for example, where each represent opposite ends of the groundedness and interview success measures, they differ in both regards. The other students fall somewhere between. The counselor in his/her work could look at the degree to which a student offers appropriate kinds of groundedness, and whether he or she provides that groundedness spontaneously or requires lots of prompting to make the appropriate connections. They could ask who is aided in making the connections with the counselor’s prompts and who still remains ungrounded even after several attempts at prompting. My findings suggest that interview success lies with both the interviewer ’s ability to use prompts and for the interviewees to articulate their thoughts. The findings do not, however, suggest that the way open and closed questions are employed by the interviewer significantly impacts the outcome of the interview. Rather, it is how the interviewee responds to those prompts, with the more successful students going beyond closed questions to provide information, that is, interpreting the closed question as if it were an open one. And, again, it appears that it is not only the quantity of students’ grounded references to goals that promote successful talk outcomes but how and how effectively they link those different reference types (abilities, interests, influencers, factual knowledge, etc.) as evidenced by an evaluation of their discourse in the “intuitiveness” exercise in this book. For example, the “John” and “Tracy” types were able to offer realistic goals because they had good self-assessment, good knowledge of what it takes to achieve those goals and plans to carry them out. Thus, the counselor could use these techniques of discourse analysis to reflect both on what the students offer and what their own role (as prompter, guide) should be. Counselors naturally make impressionistic assessments of their students day in and day out. But because some of those impressions may be inaccurate they may be less effective in their work. This is where these tools of discourse analysis offer a systematic way for thinking with and reflecting on both students and counselors’ own practice. It is not suggested here that the “right” quantitative results say conclusively, “you’re good”. Rather, these are a set of tools to think with, to deepen one’s own inquiry into students but also into the co-constructed nature of counseling.

Conclusion: Implications for Research and Practice

241

CLOSING REMARKS As I suggested earlier, most of these students could have benefited from guidance counseling and for others, I’m afraid, the complete absence of counseling intervention has left them, unnecessarily I believe, in undesirable circumstance. If I were to see again the ten students now that they have departed high school what would I learn about their decisions and their guidance sources? Will the spark, the enthusiasm that Geraldo displayed so strongly as he set out to exit 12th grade have diminished because he found he had been misguided in his desire to become a high school teacher? Will Mona recapture her longstanding interest in becoming a physician or will she have gladly found something totally unrelated? What about Sarah, who always wanted to be a meteorologist and then a lawyer only to be told by her grandmother that she wasn’t bright enough? And what has John managed to do in the face of the seemingly insurmountable challenge just to find a quiet room to sleep in at night? Has it finally come together for him now with his father suddenly reappearing in his life and reclaiming him as his son? How well has Angela adjusted to her young motherhood? Does she complete her CNA course, and is that enough for her so that she can relinquish her goal of becoming a nurse? What about Tony—always the quiet one, reluctant to come to the interviews, but always there and always asking if I’d see him again—is the plumbing trade really what he thought it would be for him or does he go the way of his brother and abandon it? Where does Evon finally settle down? Her grandmother, all those years, insisting that she must find a career in the medical field, because “that’s where the money is.” Evon, always the one with the smile, even when things weren’t going so well, always with that distinct laughter, as she makes her self-deprecating comments; I can’t help but want the best for her and I wonder where she is now, and I wonder more about where she might have ended up if she had had guidance counseling earlier. More than at any time in the past, school-based guidance counseling programs must be seen as crucial facets of the educational systems’ obligations to prepare students for futures as successful adult workers. To do that, the discourse analytic tools I’ve presented here can help, in both research and practice, to assess and implement new guidance programs where students (and counselors) make the most of their interests and talents. But the burden is not the guidance counselors’ alone, for there will never be enough resources available to them to give each student all that he or she needs to realize his/her maximum potential; guidance activities must find their way into the classrooms, homes and community organizations. And, yes, adolescents must be

242

Voices of Reason

willing to embrace these opportunities as they go about the business of deciding what they want and how they will achieve their goals.

SUGGESTED APPLICATIONS FOR THIS BOOK: METHODS COURSE, CLASSROOM LESSONS AND PROJECTS At the outset I said this book was written for a wide audience which includes practitioner-researchers, guidance counselors, teachers, parents and adolescents. I shared stories about ten unique adolescents in their own words suggesting that what they’ve had to say will awaken interests and concerns by others about their own futures, particularly adolescents. I offered guidance counselors tools they can use to assess their own practices. And I’ve written this book also for students wishing to understand a way to do research, particularly as a way to examine social issues through discourse analysis. Having said that, secondary and post-secondary educators have an opportunity to use this book to supplement their pedagogy. Beyond its application as a qualitative methods textbook, this book can serve as a catalyst for classroom discussions in the high schools. As an in-class project, for, let’s say a class of 28, each of the seven different interview styles (chapters 3–9) could be assigned to or selected by seven groups of four students each. They could talk among themselves, ask what they see as salient in the interviews. They could compare and contrast their own situations with the students in this book and suggest ways they may apply what they’ve learned to their own lives as they consider their next career moves. Thus, it could be an exercise in self-reflection and understanding decision-making behaviors in ways that directly impact their own thinking and actions. These projects can be longer in duration, perhaps taken home to work on, in groups or alone. Furthermore, the ideas here could nicely be worked into the curriculum serving the students (and teachers) in personal ways while, at the same time, giving them the lessons that need to be covered. For example, in a social studies course, the evolution of labor in this country (from the 18th to the 20th century) could be examined through changes in education that were necessary to provide future work skills, and about where we are today. It could be about how adolescents see their own roles in preparing for today’s labor market. What are the challenges that they face today that their ancestors did not and vice versa? This might be a homework assignment, looking at their own family’s work history, the their choices of careers and what the influencers were.

Conclusion: Implications for Research and Practice

243

For the English subject, these projects could provide excellent opportunities for essay writing and class discussions about things meaningful to the students as they work on writing mechanics and critical thinking/analytical skills. For example, through assigned readings they could examine ways in which characters construct their own choices (personal, careers) over time and consider what-ifs with respect to how those choices were made and their consequences. These discussions should encompass not only educational and vocational decision-making issues but also other facets of the complex mixture of how we see ourselves (and how others see us) and our aspirations and hardships as we meet all sorts of gatekeepers along the way.

Appendix 1 Selective Quantitative Findings from Early Questionnaire

SelectiveQuantitativeFindingsfromEarlyQuestionnaire

ORIGIN OF THE STUDY I was asked to assess 82 eighth graders’ own perspectives about the value of their experimental heterogeneous program (the first of its kind in this large urban school system). I conducted the assessment by questionnaires and included questions regarding their perceptions about the important choices they were making regarding their educational and vocational futures and the support entities available to them to help make these inquires. Subsequently the initial findings of the early quantitative study evolved into the five-year study that resulted in this book. Findings for two of the questions, from my earlier study, are presented here in summary for the purpose of giving the reader a sense of the diversity of the group from which the ten students for this study were chosen and evidence of and an appreciation for the diversity of the H-Team group as well as the students’ sense about the impact of that different, experimental pedagogical approach had on them, through their own talk. 1. I asked all the 82 heterogeneous (H-Team) students if they felt that they performed better academically in their two-year untracked program than they think they would have had they stayed in their traditional tracked setting. Seventy out of the 82 students said they felt the non-tracked learning environment resulted in higher academic performance in all of their six school subjects. Based on statistical analyses of the results, I concluded that the students who considered themselves to be at “Standard” or “Honors” level

246

Voices of Reason

were more likely to indicate that they benefited from their experiences and that math and foreign language were the two subjects most positively influenced. For those who did not indicate significant change, they did not say that the non-tracked experience had a negative impact on their learning. I also found consistency with the way they rated their responses, noting that the level of their declared general track ability (i.e. honors, college, standard) was consistent with the way they rated their subjects that they participated in during the two-year non-tracked program. (It was interesting to note that a high number of students declared themselves in the “College” track when it was known that there were roughly equal numbers of students for the four different track levels going into the H-Team program). Additional analysis indicated a statistical relationship students’ declared general track level and how they perceived their performance in a majority of their current school subjects, but the correlations dropped dramatically when I examined the particular subgroups of Honors, College, and Standard due to issues of homogeneity, which states that like groups result in reduced variability. 2. A second question posed to the 82 students from the H-Team relates to their decision-making activities and educational/vocational goals. I examined several factors related to the declared track levels of these eight-graders, namely how track level relates to (or if it relates at all) their high school choices in the following year (and whether or not they made the decisions themselves) and how track levels relates to their occupational goals. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that a vast majority of the students would indicate schools other than vocational technical schools, especially those at the declared higher track levels academically. But what I found was that nearly one in three said they planned to attend a vocational technical school in the following year (31.4 percent), nearly the same number as those expected to attend a traditional urban high school. Part two of the second question involves responses that 72 eightgrade H-Team children gave about their vocational goals, which revealed some surprising results: More girls indicated they wanted to be lawyers (5) than nurses (4), but only one boy said he wanted to become a lawyer. For the boys, professional sports (6) won easily, 3 to 1, over the next occupational interest, in electronics and electrician work. The girls were more varied with respect to their selections as well as more ambitious, as noted by choices like veterinarian and physician in addition to lawyer and nurse mentioned earlier. Those choices combined to represent 42 percent of all choices made by females. Males, on the other

Selective Quantitative Findings from Early Questionnaire

247

hand, offered no choices that would be considered academically challenging. Of, course one could make a case for professional sports, which represented 30 percent of all male choices. Beyond a descriptive analysis of the data, I looked at whether there was a relationship between vocational choice and declared ability track level and found no statistically significant relationship. But a chi square analysis of occupations by gender did result in a statistically significant difference (p=.03239). Not sure what this may indicate, I decided to conduct a 2[x]2 chi square by reordering the occupations into two groups, “Academically Challenging” and “Not Academically Challenging” and found statistical significance (.0024) suggesting that there was a relationship between gender and vocational categories. The findings indicated that female eighth grade H-Team students were more likely to choose challenging occupations than their male counterparts. Lastly, I conducted a 2[x]2 chi square looking at Challenging and Non-Challenging to Track levels of Honors and College and found no statistical significance. These variables were independent of each other; the general track level that these eighth grade students placed themselves in did not have a relationship to whether they chose challenging or non-challenging occupations.

Appendix 2 General Coding Categories

General Coding Categories

Below are the themes and categories and their definitions used for data categorization. A brief description of each category is offered below. Note that some of the categories are not themes, per se, but rather, distinct categories for holding relevant coded information such as in the case of the “Interviewee” category where the complete transcripts of each student, each year, are “held.” 1. Interviewees: Complete transcriptions for grades 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, for each student, subdivided by place of interview, year of interview and gender. 2. School: Coded reference to the school subjects the students liked and disliked are found here as well as who the choice makers or aides were (teachers, parents, peers) their declared/actual track level and their comments about positive and negative school-related experiences. 3. Background: Talk about the school they attended each year, and background information about their respective schools are found. This is where talk about their extracurricular activities can be found as well as information about their socioeconomic status, family, friends in and out of school, marital status of their parents, what they do for work and self descriptions by these students are all placed here. 4. World Problems: This category houses references to school-related and non-school related social problems that the students talk about. 5. Role of Interviewer: Here I have subcategories for several types of comments made during the interviews. They include agreements,

250

Voices of Reason

revoicing, statements, interpretations. There are subcategories for types of questions asked (open, closed) and another called “special” for positive and negative comments. 6. Future Talk: Relates to their talk about school and vocational choices as well as numerous separate categories for the vocational goals each of the students have stated in each of their five interview years.

Appendix 3 Rules for Coding Future Talk

Rules for Coding Future Talk

SELECTING FUTURE TALK SEGMENTS Within each student’s transcripts there are stretches of dialogue about several different topics. This study focuses on future talk, that is, all talk that relates to their educational and vocational futures. Indicators of future talk are future tense verbs, talk about careers (What I want to be”) or talk that has a forward-looking thrust. It is talk about educational goals (college selection), activities they are exploring as part of their career considerations or anything else that provides the reader with information about the future-oriented hopes and aspirations of these students. The future talk segments should have clear boundaries where the relevant topic has begun and where there is a shift to a new topic. In most cases the student’s future talk will begin with a prompt from the interviewer, but in some cases the shift to future talk may be initiated by the student. Thus, in coding the beginning and ending turns for the Future talk segments, it is important to pay attention to how and who introduces the topic and when it ends after another topic is introduced. Code markers are made in the left margins by circling the line number where the new talk segment begins and ends—and noted with a “B” and “E” respectively. I’ve included talk that clearly illustrates a shift into a future topic and then another shift out of it for purposes of clarification. When actual future talk coding is performed, these additional turns would not be included (example 1). In some cases the shift will not be away from future talk per se but away from the particular future-related topic. In those situations, each would be treated as different segments.

252

Voices of Reason

Example 1: T: We have to like do some reports halfway through and then we just wait for the report cards to come out. But the last quarter they don’t come out until almost July. That’s why they do it that way so you know what you got. (Shift) I: Okay. All right. So, the big question of course now is, where are you going? T: Anna Maria I: Okay, so you decided that’s where you’re going? You’ve applied and been accepted? T: Yes. You have to be 18 to go there. So, I’m 19. I: Okay, you got $10,000 in scholarships—terrific (revealed in earlier talk). Why did you pick Anna Maria. I know it was one of the ones you’ve been thinking about for quite some time? T: I just like it. I like the atmosphere. I: Okay. T: The classmates, I met a few of them. They were nice. I: Okay. You’ll start in September and go all the way through? T: Yes. I want to live there. I: Okay. You’re gonna live there. Terrific. And then what will you major in? Do you know? T: I’m majoring in education or elementary. I: Somebody else mentioned that earlier. So, you’ve changed. T: Right. I was majoring in lawyer. I: Right. So how did you settle on education? T: My ??? class and being in placement with children. It was great. I loved it. I: So you really felt that you were interested and did well with that and connected and that’s just how it works?like training. So four years from now you’ll be out of college, and where will you be? Do you have any idea? T: Well, I want to teach first grade. I: Okay. T: So, hopefully, I’ll have my teacher’s certificate. I: Certified and all that. T: Yes. So, I’ll either try to get a job in that field or go to graduate school or something like that. I: You’ve got some wonderful ideas. And so you’re not—If you would end up somewhere else—let’s say a teaching job didn’t work. Where would you go? Do you feel compelled to be here, to work here or would you— T: I wouldn’t go out of Massachusetts. I: Okay, so obviously you can be certified here and I suppose—I don’t know what would happen if you went somewhere else. They’d have different requirements. (Shift) So, how are the courses here this year?

Note the shift by the interviewer by introducing a different topic.

Rules for Coding Future Talk

253

SELECTING GOALS Any talk about educational and/or vocational goals is coded. These include names of occupations, training options including colleges and universities, or could be general talk such as mentioning the desire to attend college, or having an interest in medicine but not be any more specific than that. Examples: • “If I work at it, maybe a professional ball player” • “I was thinking about my business degree and starting—and going to cosmetology academy, because I really enjoy that too.” • “—veterinarian. I like animals and I always want to help them or something.” • “I’m going to transfer to Worcester State afterwards and get a major in teaching either Science or History.” • “I want to go to a university.” • “Yeah, I’m going onto college and work as a CNA.”

SELECTING/CODING REFERENCES TO GOALS All talk that makes some reference to the goal(s) 1. Grounded References: Grounded references (Rg) are student talk which reflect clear evidence of connection between his/her embodied experiences, personal knowledge of people, places or activities linked to the stated educational and/or vocational goal. Examples: • (Why do you want to be an electrician?) “To make good money.” • “—I changed my mind for four years. Man, I changed from wanting to be a physical therapist to a computer programmer. Now I want to be a teacher. I picked teaching because I think it’s one of the best jobs there is. Whatever you say?Whatever you teach it has an effect on their life. So you got a big responsibility on you shoulders. I think that?not anybody that they could relate to with the problems they’ve been through. The pay is good, I think. It’s not the greatest but it’s good. You get the summers off. Vacation is great. Before I wanted to make a lot of money. Now I want to be happy. You know, I’ll teach. Okay, I’m happy teaching. People are learning from me and I got time off for myself.” 2. Ungrounded References are counted for unsubstantiated comment(s) about a goal. They are identified by statements about feelings or desires about certain goals without any rationale attached to them.

254

Voices of Reason

“I like” Mentality (URl): The student suggests interest in a goal without rationale for it. (“I just want to be. It looks interesting, you know,” or “I think it would be fun”) and may acknowledge the lack of rationale (“I don’t know”). The central characteristic of this type of ungrounded reference is the lack of any claim of personal knowledge or embodied experience. Additional characteristics, as discourse markers, may include, “I don’t know” or hedges such as “Just” as in “I just want to be,” or fillers such as “you know?” • “I think it would be fun” • (Microbiologist) “And I want to work with diseases and all that. Find cures for diseases and—because, I don’t know. I just like looking through a microscope and all that stuff.” (Have you had a chance to do that?) “No. Not yet.” • (Why veterinarian) “I like animals and I always want to help them or something.” • (Being a lawyer) “I see people on TV acting out their stuff, and I like it.” • (Being a police officer) “I would like to be a police officer. It looks interesting, you know?” • (Being a professional dancer) “I can dance. I know that but not—I haven’t been like trained or anything to do all the stuff but, yeah, if I was trained, I could be one of the best, I know.”

CODING GROUNDED REFERENCES FURTHER I developed six mutually exclusive categories of grounded references; each defined below. This coding scheme allows for a more subtle analysis of grounded references. This is, it is possible to not only examine the degree of groundedness in general for each of these students, but we can create a profile of the types of Rg’s that make up the arguments for the choices they make. In other words, some students may rely substantially on what others tell them when selecting their goals while others may look more into their sense of their abilities to guide their choice or significant experience. Of course, it is possible for a student to provide references in a variety of categories and not fit neatly into a profile of reference preferences. Six Grounded Reference Categories: 1. Experience (Re) Any talk that refers to a situation or a plan that has been completed, from which the student emerged with an appreciation for the stated

Rules for Coding Future Talk

255

goal. The experience could be recent or distant but it has the quality of drawing the student into thought or action regarding stated goals. It has the quality of embodiment, in that the student is, to some degree, compelled by the experience to act on it. The experience offers evidence (to the student) of something important going on as it potentially relates to educational and vocational goals. • (Writer) “I’ll sit down like in my free time sometime and write creatively.” • (Doctor) (Where did you get that idea that you want to be a doctor and how long have you had that interest?) “I’ve had it for about three years now, because in the sixth grade, we were studying a unit (on) the bones in the body and that interested me most.” • (Psychology) “I don’t even know if I would go into it as a field of study, but I’m extremely interested in it, like I read it all the time and stuff. I even read about Clark and Sigmund Freud making stops.” 2. Influencer—Person (Ri) Talk that relates to what the student reports as having been said or done by someone else to or for them resulting in some significant degree of influence over their own thoughts or actions about their goals. The influencing person is usually a teacher, family member or friend but not limited to them. • “I kind of figured—My teacher, Mr. Foley, my golf teacher, helped me ’cause you know he talks about how to buy a house. He talked about mortgage laws, and when we was talking about mortgage laws, he always goes into conversations about what kind of good jobs there are. And he would always say, don’t knock teaching out of the question. Don’t knock teaching out of the question ’cause you know, live happy. You know what I’m saying. I think that’s what influenced me the most.” • (College Choice) “. . . and a lot of my relatives went there (Northeastern University) and they said it’s excellent because you make connections and you work for—.” • (Medicine) “They just day do something in the medical field. You get a lot of money and all this and you’ll—because my—my grandmother is a nurse and she wants me to do something in the medical field.” 3. Ability—supported (Rab) This refers to any talk about the student’s abilities that is supported by objective measures. For example, a student says he/she does well in math and has been getting high marks on report cards, or says he/she

256

Voices of Reason

is a strong athlete in some sport supported by placement on varsity team, plays often, high points average, etc. So, in order to code this, there must be a statement of ability followed by some supporting evidence that can be substantiated. • (Engineering) “My best two subjects are science and math—my highest grade averages. I mean, I can do them really well; so, I thought engineering would be a good field to go into.” • (Journalism) “I seem to lean towards something from the English department, journalism or something of that sort, because it comes like really naturally to me.” • (College Choice) “Then I have to count also if I’m gonna continue playing basketball because that would play a big role in deciding what college I go to because Clark is a Division 3 I could obviously play there. Whereas if I go to like Northeastern I’ll just be watching from the stands, so.” 4. Accurate Factual Claim (Rf) References about facts relating to a goal. Any statement that is plainly a fact that the student has learned and has incorporated into his/her thinking or action related to a stated goal. Facts are different from the “Ability-supported” category in that it stands alone as some objective statement outside of the student’s own reference to or participation in it. For example, the SAT requirements for admission to a school of choice, a particular program arrangement that is of interest to the student, (for example Northeastern’s Co-op program), low socioeconomic status requires financial aide considerations to pay for college. • “I know from my financial situation that where I go (to college) is going to be based on scholarships, grants, loans, financial aid and that sort of thing.” • “Well, I’m contemplating Northeastern because it has the Co-op Program.” • “I wanted to go to NYU or Cornell or UMass but lately I’ve been saying BU, but I don’t know . . . ’cause I’m in this program, like, I got because of my PSAT score this program on (Macy) Scholars, like, minorities in medicinal or whatever . . . but it’s like there’s six colleges in the like Macy Scholars—like the college is gonna help or something and with early admissions and stuff. And Cornell is one and NYU, I think, is one.” 5. Goal-Directed Activity or Planned Activity (Rp) Making inquiries, researching, making or planning actual visits, i.e. colleges. Anything that the student says he/she plans to do that relates

Rules for Coding Future Talk

257

to stated goals. This is different from the “Experience” category in that it is about ongoing or future activities, not situations that have already taken place. It’s about exploring the goal further in an attempt to validate, discard or modify it. It is essentially the evidence about selfdirected search. While these types of references are more statements about steps toward goals as differentiated from the other categories about rationale for goals, this category, nonetheless, is about evidence for rationale through appropriate actions. • (Computer Programming) “I sort of want to go into computer programming. I’ve been inquiring to a specific school of the #1 programming school in the total world actually. It’s called Digiten Institute—Digital-Pen—and it’s actually in Vancouver, Canada.” • (Law Interest) “I’m taking law right now. There isn’t Law II so I’d end up probably?I’m thinking about going to Washington, D.C. on a—I forgot what it’s called. It’s a 4-day trip and you work with the law system and you go on field trips and everything. I’m working on that.” 6. Affect with Origin (Ra) These are remarks that relate to the feelings connected to the goal(s). As differentiated from the ungrounded talk such as “I like” with no supporting statement(s), these grounded references provide a sense of the students’ state of mind, how they feel about the goal or some aspect of the goal. It is their comment about their own emotional reaction to or about circumstances that relate to the goal or emotional reactions to the goal itself. It offers a sense of the quality and intensity of the interest of their goal; a sense of curiosity about something. • (Psychology) “Well, I was in a psychology course last year for a study and I was really interested, instead of like going to sleep in my study or doing work, I like sat there and paid attention to the class.” Student places emphasis on level of interest, not just interested but “really” interested and then gives evidence to support it by saying that he paid attention instead of falling asleep. It’s more than just a statement about liking something. He demonstrates the strength of his interest by saying that it served to keep him attentive in class. • (Psychology) “And then like this year, I looked in a few books and stuff, because I was curious because like my mother always claims to have this illness and whatnot.” Here the student states that he is drawn to psychology out of curiosity because of a personal situation that directly effects him (his mother).

258

Voices of Reason

Again we have a connection between a description of affect and a resulting behavior, i.e. behavior of reading books because he wanted to know what his mother was about. • (Journalism)—“I love writing . . . I like to write stories dealing with everything from just a regular old high school to, you know, rape, and abuse and all that stuff . . . I keep a journal every night.” 7. Marking Interviewer Prompts With varying degrees, the interviewer used prompts (lead-in questions, clarification statements, etc.) both to introduce topics, in this case future talk, and to request students to elaborate their answers. (See chapter 3, under “Interviewer Role—Prompts” for a definition.) I: Okay. So, are you thinking about going to college? (Prompt) A: Yes. I: Thinking about making a goal of going to college? (Prompt) A: Yes.

This would be counted as two prompts, and one ungrounded reference to a goal. I’ve simply reiterated the question for which she gives the same answer regarding the same goal. Example 2: I: Any ideas at all about what you might want to do for a living someday? (Prompt) A: No, not really. I dream about stuff I want to be, but I know it ain’t going to happen. (Ungrounded Reference) I: Well, what do you dream? (Prompt) A: Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that. I (could) go to law school for that. (Grounded Reference)

Without the prompt from the interviewer, it appears that the student would have not revealed one of her vocational considerations. She is encouraged to elaborate in line 167 and in line 168 she provides a reference to her goal, noting that she has the knowledge that she’d have to attend law school if she decides to become a lawyer, although it is unclear how much she really knows about preparation time. (Actual Factual Claim) Example 3: (P) I: Have you been thinking about it (college)? T: Yeah. This past April vacation, I went down to Washington, D.C. with my mother and we visited Howard University (G: grounded reference to “college” goal as an embodied experience) , and I really like it there, (UNG) but my mom is say, Money, Money, Money (G) and I’m just like, No, No, No, Scholarship, Financial Aid. (G)

Appendix 4 Coder Instructions: Coding Future Talk

Coder Instructions: Coding Future Talk

Your task is to mark (code) transcripts derived from my talk with students about their school and personal lives. Using the “Rules For Coding Future Talk” (Appendix 3), you will be looking for instances where the students talk about their educational and vocational futures and references to their future talk. You will conduct the coding exercise as outlined below: Step 1: You will begin first by reading over the entire transcript so you can become familiar with it, as to the variety of topics and the topic shifts. Step 2: Go back and mark, by line number found in the left margin, the beginning and ending of each stretch (segment) of talk that relates to the student’s educational and/or vocational future. Be sure to include all text that appears to mark the start and finish of that segment of future talk. See the example given in Appendix 3, under “Selecting Future Talk Segments.” When you’ve locating the beginning line, circle the line number and place a “B” for beginning and an “E” for the line that ends that segment. Step 3: Now you should have future talk segments from the transcript, usually two segments (although could be more or less). Next you will examine the student’s talk about his/her educational and/or vocational goals. Underline all words that describe goal(s). Example: “I want to be a lawyer.” Step 4: Now it is time to locate all talk that makes references to the goals. Go back and read the text surrounding the marked goals. Again,

260

Voices of Reason

refer to Appendix 2 for what is considered “Reference” talk. At this stage, you will code all references to educational and vocational goals regardless of whether they are “Grounded” or “Ungrounded.” You will code each reference by double underlining the sentence that holds the reference. Example: “Like I dream I want to be a lawyer or something like that. I (could) go to law school for that. Step 5: Now return to the text that you coded as references and determine if they are grounded or ungrounded references. Mark the end of the reference sentence as either G or UNG. If the sentence has more than one reference mark it where each reference occurs. Example: “I still want to be a meteorologist. I mean, even though I have to take math (G), but I’ll just get a tutor to help me out (G) ’cause I can’t—I can do it but, you know, if I have help, if I do it, like if someone teaches me to do it, I could do it.” Example: “I would like to be a police officer. It looks interesting, you know?” (UNG) Step 6: Now all references to goals in the future talk segment should be underlined and marked as “G” or “UNG”. You will now go back to all of the references marked grounded and categorize them as one of six types. See Appendix A for a description of each. Simply pencil in the reference type using their abbreviations, Re, Ri, Rab, Rf, Rp or Ra, just above where you marked the reference as grounded (G). Example: “I still want to be a meteorologist. I mean, even though I Ra Rp have to take math (G), but I’ll just get a tutor to help me out (G) ’cause I can’t—I can do it but, you know, if I have help, if I do it, like if someone teaches me to do it, I could do it.” The “Rab” coding relates here to her statement about a weakness in math that could pose a problem for her meteorology interest, so it is about abilities. The “Rp” coding is given here because it relates to some future activity being planned or considered that could aid with determining if this will be a realistic goal. Step 7: In the final step, you are going to examine if the student’s references were prompted by the interviewer. See Appendix 3 for the definition of “Prompts.” Go back and locate each coded reference and see if the student’s talk followed prompt(s) from the interviewer. If so, go to the interviewer’s turn just prior to the student’s turn and mark it with a “P” at the start of that turn, in the left hand margin.

Coder Instructions: Coding Future Talk

261

Example: (P) I: So the big question after that is of course now that you’re graduating is, where are you going? S: Laboure College. I: Where is that? S: Laboure. I: Oh, okay. S: Do you know what I mean? (P) I: Yeah, over at—How did you decide on that? S: ’Cause I want to be a dietetic technician. I: Oh, okay. Last year you were really not sure about anything. I don’t know if you remember but for a long time you wanted to be a meteorologist and things were kind of not certain for you last year but now you’re back on track? S: Yep. (P) I: How did you decide you wanted to do that? S: Well, I needed to do something so I just decided that, you know, I went Re to anAmerican home as a dietetic aide.(G) So I wanted to become a dietician but because I moved around to so many schools and stuff—my Rab grades weren’t all that good. (G) And I didn’t want to try to go to a four-year college. So I wanted to go to like a two-year community college but I still wanted to do something in that field and Laboure is, I think is Rg the only one in Massachusetts that has that program.(G)

No (P) coding is given for the first interviewer turn (“So the big question after that...”) because a reference to a goal does not follow the interviewer turn. Example of a Coded “Future” Talk Segment (2) (P)I: What is your preparation? What are you preparing for? K: To be somewhere in the health facility. I: Okay. Something in the health area, but you’re not sure exactly what it will be yet? K: No, not yet. (P) I: Do you remember what you said last year about what? K: Yeah, an RN (P) I: Okay. Now, what are your feelings now about that? K: I worked in a hospital-volunteering—That’s part of our program

262

Voices of Reason Re Re here (G). And I don’t like—I’ve seen what the RN’s do—I don’t like it (G). I: Okay. What part of it don’t you like? Rf K: Cleaning up people—giving needles (G). I: Yeah. Okay. So, now you’ve had the actual experience and have seen what it’s like, you’re having second thoughts about doing the RN work—and the LPN would be— (P) you have LPN and you have RN—but still either of those you don’t think you’d be interested in? (E) K: I might. I might still, but I’m just thinking it all over now.

Appendix 5 Interviewer Discourse Codes: Examples

InterviewerDiscourseCodes:Examples

Another dimension in assessing the students’ degree of groundedness about their future and the success of the interviews is the role of the interviewer in co-constructing the interviews. For the analysis, such questions were asked as, How or in what ways did I influence, direct, guide or misguide the interviews? Were there similar/different discourse styles (or talk characteristics) used for each of the ten students? How were they identified? What were the discourse methods the interviewer used and how and how often were they employed? Most importantly, what was it that the interviewer did that helped the interviewee tell his/her story (or hindered that process)? Examined were statements, comments and questions in the five years of future talk segments and identified the following categories: 1. Acknowledgement (ACK): Any response by the interviewer that agrees with the interviewee. A frequently used example is the one-word response, “Okay.” Example 1: “Right, that’s true” Example 2: “All right” 2. Open Question (OQ): These are questions I asked the interviewee which generally require more than one-word responses. Example 1: “What other dreams do you have?” Example 2: “Now what’s the reason for wanting to be a meteorologist, at this point?”

264

Voices of Reason

Example 3: “And you said you wanted to go to the Worcester Vocational High School. So, you went there for a half a year and now you’re here and what are you going to do next year”? 3. Closed Question (CQ): Questions that ask for a “yes” or “no” response. I used this code literally. If the question was framed to be answered yes or no then it was a CQ code even though the children varied widely in how they handled such a question. Some answered with a simple yes or no. Others provided more details. Example 1: “Are you gonna talk to your counselor about that?” Example 2: “Okay, and then would you go on to college?” Example 3: “Have you been down to Howard University and checked it out?” 4. Personal Comment (PC): These are comments I made, usually positive, although could be negative, and usually in the form of praise or support. Example 1: “Good, that’s a good thing to have.” Example 2: “You’ve got some wonderful ideas.” Example 3: “That’s great.” Note that example 3 above is coded as a “PC” and not an “Ack” because it is making a judgment about what the interviewee has just said. If I had said, “Okay, that’s good” it would be an acknowledgement. Although the word “good” is used, it is done so as a common expression, connoting understanding of what was said and that we can proceed with the discussion at hand. “That’s great” on the other hand, is said with a more intentional positive sense, as though it could be followed by an exclamation point. 5. Revoicing (Re): This code was applied to talk where I repeated, paraphrased, revoiced or in some way reiterated what the interviewee said. Example 1: “So you’re thinking you still want to be a doctor, but it would be a different kind of doctor.” Example 2: “So, after you’re finished here, you’ll go on and do two years of apprenticeship for somebody.” Example 3: “Okay, so it will be the medical field. You’ve always had an interest in biology, anatomy and things that are related to that.” 6. Interpretation (Int): These were interpretation-type responses I made, or opinions, or inferences, about something the interviewee said.

Interviewer Discourse Codes: Examples

265

Example 1: “So, by experiencing that it gave you an idea of what it would be like if you were to get into that field, it would be a lot more math, a great deal more math.” Example 2: “You’re kind of drawn to it?” Example 3: “So when you say, my goal is to be a nurse, you sound very sure of yourself.” Example 4: “So, it sounds to me like, even though you say you don’t have a clue, you do have an idea what you want to do.” 7. Counseling (Co): Any statements of the type I’d use in counseling situations, as if wearing my counseling hat (professional judgement, comment). Example 1: “Oh sure. It would depend on what they recognize. If you’re thinking about going to Howard University, something you could check out and ask them. Say, ‘If I go to your college here what would you take, what will you accept?’ Know it up front before you even go in.” Example 2: “You ought to look into that. Maybe it can become an elective for you later on.” Example 3: “Well, you could go for that. Because, I mean for a meteorologist, you really wouldn’t have a chance to have a lot of people contact.” 8. Clarification (Cl): Applied to requests for clarification from the interviewee if I didn’t understand what they said. Example 1: “And your brother is already trained or he’s in high school now?” Example 2: “Pardon me?” Example 3: “Be what?”

Appendix 6 Discussion about Reliability and Validity in This Study

Discussion about Reliability and Validity in This Study

RELIABILITY In qualitative research, when we want to examine the degree of accuracy of interview data coding, for example as it applies here, we have two or more independent persons code the same data to see how consistent they were in coding the same way. This is called inter-rater reliability. It is an important first step in establishing the clarity of my operational definitions and ultimately the credibility of my findings. The degree of variance, in other words the degree to which independent coders differ, results in a coefficient, analogous to a correlation coefficient and has the same range of values (–1 to +1). Thus the reliability coefficient indicates the degree of agreement between the independent coders. There are several methods for conducting inter-rater reliability (Scott’s Pi, Cohen’s Kappa, Krippendorf’s r). The one to use is, in part, determined by the type of data. Some of the data that was coded in this study are called nominal data because the codes were assigned to the interview (future talk segments, the six grounded reference categories, etc.) merely as labels of or names for those responses. The Kappa reliability coefficient was used here. It is especially useful in that it takes into account chance-expected agreements between coders noted as Ie. Thus the Cohen’s Kappa looks like this: Where the value of 1 connotes complete agreement for each occurrence, let Io denote the observed value of all agreements and Ie denote the value based on chance alone. The obtained excess beyond chance is Io – Ie;

268

Voices of Reason

The maximum possible excess is 1 – Ie; For complete agreement = +1 Thus the formula is: = (Io – Ie)/(1 – Ie) Aided by the “coder instructions” manual in Appendix B and the operational definitions and illustrations in Appendix A titled “Rules For Coding Future Talk,” the independent coder coded five interview transcripts which would be expected to produce about 10 future talk segments, or approximately 10 percent of all future talk segments across five years for all students. Step four of the coding steps was statistically evaluated using the Cohen’s Kappa coefficient. The steps are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Future talk Educational and vocational goals Grounded and ungrounded references to future talk Six categories of grounded references to future talk Ungrounded references to future talk Coding interviewer prompts Marking interviewer discourse codes (IDC’s).

Steps 1–3 did not require rating but rather location of the data in the interview transcripts and so did not undergo the Kappa evaluation for inter-rater reliability. In other words, at these steps the coder either found the correct data or they did not. Specifically, beginning with future talk segments, the coder was asked to locate the beginning and ending stretches of talk that were, by the definition provided to them, future talk stretches and then returned to locate goals stated by the interviewee and then the incidents of grounded and ungrounded references. For these steps I give the percentage of correct location of the data. For step 4 , the coder was instructed to make a judgment about the type of each grounded reference from six choices, per a provided written document giving their definitions. Here, as nominal data, the Kappa Coefficient was used to measure the strength of the two coders’ agreement about what reference types those grounded references were. At steps one and two, identification of future talk segments and goals achieved 100 percent agreement between the independent coders. At step three, there was a 92 percent agreement rate between the coders. Step four, considered the most complex of the coding levels, underwent a Kappa Coefficient using a matrix with the following results: Re = 1.45 R i= .65

Discussion about Reliability and Validity in This Study

269

Rab = .13 Ra = 0 Rf = 5.81 Rp = .52 Kappa = d (diagonal total of cells) – q/ N (total of columns or rows) – q Kappa = 27 – 8.56/ 31 – 8.56 = .82 The closer Kappa is to 1.0 the higher the accuracy of the data; thus a Kappa Coefficient of .82 indicates a strong agreement or relatively high data accuracy. Step six was not subjected to inter-coder reliability due to its simple exercise of locating where the interviewer asked questions or otherwise prompted more information from the interviewee. Step seven was not part of the G-rating analysis and did not undergo inter-rater reliability, something that could have been done and may at a later time.

VALIDITY Validity, as it is traditionally used, refers to how correct or accurate statements or findings are, about how close to the truth some given knowledge is as tested using established quantitative conventions. Thus from a positivist approach, as a scientific endeavor, validity is established by some measurement that asks the question, “Am I measuring what I think I am measuring or claim to measure?” From a qualitative perspective, as with this study relating to interview research, it is more about the plausibility and quality of my presentation (findings) and conclusions. On one level, as Wolcott writes, “I try to understand, rather than convince” (1990, 121), to learn student’s approaches to making important decisions through a systematic examination of our co-constructed interviews using discourse analytic tools. At another level, if I have been successful with conveying to the reader what knowledge my research has brought about (answering the research questions in chapter 1) then I’ve achieved one of my main objectives. The validity strength of discourse analysis is not based on “reality” per se (Carspecken 1996; Mishler 1990) because each of our own constructions of that reality is based on language plus situations “out there.” But, having said that, and understanding that validity status is not static, Gee offers 4 elements on which validity in discourse analysis is based:

270

Voices of Reason

1. Convergence: A discourse analysis is more, rather than less valid (“Trustworthy”), the more the answers to eighteen questions 1 that “converge” to support the analysis. 2. Agreement: Answers to the eighteen questions are more convincing the more “native speakers” of the social languages in the data and “members” of the discourses implicated in the data agree that the analysis reflects how social languages actually can function in such settings. 3. Coverage: The analysis is more valid the more it can be applied to related sorts of data. This includes being able to make sense of what has come before and after the situation being analyzed and being able to predict the sorts of things that might happen in related sorts of situations. 4. Linguistic details: The analysis is more valid the more tightly it is tied to details of linguistic structure. All human languages have evolved, biologically and culturally, to serve an array of different communicative functions. For this reason, the grammar of any social language is composed of specific forms that are designed to carry out specific functions, though any form can usually carry out more than one function. (Gee, 1999: 95)

NOTE 1. The reader is directed to Gee’s detailed outline of the sorts of questions that an “ideal” discourse analysis would attempt to answer in his book, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 1999, pages 92–93.

Bibliography

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays By M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Hoguist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Beck, Aaron T. Depression: Clinical, Experimental, and Theoretical Aspects. New York: Hoeber, 1967. . Cognitive Theapy and Emotional Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1976. Bogdan, Robert C. & Sari Knopp Biklen. Qualitative Research for Education. 2nd ed. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1992. Briggs, C. Learning how to ask. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Brown, Gillian. Speakers, Listeners, and Communication: Explorations in Discourse Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Brown, Gillian, & George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. . “Culture and Human Development: A New Look.” Human Development, 33, 1990, 344–355. Bruner, John. Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993. Cameron, D., E. Frazier., P. Harvey., B. Rampton, & K. Richardson. Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment: Issues of Method in Researching Language. London: Routledge, 1991. Carspecken, Phil Francis. Critical Ethnography in Educational Research. London: Routledge, 1996. Carspecken, Phil Francis, & Michael Apple. “Critical Qualitative Research: Theory, Methodology, and Practice,” in M.D. LeCompte, W.L. Millroy, &

272

Bibliography

J. Preissle (Eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education. San Diego: Academic Press, 1992, 507–553. Cetron, Marvin & Margaret Gayle. Educational Renaissance: Our Schools at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Clark, Herbert H. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Cohen, Elliot D. & Cale Spieler Cohen. The Virtuous Therapist. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1999. Cole, Michael. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Lives of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990. Coulthard, Malcolm. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1977. D’Andrade, Roy. “Schemas and Motivation,” in Human Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 23–44. D’Andrade, Roy, & Claudia Strauss (ed.). Human Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Durani, Alessandro. “Ethnography of Speaking: Toward a Linguistics of the Praxis.” In F. J. Newmeyer (ed.) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Volume IV. Language: The Socio-cultural Context. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 210–227. Eckert, Penelope. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1989. Erickson, Fredrick. “Ethnographic Microanalysis of Interaction.” In M.D. LeCompte, W. L. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education. San Diego: Academic Press, 1992, 201–225. Erickson, Fredrick, and Jeffery Shultz. The Counselor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Firestone, W. A. “Alternative Arguments for Generalizing from Data as Applied to Qualitative Research.” Educational Researcher 22(4), 1993, 16–23. Freud, Anna. “Adolescence.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 13, 1958, 255–278. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1961. Gardner, Howard. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Garfinkel, H. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies in Discourses. London: Falmer Press, 1990. . “A Linguistic Approach to Narrative.” Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1(1): 15–39. . The Social Mind. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992. . An Introduction to Human Language: Fundamental Concepts in Linguistics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993. . An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge, 1999. Gee, James Paul, Sarah Michaels, and M. C. O’Connor. “Discourse Analysis,” in M.D. LeCompte, W., L. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.), The Handbook of

Bibliography

273

Qualitative Research in Education. New York: Academic Press, 1992, 227– 291. Gee, James Paul, & Sarah Michaels. “Discourse Styles: Variations across Speakers, Situations, and Tasks.” Discourse Processes, 12(3), 1989, 263– 266. Gee, James Paul, Glunda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Sydney: Westview Press, 1996. Georgakopoulou & Dionysis Goutsos. Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Ginsburg, Herbert P. Entering the Child’s Mind: The Clinical Interview in Psychological Research and Practice. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. . “The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalizations,” in Asylums. New York: Anchor Books, 1961, 323–386. . “On the face,” in Interaction Ritual. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. . Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1974. . Forms of Talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Goldenberg, Sheldon. Thinking Methodologically. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. Gumperz, J. J. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Halliday, M.A.K. “Language Structure and Language Function,” in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. J. Lyons. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970. Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Herr, Edwin, & Stanley Cramer. Career Guidance and Counseling Through the Lifespan: Systematic Approaches. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. . Vocational Guidance and Career Development in the Schools: Toward a Systems Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972. Holland, Dorothy. “How Cultural Systems Become Desire: A Case Study of American Romance,” in Human Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 61–89. Holland, Dorothy, & Naomi Quinn (eds.). Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hoppock, Robert. Occupational Information. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976. Howe, K. R. “Two Dogmas of Educational Research.” Educational Researcher 14(8), 1985, 10–18. . “Against the Quantitative–Qualitative Incompatibility Thesis or Dogmas Die Hard.” Educational Researcher 17(8), 1988, 10–16. Hunt, M. The Story of Psychology. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

274

Bibliography

Hutchby, Ian & Robin Wooffitt: Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988. Hymes, Dell. In Vain I Tried to Tell You. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. . “Toward Ethnographies of Communication,” in Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. Inhelder, B., and J. Piaget. The Early Growth of Logic in the Child. New York: Humanities Press, 1964. Kagan, J. The Nature of the Child. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1964. Kaufman, P., J. Y. Kwon, S. Klein, & C. D. Chapman. “Dropout Rates in the United States: 1998” (National Center for Education Statistics 2000-022), 1999. Kvale, Steinar. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996. Labov, William. “The Study of Language in its Social Context,” in Sociolinguistic Patterns. Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvana Press, 1972. Labov, William & Joshua Waletzky. “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,” in Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. June Helms. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. Lightfoot, Sara Lawrence. The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Linde, C. “Explanatory Systems in Oral Life Stories,” in Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 343–366. Maanen, John Van. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Mandler, Jean Matter. Stories, Scripts, and Aspects of Schema Theory. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1984. Maxwell, Joseph A. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996. Merriam, Sharon B. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Michaels, Sarah. “Sharing Time: Children’s Narrative Styles and Differential Access to Literacy.” Language Socialization (10), 1981, 423–42. . “Influences on Children’s Narratives.” Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 5 (no. 2), 1983, 30–34. . “Hearing the Connections in Children’s Oral and Written Discourse.” Journal of Education 167, 1985, 36–56. Miles, Matthew B. & A. Michael Huberman. Qualitative Data Analysis. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 1994. Mishler, Elliot G. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. . “Validation in Inquiry-Guided Research: The Role of Exemplars in Narrative Studies.” Harvard Educational Review, 60(4), 1990, 415–442. . “Representing Discourse: The Rhetoric of Transcription.” Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1(4), 1991, 255–280. Mitchell, Mark & Jaina Jolley. Research Design Explained. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988.

Bibliography

275

O’Connell, D.K. “A Note on Time, Timing and Transcriptions Thereof.” The Georgetown Journal of Language & Linguistics, 1(2), 1990, 203–208. Ortony, Andrew, Gerald L. Clore & Allan Collins. “The Cognitive Psychology of Appraisal,” in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 34–58. Parsons, Frank. Choosing a Vocation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: The Free Press, 1965. . Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1968. Prediger, D. J., J. D. Roth, & R. J. Noeth. Nationwide Study of Student Career Development: Summary of Results. Iowa City: The American College Testing Program, 1973. Psathas, George. Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. Quinn, N. H., D. “Culture and Cognition,” in Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Rogers, Carl. Client-centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. . On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. Rose, Michael. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Rubin, Herbert J. & Irene S. Rubin. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation.” Language 50, 1974, 696–735. Sarbin, Theodore R. ed. Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York: Praeger, 1986. Saussure, F. A Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Schegloff, Emmanuel A., G. Jefferson & Harvey Sacks. “The Preference of SelfCorrection in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language, 53, 1977, 361–382. Schiffrin, Deborah. Discourse Markers. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. . “Conversation Analysis,” in F. J. Newmayer (Ed.), Linguistics; The Cambridge Survey. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 251–76. . Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell, 1994. Silverman, David. Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Swingle, Paul G. (ed.) Social Psychology in Natural Settings: A Reader in Field Experimentation. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. Tharp, Roland G. & Ronald Gallimore. Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Van Maanen, J. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Vygotsky, L.S. The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1: Problems of General Psychology. (Edited by R.W. Rieber & A. S. Carton). New York: Plenum, 1987. Weinstein, E. A., & J. M. Tamur. “Meanings, Purposes and Structural Resources in Social Interaction,” in J. G. Manis and B. N. Meltzer (eds.), Symbolic Interaction (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978.

276

Bibliography

Weissberg, M., M. Berentsen, A. Cote, B. Cravey, & K. Heath. “An Assessment of the Personal, Career, and Academic Needs of Undergraduate Students.” Journal of College Student Personnel 23, 1982, 115–122. Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Whyte, William Foote. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. 4th ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Wolcott, Harry. “Posturing in Qualitative Inquiry,” in The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education. New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1992. . Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994. Zern, David S. “The Expressed Preference of Difference Ages of Adolescents for Assistance in the Development of Moral Values.” Adolescence, XX(78), 1985.

Index

Index

Actual G rating, 204–6 Actual Rg score, 205 Adolescents: at-risk, 8, 11 n.2; expectations, 9, 33, 35 Angela: introduction to, 65–66; pregnancy, 72–75; second year summary, 69–70; setting up interview, 66; talk amount, 208; twelfth grade summary, 75–76; vocational interests, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76 Audience, 21 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 20 Balancing act, 93 Beck, Aaron, 32 Career counseling: emerging approaches to, 14 Chromos, 17 Class projects, 242–43 Client-centered approach. See Rogers, Carl Closed-ended questions, 37, 65, 217– 18 Co-construction, 13, 15 Coder agreements, 194–95 Coding: categories, 192; future talk, 193–96. See also Themes Coherence, 18, 23

Communication competence, 17, 25, 32, 208 Communicative meaning, 23 Compassionate communicator, 141 Composite G rating: rationale for, 207–8 Confidentiality, 35 Content words, 283 n.8 Context-stripped cases, 213 Contextualization cues, 23 Conversation: process of, 213; as culturally organized, 16 Conversation analysis (CA), 22 Counseling: discursive process, 192–93 Counselor: role as, 192–93; in role as interviewer, 219, 221 Counseling applications, 31–32 Credibility. See Validity Crusaders for justice, 141 Culture: study of, 25 Cultural heterogeneity, 23 Dan: introduction to, 123–24; vocational Interests, 125, 126, 128 Dance, 93. See also Talk Data coding, 188 D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. flowchart, 188, 235–37

278

Index

Decision-making, 228; communication competence in, 8, 32; focus on abilities, 222; John, 47; maturity in, 135–36; need for, 240; reactive behaviors of, 130 Demographics, 189 Discourses: coherence, 23; (D)iscourse, 19; feature of, 6–7 Discourse analysis: definition of, 18; sociocultural approach to, 19; tools, 31, 188 Education: Sarah, 155–56, 167–68 Erickson, Fredrick, 16–17 Ethnography of communication, 25– 27 Ethnomethodology. See Conversation analysis Evon: introduction to, 171–72; racism, 176–77; vocational interests, 173, 175, 178, 180, 182–83 Eye contact, 79 Front, 24. See also Goffman, Erving Function: of language, 28. See also Language Future talk, 18, 31, 192; coding, 193– 96; coding future talk segments, 193–94; coding educational and vocational goals, 194; coding grounded and ungrounded reference goals, 194–95; six reference types, 195; ungrounded reference categories, 195. See also Groundedness; Talk Gatekeeper, 9 Gee, James Paul, 18–19, 20, 21 Generality issues, 214 Genres: as patterns defined by emic, 21; etic, 21 Getting the job done, 125 Geraldo: coded talk, 231–33; H-team, 114–15; introduction to, 110–11; violence, 172; vocational interests, 111, 113, 115–16, 117, 119–20 Goes with the wind, 65 Goffman, Erving, 24–25

G-Rating. See Actual G rating Great orator, 37 Groundedness: evidence for, 21, 192, 197, 227; references, 14, 194; six categories, 195, 204–5, 220–22; ungrounded references, 195. See also Ungrounded references Guidance: inner-city, 6; role of counselor, 16, 31; services, 6; time constraints, 208 Guidance counseling program: need for, 7–79, 241–42 Gumperz, John, 23–24, 25 Holistic overview: of talk data, 192 H-Team, 10–11; Geraldo, 114–15; John, 57–58; Tracy, 142–43 Humanistic psychology: see Rogers Hymes, Dell, 25 Identity: performed social, 16; social, 17 Inter-rater reliability, 198–200; kappa coefficient, 195 Interview success, 29, 211–12; factor of, 207–8; features of, 222–28; value of, Mona, 105. See also Talk Interviewer discourse codes, 196, 216–19 Interviewer prompts, 196, 240; as active listeners, 15; interpretation of, 30 Interviews, 20, 32; as speech acts, 26; co-constructed nature of, 20, 28; format, 27, 190–91; questions, 27 Interviewee: candor, 84; confidentiality, 35; demographics, 189; P-Ivee, 206; selecting, 10–11, 188 Interviewer as co-constructor, 13 Intuitive G rating, 197–202; calculating, 201 John: about talk amount, 208; favorite school subjects, 40, 43–44; home and school life, 42, 51–52, 55–56; initiative, 53; introduction to, 37–38; ninth grade summary, 46–47; vocational interests, 40, 44, 50–51, 54, 56

Index Karos, 17 Kelly: about talk amount, 208; introduction to, 130–31; vocational interests, 133, 134–35, 136, 138 Knowledge: construction of, 16 Language: structure and function of, 20, 28 Longitudinal study: value of, 214 Meaning: in language, 20; in social context, 18 Meaningfulness, of numbers. See Inter-rater reliability Measures: actual G rating, definition of, 204; inter-rater reliability results, 199–200; intuitive G rating, 197; statistical correlation, 209–11 Michaels, Sarah, 19, 21 Mishler, Elliot, 20, C. 30–31 Mona: college considerations, 100; introduction to, 93–94; racism, 101; twelfth grade synopsis, 106–8; vocational interests, 95–96, 98, 100– 101, 103–4, 107 Moves, 24. See also Goffman, Erving Non-tracked. See H-Team Nud*ist, 191 Parson, Frank, 14 Performance, 234 n.10 P-Ivee score: formula for, 206 P-Iver score: formula for, 205–6 Productivity, 206. See also Actual G rating Pulling teeth, 79 Qualitative analysis: credibility of, 215 Qualitative research, 187 Qualitative software: Nud*ist, 191, 233 n.3 Quantitative analysis, 10, 11 n.3, 203–4 Quantitative measures: in a qualitative study, 213–15

279

Questionnaire, 15, 189–90; limited nature of, 15 Questions: closed, 65, 217, 225, 226; interview, 27; open, 217, 224, 226– 27; reformation of, 30; research, 13– 14, 187, 191, 193 Racism: Evon, 176–77; John, 57; Mona, 101; Sarah, 166–67 Rank order values: rationale for, 206–7 References: grounded, grounded, 14, 194; ungrounded, 234 n.10. See also Groundedness Reference score, 194 Reliability, 213–14, 234 n.14. See also Inter-rater reliability Relative outcomes, 214 Research design: D.E.C.I.S.I.O.N.S. flowchart, 188; subjects, 188 Research questions, 13–14, 187–93 Researcher’s agenda, 27 Results, 239–41; generalization of, 214–15 Revoicing, 93 Rogers, Carl, 32–33, C. 33 Sarah, 153–54; about amount of talk, 208; education, 155–56, 167–68; respect, 159–60; vocational Interests, 154–55, 158, 161, 163–64, 165–66 Scaffolding, 65, 79, 81 Schiffrin, Deborah C., 24 Schultz, Jeffrey C., 16–17 Segments. See Future talk Sense-making, John, 17, 46–47 Sentence meaning, 18 Signaling mechanism, 23 Situational co-membership, 17 Social setting, 21 Sociocognitive view of mind, 19 Social construction: of knowledge, 16; of language, 16 Sociocultural approaches, 19. See also Discourse analysis Sociolinguistic interviews, 27 Social identities, 17 Social Institutions, 38 Social practices. See Gee, James Paul

280

Index

SPEAKING grid, 25–26, 27 Spearman correlation coefficients, 209 Speech activity, 23–24 Speech events, 26 Statistics: descriptive use of, 213; dropout rate, 8 Stories, 9; horizontal building of, 65; vertical building of, 37 Students, at risk, 11 n.2 Structure and function: of language, 20, 28 Subjects, 188. See also Interviewees Success, in talk. See Talk Talk: as a dance, 93; exemplars of, 228–33; features of co-constructed, 222–228; future, 18, 31; joint production of, 31; successful, 18, 240 Themes, 191–2 Tony, 79–80; changing demeanor, 88; mother, 86; vocational interests, 82, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 139–40 Track level, 189 Tracy, 141–42; H-Team, 142–43, 152; twelfth grade summary, 151; violence, 144, 148, 152; vocational interests, 143, 145, 147–48, 149, 151 Traits and factors, 14 Transcripts: line numbering, 35 Transcription: using Nud*ist for, 191 Turn taking, 24; graphs of, 79; length of, 93 Two voices, 171

Types of interviews: a balancing act, 93; compassionate communicator, 141; getting the job done, 125; goes with the wind, 65; great orator, 37; pulling teeth, 79; two voices, 171 Ungrounded references, 195, 234 n.10 Unit of analysis, 26, 193, 194, 204 Validity, 214–15, 234 n.14 Videotapes: use of, 190 Violence: Geraldo, 112; Sarah, 159– 60; Tracy, 144, 148, 152 Vocational Goals: Angela, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76; Dan, 125, 126, 128; Evon, 173, 175, 160, 182–83; Geraldo, 111, 113, 115–16, 117, 119–20; John, 40, 44, 50, 54, 56; Kelly, 133, 134–35, 136, 138; Mona, 95–96, 98, 100– 101, 103–4, 107; Sarah, 154–55, 158, 161, 163–64, 165–66; Tony, 82, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 139–40; Tracy, 143, 145, 147–48, 149, 151 Vygotsky, L.S., 19 Wertsch, James, 19 Words counted, 233 n.8; patterns, 34 n.1 World problems, 96; education, Sarah, 155–56, 167–68; racism, John, 57; Evon, 176–77; Mona, 101; Sarah, 166–67; violence, Sarah, 159–60; Tracy, 144, 148, 152; Geraldo, 112 World view, 25

About the Author STEVEN B. SACHS received his Ph.D. in Education and is Hiatt Research Assistant Professor at Clark University.