It is now anybody with access to a fifteen hundred dollar computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. It is how our kids think. It is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves.
—From Lawrence Lessig’s TED Talk on “Remix Culture”
I first heard the preceding quote during one of the Downtown School’s after-school workshops. The school had invited a local media artist—a young white man who wore blue jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for Creative Commons—to lead a workshop on remixing videos. Before letting the students loose on the computers, the instructor gave a short lecture on what he referred to as remix culture. During his presentation the artist showed several example videos as well as a segment of the legal scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig’s TED Talk. After Lessig said, “This is how our kids speak,” the instructor paused the video and told the students, “That’s you,” before resuming the clip. After the video ended, the visiting artist told the students that it was their civic duty to remix media.
That evening I wrote about the incident extensively in my field notes. I found it ironic that the instructor was trying to persuade the students to participate in a practice that, according to the video he had just shown them, defined not only how their generation spoke and thought but also who they were. I also found it curious that he associated a particular media-production activity with a more general responsibility for contemporary citizenship. It seemed that the instructor, and also the school, wanted to have it both ways: on one hand, to better serve the young by being sensitive to their presumed interests with new media technologies but on the other hand, to mold students into the kinds of workers and citizens that reformers thought the world needed. It was a tension that I saw over and over again while conducting fieldwork, especially when reformers and educators tried to figure out how to deal with students who seemed less than fully amenable to the reformers’ philanthropic prescriptions.
As we saw in the last two chapters, in designing a disruptive philanthropic intervention, experts translate more widespread yearnings for social change into concrete programs in part by imagining and rendering spaces and activities in terms that are seemingly transformable and controllable with the new tools that they have at their disposal. We also saw how these fixations inevitably leave out much of the complexity of life on the ground and thus lead to unanticipated challenges for reformers once a project has launched. It was also shown how reformers tend to respond to these unexpected forces by quickly reaching for resources that will help stabilize the project, even though many of these resources come from inherited versions of the institutions that reformers aim to supersede.
This chapter examines the workings and consequences of another thread of disruptive fixation: rendering the intervention’s intended beneficiaries as if they are especially in need of, amenable to, and fixable with the new technical remedies that reformers have on hand. While spatial fixations allow reformers to imagine environments that can be designed, linked, and governed and while pedagogic fixations allow reformers to envision and script the experiences that will supposedly take place in those spaces, subject fixations allow reformers to imagine a population of beneficiaries that will (often voluntarily and agreeably) take part in those designed experiences. This chapter explores how reformers often knew very little about the people they aimed to help, nor could they with the resources they had available, despite their claim to put students’ interests at the center of their concerns. Instead, processes of problematization and rendering technical allowed them to imagine those persons as especially in need of, amenable to, and fixable with their gamelike pedagogy and digitally themed offerings more generally. Such fixations not only led to further unanticipated pressures and dilemmas for reformers and educators once the school had launched, but they also encouraged reformers to respond to these dilemmas in ways that helped remake many of the institutional processes that they aimed to disrupt as well as the social divisions that they hoped to bridge.
One of the curiosities of these subject fixations is that the designers of the Downtown School were aware that many past educational reforms had failed in large part because they had privileged the viewpoints of experts and managers over the viewpoints of those they aimed to help. In their processes of problematization, the founders of the Downtown School stressed that their approach to reform was unlike the paternalistic and top-down approaches of many other social reformers, both past and present. They were clear that their project had been designed with the presumed needs and interests of contemporary children and young people in mind. This vision of reform drew on popular discourses in the worlds of technology design, and expert-planned interventions more generally, that advocate for putting students, users, humans, citizens, or the community at the center of designed interventions (Norman and Draper, eds. 1986; Norman 1988; Sandholtz et al. 1997). As we saw in chapter 2, these democratizing discourses dovetail nicely, if not necessarily explicitly or intentionally, with modes of governing that have gained influence in recent decades, particularly those that emphasize consumer sovereignty and community involvement (Rose 1999, 137–96). This resonance has allowed reform projects like the Downtown School to take root in, and thus to give material shape to, policies that promote marketlike solutions for the perceived shortcomings of statecraft—and top-down planning more generally—even though such goals are not necessarily reformers’ professed aims (Rose 1999; Sennett 2006).
While such approaches to social reform attempt to invert, or at least balance, the power relations of top-down interventions and hence to escape the latter’s much-discussed shortcomings (Scott 1998), reformers and designers who advocate for various human-centered philanthropic interventions still face the problem of how to understand the lives of the people they aim to help while also maintaining that their model of change can be generalized. On one hand, and in a more postmodern gesture, these reformers often claim to want to design interventions that are suited for the contingencies of local conditions and the dynamic multiplicity and hybridity of cultural differences. On the other hand, and in keeping with the high modernist social reformers that they often problematize, these reformers want to produce models of intervention that can be replicated and spread. The former could perhaps address problems associated with top-down planning, but doing so would be costly, time consuming, and not easy to replicate. The latter could be “scalable,” to borrow a popular term, but they privilege the perspectives of experts over those of a project’s imagined beneficiaries.
Like many other techno-philanthropists, the founders of the Downtown School rendered this problem fixable by invoking popular ideas about the unprecedented possibilities of new innovations in information technology. If contemporary youth were first and foremost members of a digital generation, as numerous social and cultural commentators like Lawrence Lessig had suggested, and if new media technologies permitted a seemingly infinite proliferation of opportunities for cultural participation, and hence learning, then a model of philanthropic intervention centered on new media technologies seemed to be both generalizable and adaptable to cultural specificities and personal idiosyncrasies. From such a perspective, the designers of the Downtown School did not need to know much about their students’ lives while they were designing their intervention, nor did they have the means to acquire such an understanding. Instead, they could design a “school for digital kids” that would teach students from any background how to build on their presumed affinities with new media in order to pursue their diverse interests. In imagining and crafting such a plan, the designers of the Downtown School built on the work of technologists and scholars that had heralded the “long tail” (Anderson 2004) character of new media ecosystems. According to this popular and influential view, networked digital media now made it possible for just about anyone to participate in rewarding and diverse forms of cultural production (Benkler 2006) and, hence, learning (Ito et al. 2010). At the same time, scholars problematized unevenness among those who pursued such opportunities as the “participation gap” (Jenkins et al. 2006), a problem that designed educational interventions could perhaps remedy. With these technical problems and solutions in mind, the designers of the Downtown School imagined that subjects from various backgrounds would be in need of, amenable to, and fixable with programs such as the after-school workshop on remix culture, as well as many of the school’s other digitally themed pedagogic offerings.
This chapter examines how these reductive renderings of the project’s intended beneficiaries excluded much of what mattered to many students as they negotiated identity and difference with each other at school and online. As such, reformers were especially unprepared and ill equipped when students attempted to configure identities that did not match reformers’ idealizations. This chapter explores the limitations and consequences of these subject fixations by examining processes of subject formation, not just from the perspective of reformers and designers but also from the perspective of those targeted by philanthropic intervention. The chapter first looks at the practices through which students negotiated differentiated social identities—and, hence, divisions—in the context of schooling before considering the role of school-sanctioned counterpractices in the production of these identities. Throughout, I draw attention to how reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical simplified and mischaracterized both students’ and educators’ contributions to processes of identity construction and, hence, to the production of social division.
Identities-in-Practice
Ethnographers who have conducted research in schools have repeatedly shown how students often develop an intimate perspective on the salient social divisions of the adult worlds for which they are being prepared, in part through their participation in the school-based cultural worlds of peers, which, especially in middle school, tend to organize into informal peer groups, or cliques (Willis 1977; Eckert 1989; Corsaro and Eder 1990; Thorne 1993; A. Ferguson 2001; Lewis 2003; Pascoe 2007).1 According to Paul Willis, in capitalist societies with compulsory education, larger political-economic processes, such as social reproduction, are accomplished in part through these informal peer groups or, more precisely, through the partially autonomous cultural productions of these groups. From such a perspective, subjects are not simply stamped out, or interpellated, by schools and then delivered to different locations in a capitalist social order, as social reproduction theorists from Althusser (1971) to Bowles and Gintis (1976) to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) have, in different ways, implied. Nor are gendered (Thorne 1993; Pascoe 2007) and racialized (Lewis 2003) identities made and remade simply because of unexamined institutional biases. Rather, young people play an active, which is not to say independent, role in making, remaking, and reconfiguring these identifications and divisions, in part by participating in the differentiated and differentiating cultural worlds that young people form as they navigate schools and other adult-controlled institutional settings (Sims 2014a, 2014b).
These cultural worlds are connected to, but also partially autonomous from, the adult-designed scripts and modes of control that characterize official activity in institutional settings that have been designed for young people. In the United States, semiautonomous cultural worlds of young people became much more extensive in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when compulsory schooling, and its age-graded social organization, was institutionalized. Correspondingly, many children and young people were moved out of places of paid and unpaid labor, which were more age heterogeneous, and assembled together in shared settings (Qvortrup 1994). One consequence of this transformation was that children and young people now spent much of their lives with people of similar ages and in institutional settings where they far outnumbered those in positions of authority. Under such conditions, semiautonomous, and often age-graded, cultural worlds, or youth cultures (Coleman 1961), emerged, a development that was aided and accelerated by entrepreneurs aiming to create and expand markets for everything from clothing to food to media (Cook 2004). While children and young people have largely remained materially dependent on adult family members for longer periods of their lives, and while they are routinely subjected to adult-defined scripts in settings such as schools, they also construct cultural practices and understandings that are somewhat independent from these scripts as they navigate age-segregated schools and adult-controlled settings more generally (Qvortrup 1994; Buckingham 2000; Corsaro 2005; Thorne 2009).
From a social practice theory perspective, the partially autonomous cultural worlds that young people make and configure in these settings are integral to how the subject positions and divisions that they come to inhabit—what Holland and Lave (2001) refer to as “history in person”—are learned, embodied, made, and changed (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1995; Holland et al. 1998). By negotiating participation in the practices of informal peer groups, students learn how to fashion themselves, speak, and act in particular ways that articulate belonging and difference. From this social practice theory perspective, social identities are always identities-in-practice, that is, coconstructed and contested by way of ongoing negotiations and struggles over who does what with whom in situ. As such, identities are always multiple, relational, and in processes of ongoing construction as students negotiate participation in some forms of group life and not others.2 Students cannot fashion any identities they like since participation in the social practices of a clique partially depends on embodied knowledge and material resources that have been learned and provisioned outside of school. Participation also depends on acceptance by others who coparticipate in the shared social practices of these informal groups. Further, while participation is partly a matter of belonging, it is also a matter of differentiation. Students are identified and make their identities in part to say whom they are and in part to say whom they are not. Changing participation in peer groups changes both identities and peer groups, and yet some social divisions, notably gender and racialized class divisions, remain fairly consistent over time despite having to be rebuilt in situ (Eckert 1989; Thorne 1993). Given the power relations inherent to all philanthropic interventions, one especially salient factor in the ongoing negotiations over identity-in-practice among those targeted for intervention is how to orient toward the expert-designed scripts, as well as the authority structures more generally, of the intervention (Willis 1977). As we will see, it is in part by taking different stances toward these power relations that peer groups distinguish themselves from one another as they relationally construct different—and differentiating—criteria for status, recognition, and value.
While reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical had considered the salience of young people’s cultural worlds in processes of learning and identity making, they also idealistically imagined that they, the experts, could design and manage the cultural worlds that facilitated such processes. In particular—and in a manner that is akin to business managers’ misguided attempts to design “communities of practice” within workplaces (Duguid 2008; Lave 2008)—the founders of the Downtown School imagined that the game worlds that they designed and into which they attempted to conscript students would furnish students with the cultural resources that they needed for identity construction and learning, a vision that was highly influenced by the renown learning theorist and video-game advocate James Paul Gee (2003). Doing so, the school’s designers argued, would remedy a problem with conventional schooling: the expectation to learn skills and acquire knowledge that is divorced from a culturally meaningful context of application. According to this combination of problematization and rendering technical, designed game worlds could fix this problem by providing the missing cultural context.
Once again we can see how reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical entailed partial critical insights into the limitations of the expert-designed interventions that they aimed to disrupt. But we can also see how these insights were narrowly fixated on what reformers could foreseeably control and transform with their new sociotechnical remedy, in this case a gamelike version of schooling. Such a vision of learning and identity formation did problematize the vision of learning and identity formation that underwrote conventional schooling—the idea that identity transformation is reducible to knowledge acquisition—but it also overlooked and ignored the lessons that Willis and other ethnographers had taken pains to establish: that subordinates in formal organizations form their own informal groups and cultural worlds in part to cope with the power relations and shortcomings of managerial attempts to formally organize their activity (Orr 1996; Suchman 2006). The limitations of these more contemporary attempts to design, construct, and control cultural worlds as a means of managing activity and learning are made apparent once we consider processes of identity formation from the perspective of those targeted for management and improvement.
Just about every day that I conducted fieldwork at the Downtown School, I made a point to eat lunch and attend recess with the students. These were the main times during the day when students had greater autonomy over their activities and thus more opportunities to negotiate friendship and difference with their peers. At lunch, students could more or less do what they liked so long as they stayed in their seats, kept the volume of their voices down, did not make a mess, and did not have more than six students at a table. Within these adult-defined rules, individual tables became like small islands. Persons and practices from proximal tables would sometimes spill into each other, but typically the practices of more distant tables remained fairly opaque to other students, even though much of what happened at different tables was fairly similar: students ate; they traded and gifted food; they conversed about a variety of topics from homework to gossip about their peers, commentary on teachers and other school adults, sharing details about family life, and expressing and arguing about their tastes for, knowledge of, and previous experiences with everything from food, TV shows, music, YouTube videos, fashion, travel, afterschool and weekend adventures, violence, and sexuality.
Yet despite these similarities, many students cared deeply about where they sat. As the period immediately prior to lunch approached its end, I would line up with the students and wait for the teacher to lead us down several flights of stairs to the cafeteria. Upon entering the cafeteria, many students would quickly rush to claim seats for themselves and their friends; yet it often took several minutes to settle who was going to sit with whom. While the entire school attended lunch at the same time, some classes arrived slightly before the others and some students, notably ones from less-privileged families, got in line for the hot lunch, which led students to try various tactics for holding seats for their friends. Sometimes, when a high-status student arrived after a table had filled, the bulk of a table’s occupants relocated, awkwardly leaving behind one or two. More marginal students in a clique made bids for inclusion at a coveted table by offering to share food, candy, and other small treats with more established table dwellers. Having a friend who was already a regular member of a table was perhaps the most common way for a new person to gain a seat. Similarly, one of the most frequent sources of drama was when a friend joined a new table but did not bring along the friends with whom he or she had sat previously.
After twenty minutes for lunch, the cliques that formed at tables in the lunchroom migrated to recess with some reworking. Students could choose to go to either the gym or a classroom, both of which adults monitored. Activity in the gym centered on a regular game of touch football that was run by an educator. Activity in the classroom was not as scripted by adults, but the school counselor and often a teacher or the principal roamed the room and intervened if students talked too loudly, touched each other in ways deemed excessive, or noticeably insulted one another. Typically, students in the classroom hung out in inward-facing huddles that mostly matched the groupings they formed at tables during lunch. Pairs and trios of “besties” would sometimes break off from a huddle and roam the room before reuniting with their larger friend group. In a bid to cross these group boundaries, individual students sometimes ran up to someone in a cluster to ask a question, offer a gift, deliver news, or play a prank.3 For the most part, though, groups of students carved out distinct territories within the crowded classroom. Some groups fortified themselves between a table and a wall, which kept both unwelcome peers and adults at a distance. These huddles were usually tightly knit and hard for outsiders, and especially monitoring adults, to observe, let alone enter.
I paid a lot of attention to these informal peer groups, or cliques, that congregated at lunch, recess, and other moments in which students had relative autonomy, including after school and online. While reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical had largely overlooked such practices, these groupings seemed to matter deeply to many of the students. As such, I thought they could not be separated or diminished from an attempt to understand an intervention that billed itself as student centered. Peer groups mattered to students in part because these groups provided opportunities for friendship, belonging, and collective ways of undergoing and interpreting the always-changing experience of being a student, a child, a sibling, and a friend. But they also mattered because they involved open-ended—and hence uncertain, dramatic, and risky—processes by which students came to develop sentient perspectives on their relationship to social identification, division, and status hierarchies, not only in the school, but in their worlds more generally. Negotiations over participation in cliques at school were closely tied to students’ out-of-school lives, and they shaped students’ futures not just in the school but also beyond it (Sims 2014a). Peer groups were not just shared expressions of individual affinities; rather, they were produced in relation to all the potential opportunities for participating in group life that existed within the shared space of the school. Some of these opportunities were taken, others were not; sometimes bids for inclusion were accepted, other times they were rejected. In any case, the outcome of each of these indeterminate moments said something about who the student was and was not. Finding a table to join at lunch was just one of many recurring moments during the school day when these processes unfolded.
Assembling Affinities and Divisions
Within a few months of the Downtown School’s opening, four dominant cliques emerged and continued to orient the social worlds of students for much of the first year. The divisions students made within the school mostly mirrored the divisions that structured their out-of-school lives, but the process of assembling these groups was always ongoing and never fully settled. There were two cliques of predominantly boys and two cliques of predominantly girls, and each clique was largely segregated in terms of racialized social class. Like social worlds more generally, these cliques formed as students negotiated different standards of performance, status, and authenticity as they faced the shared challenge of how to be good at navigating middle school (Strauss 1982). These processes also produced factions and hierarchies within cliques, and sometimes these processes produced splintering and subworlds. Through these processes, which were never fully settled, a few students tended to be elevated as exemplars of performance within the clique, and often, but not always, students who were not members of a clique would identify these stars as representative of the clique as a whole. However, and as we will see, outsiders tended to stereotype these exemplars, and hence the clique, pejoratively and reductively, in part because they appeared to offer models of how to be a good middle school student that were at odds with their own standards.
While these four cliques constituted the main opportunities for students to participate in group life with peers at school, many students avoided regular participation in these cliques, failed in their attempts to win acceptance, or moved in and out of participation in a clique’s activities. Several students formed small clusters of two or three friends, and a few students primarily kept to themselves. While these more interstitial groups and individuals exemplified the diversity of ways that students could navigate life with their peers at school, students who did not participate in the main cliques often paid the price of social isolation, lack of recognition, and low status among their peers. In interviews, many students referred to students who kept to themselves as loners, nobodies, and lonely people if they recognized them at all; small clusters of friends were often similarly overlooked or stigmatized.
The formation of these group divisions was not intended nor anticipated when the reformers imagined the beneficiaries of their intervention, and reformers and educators spent much of the first year trying to figure out how to deal with these unanticipated processes. Through their processes of problematization and rendering technical, the school’s designers had assumed they were taking students’ out-of-school lives and interests into account in a way that would bring students from diverse backgrounds together. These aspirations were, in my opinion, sincere, but they were premised on the assumption that reformers knew what students were up to in their out-of-school lives, which they mostly did not and could not with the resources that they had available. Of the four main cliques, only one group resembled the generational stereotype that underpinned the reformers’ imaginings of a “school for digital kids.” This group, which other students sometimes referred to as “the Geeky Boys,” was the largest clique at the school and was also the most diverse economically and ethnically.4 Only one girl, Nita, occasionally hung out with this group, and the majority of the clique’s regular participants, about seventy percent, had professional parents, most of whom worked in the culture industries. All the regular participants in the school’s after-school programs—which, as a reminder, focused exclusive on media and technology production—were participants in this clique, and, indeed, many of the clique participants had become friends in part by attending the after-school programs. Other students primarily stereotyped participants in this clique for their distinctive affinities for certain digital technologies and media, especially video games but also manga, anime, and transmedia franchises such as Pokémon. As Christopher, a boy from a less-privileged family who regularly hung out with the other main clique of boys, noted to me about this group during an interview, “I think a large part of the school body is the kids who are into game design and stuff like that, kids who are really into that.” Similarly Sacha, a girl whose parents were creative professionals but who nevertheless struggled to gain acceptance by any of the main cliques, said, “[They’re the] kids who like Pokémon, or are Bakugan loving,” and as Troy, one of the higher-status members of the other main clique of boys said, “They talk about TV shows. Like let’s say Naruto probably.”5
Participants in this clique described themselves in similar terms, but they valued their differentiating practices and interests in certain forms of media and technology proudly and positively at school even as they did not reduce themselves to these interests. Many self-identified as gamers or even hardcore gamers, and they routinely used material culture—such as clothing, stickers, and games—as well as talk in order to express their distinctive enthusiasm for, knowledge about, and expertise with video games as well as new digital technologies more generally. As Raka, a member of this clique whose parents were both professionals, told me when I asked him about his favorite digital technologies, “I use everything.” When I asked him to identify his favorite media technology, he continued, “Oh, that’s hard,” before pausing, seemingly to think it over. After a moment of reflection he suggested that it was probably his laptop, a fairly new Apple MacBook, before elaborating, “But I’m at the cutting edge of technology. My dad has three plasma-screen TVs for his computer and this computer that has not even come out yet. And since me and my brother are really good gamers we have Alien computers. Whenever a game comes out we get it. We beat it in two days. We’re done.”6 Raka was among the students that most regularly showed enthusiasm for new media technologies to his peers at school, but his enthusiasm was indicative of a more general, if sometimes more muted, affinity among members of this clique, and his performances of affinity for and skill with new media technologies appeared to help him win recognition and status within the group.
The main nonschool media practices for which many of these clique participants shared affinities and expertise focused on gaming, especially playing hypermasculine first-person-shooter games like Modern Warfare II, action and adventure games, and, for some, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. They frequently discussed these games while hanging out at school, some played with other clique members in person and online out of school, and many prominently expressed their interest in games and new tech gadgets on Facebook and other social media. For example, many of these boys used pictures of characters from their favorite video games as their profile photo on Facebook, and some also uploaded images from a game to their profile and then tagged the various characters with the names of their friends. Modern Warfare II was so popular among a subset of this clique that one of the tables in the cafeteria even came to be known among members of this clique as the Modern Warfare II table.
The participants in this clique were by no means the only students to use new technologies extensively outside of school, nor were they always the most skilled and knowledgeable users of many of these technologies. But participants in this clique were the only students that routinely expressed an affinity and sophistication for certain new media as a basis for social distinction within the school, and they were the only ones to avidly pursue and develop these affinities and skills through expert-designed pedagogic interventions that were not required, such as the school’s after-school programs that focused on media production. Nearly all students at the school had played video games, and many still played them frequently. Most students had cell phones, and several had considerable experience on social media. Many of the students who produced the most sophisticated media projects in the school’s required game-design course were girls who hung out together in one of the other main cliques, and many of the most sophisticated users of social media were girls who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch and who hung out in another of the major cliques. And yet, despite these areas of relative experience and expertise, these other students were not typically recognized by their peers for their technical acumen, nor did these students routinely and prominently express their technical sophistication at school or online, and none regularly participated in the school’s nonrequired but adult-scripted media-production activities. Instead, they participated in a diversity of other out-of-school activities, and their peers at school generally described these students in nontechnical terms.
The clique of girl students who predominantly came from homes where one or both parents worked in professional fields—which included two less-privileged girls, who were twin sisters, but no boys—was primarily known by their peers as being studious and obedient toward school adults. Both students who did and did not participate in this clique often referred to them as the “good kids,” although many students who did not participate in the clique viewed their more obedient orientation toward school adults as too eager to please. For example, in an interview, Star, a girl from a lower-income household who rarely hung out with this group but who also avoided the other main clique of girls, described this group pejoratively, calling them the “Goody Two-shoes,” before explaining, “You know like the coupons, they’re always in a rush to get them. And they’re always the same people who win them.” Star was referring to a classroom-management technique that one of the teachers had implemented midway through the year. The teacher gave students paper tickets, called coupons, as a reward for obedient behavior, and the teacher named whoever accumulated the most coupons by the end of the week the Student of the Week. The winner got a poster with their name, avatar, and accumulated coupons posted on a bulletin board in the hallway. After several months of this contest, nearly all the winners were regular participants in the clique that Star called the Goody Two-shoes, and several of these girls had won the contest so many times that their posters in the hallway were covered in coupons.
The Goody Two-shoes more-obedient orientation toward school authorities, as well as the more general gendering of techno-scientific expertise, may help explain why their peers did not recognize this group as being distinctively technical despite their impressive accomplishments on adult-assigned media-production projects. The students who successfully claimed a distinctively technical identity in the eyes of their peers all avidly pursed media and technology projects in realms of their life over which they had more autonomy and control, notably after-school programs and leisure activities. In these more voluntaristic realms of activity, this clique of mostly privileged girls oriented toward activities that were neither focused on new technologies nor supported by the school. The privileged members of the clique participated in private classes for dance, music, foreign language, swimming, ice skating, tennis, snowboarding, and horseback riding. Many also had extensive experience with international travel, sometimes for tourist purposes and sometimes for their parents’ work. When asked to name their hobbies and interests in interviews, many noted a similar list of out-of-school activities and experiences and, much like their peers, also tended to feature their out-of-school activities on their social network profiles (once they got them) and discussed these activities while hanging out with their friends at school; several participated in the same out-of-school activities, in part because of their parents’ facilitations (chapter 3). Reformers’ rendering of students as digital kids did not anticipate these out-of-school interests and practices, and, as such, they were not initially institutionally supported or recognized within the school. Consequently, many students who did not participate in this clique were largely unaware of their out-of-school lives, and they primarily associated these students with an obedient orientation towards school authorities—hence pejorative labels such as Goody Two-shoes.
Participants in the other two main cliques were primarily from lower-income homes and most qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Like the Geeky Boys and the Goody Two-shoes, these two cliques helped remake gendered divisions, but unlike the more-privileged cliques, these cliques interacted with each other rather frequently. The participants in the clique of girls were all from less-privileged families, with the exception of two girls, Hannah and Chloe, both of whom had professional parents and had recently moved to the United States from Europe. All the participants in the clique of boys were from less-privileged households, but some were more materially disadvantaged than others. Many of the students in these cliques were high-achieving students, and some produced complex media productions as part of required coursework, but students who did not participate in these cliques did not tend to see these students as overly obedient to educators, as they did the Goody Two-shoes, nor did they associate them with a distinctive expertise with or affinity for new technologies, as they did with the Geeky Boys. Most of the participants in these cliques made extensive use of digital media in their out-of-school lives, just not in the ways that the subject fixations of the school’s designers and educators had assumed. Some of the less-privileged students, and especially less-privileged girl students, were the most experienced and sophisticated users of social and communications media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, a video-chat program called ooVoo, mobile phones, various instant messenger programs, and so forth. They used these tools to develop and maintain a diversity of relationships with friends and family, adjusting technologies and practices according to their interlocutors. Their early adoption and sophisticated use of these tools was partly supported by their relative freedom from organized activities in the afternoon hours and partly by a less-rigid mapping of social media practices onto age divisions within their families. While privileged families, and especially professional parents of girls, tended to view sites like Facebook as a youth-centered social space to which their children should be prohibited access until they were older (which ended up happening in seventh or eighth grade for many of these students), many of the less-privileged students had already been on Facebook for several years by the time they arrived at the Downtown School. Many of these early adopters had been introduced to social media by family members so that they could stay in touch with extended family members that were geographically distributed, and many had received hand-me-down cell phones so that various adult members of their families could coordinate child rearing alongside work schedules and other commitments. Like the students who participated in the Geeky Boys clique, many of the students who participated in the clique of less-privileged boys also continued to play video games extensively outside of school, and many had done so even more when they were younger.
But many of the students who participated in these cliques also had out-of-school interests, experiences, and skills that did not center on digital media. Like their more-privileged peers, several of the less-privileged girls had years of experience with dance, music, cheering, and performing arts, but unlike their more-privileged peers, these students primarily accessed these activities through their elementary schools, not the private market, and some also attended enrichment programs sponsored by churches and organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation. In general, though, girls from less-privileged families were the least involved in organized after school programs once they arrived in middle school, in part because the Downtown School did not support programs that aligned with their interests and in part because many increasingly took on work responsibilities at home. Several aided their parents, aunts, and uncles with chores and with looking after younger relatives, and several went home, to the park, or the library after school. None of the members of this clique participated in the Downtown School’s suite of after-school programs focused on media and technology production.
Similarly, none of the participants in the clique of boys from less-privileged homes participated in the Downtown School’s after-school programs. Instead, many of these students participated in sports, particularly basketball and football, outside of school. Many had done so for years and had numerous family members with extensive athletic histories. When I asked a student named Jamal if he ever worked on media-production projects outside of school he replied, “I don’t really do stuff like that outside of school, because, really, my family, like on my mom’s side and on my dad’s side, our talent is in sports. So usually I’m playing sports, or I’m playing sports games.”
Some of these sports programs were sponsored by a local Boys Club, which charged $10 a year and also offered programs that helped underprivileged boys prepare academically for college, a program that several of the highest status members of this clique had been involved in for years. Other sports programs, such as football as well as a competitive basketball league, were more expensive and run by private organizations. Finally, several of the less-privileged boys were also involved in youth groups for their church. Again, and like their peers, participants in this clique prominently displayed many of these out-of-school interests and experiences both online and at school, for example, by wearing a football jersey to school, by posting pictures of themselves in their basketball uniforms on Facebook, by posting pictures online of their favorite professional athletes and gear, and so forth. And yet none of these areas of distinctive affinity and expertise were supported by the school’s student-centered intervention, and none were celebrated in the school’s more public festivals and ceremonies, which, as noted in the last chapter, focused almost exclusively on the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. All these interests and practices were not especially centered on new media, and, as such, they largely escaped reformers’ renderings of subjects that were amenable to their innovative intervention.
Given the lack of institutional support and valorization for many of these students’ out-of-school experiences and interests and given that the bases of recognition and status in the other main cliques were rooted in material privileges, these students put forth alternative bases for recognition and status among their peers at school. The main ways these students promoted alternative bases for recognition and status were by emphasizing to their peers that they were more precocious in certain realms and, in a related vein, that they enjoyed more autonomy from the controlling scripts that adults routinely attempted to place on the students’ lives. In keeping with Eckert’s (1989) analysis, many less-privileged students had access to kinship and friendship networks that were more age-heterogeneous than privileged students, and this age-heterogeneity likely allowed some less-privileged students to observe and emulate the knowledge and practices of older youth in ways that their more-privileged peers could not. Acceptance by older youth and cousins also offered support for alternative temporalities and trajectories of learning to the ones promoted in the school and normatively encouraged by more-privileged parents. Here, for example, was how Troy, one of the high-status members of the clique of less-privileged boys, explained how he got the nickname of Kobe, a reference to the professional basketball star Kobe Bryant, while playing basketball at a local park, “When I was nine, I used to play [basketball] with [this boy who] was about 14 years old. After I played with people that are really good, I started to get better myself. That is when they started calling me Kobe.” By drawing on these out-of-school networks and practices, some of these students from less-privileged households attempted to construct alternative bases of recognition and status from the ones that the school’s designers and educators were attempting to construct inside the school. But, as we will see, because reformers’ and educators’ subject fixations mostly excluded these bases of recognition and status, less-privileged students’ attempts to construct alternative criteria were increasingly seen by reformers and educators as problematic and deviant.
Participants in these cliques of predominantly less-privileged students demonstrated their relatively superior precociousness and independence in numerous ways, many of which drew attention to the fact that their out-of-school lives provided them with experiences, knowledge, and expertise that their more-privileged classmates lacked. For example, one of the main ways they did so was by being the first students in the school to dabble in flirting and dating. While students in the Geeky Boys and Goody Two-shoes cliques rarely interacted with students outside of their gendered group boundaries until seventh and eighth grade, participants in the two cliques of predominantly less-privileged students routinely interacted with each other in sixth grade, especially at the beginning of the year. These interactions often centered on the possibility of whether a high-status member of each clique was going to “go out” with the other. These courtship rituals primarily consisted of members of each group speculating about and trying to facilitate the coupling of high-status members of their respectively gendered groups. The students that clique participants identified as potential couples often played a fairly passive and silent role in these processes, and on the rare occasions when two students did finally agree to go out, I got the impression that they did so in large part because they risked losing their high standing in their respective peer groups if they did not acquiesce. For example, the first couple to go out did so after several weeks of pressuring by friends, but the relationship only lasted for a few hours before the boy ended things. The boy’s status in his gendered clique was elevated and, perhaps more importantly, the prospect of emasculation by his peers, which could have occurred if the girl had ended the relationship first, was avoided.
In addition to interacting across gendered clique divisions, albeit in ways that often helped construct and affirm heteronormative gender and sexuality binaries, members of these cliques performed their precociousness by drawing attention to the areas in which they had, or sought, more autonomy and independence from adult prescriptions. For example, while students from privileged homes had traveled internationally much more extensively than their less-privileged peers and while they often referenced and displayed these worldly experiences for their peers at school, privileged students were comparatively inexperienced when it came to knowing how to navigate New York City, let alone the broader world, without the help of adults. Some students from less-privileged homes latched onto this difference as a basis of social distinction. In one such moment, three high-status members of the clique of predominantly less-privileged girls recalled their attempt to get together over the weekend without having an adult coordinator. Hannah and Chloe—who, as mentioned before, were from privileged backgrounds but hung out with a clique of predominantly less-privileged girls—did not know how to instruct their friend Niki—who qualified for free lunch—on how to get to Hannah’s house, nor did they yet have enough experience with mobile phones or navigating transportation options to overcome the challenge. As the girls playfully recalled the episode, Niki teasingly drew attention to the areas where she was comparatively more precocious and worldly.
“You don’t use your phone!” Niki exclaimed, in teasing disbelief.
“Yes I do, I text people,” Hannah countered, “It took like an hour texting you to come to my house. You were like, ‘Okay, what bus do I take?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, um, take this bus.’ Hello? I don’t know a lot of this stuff. And it’s hard texting on my phone.”
“And then you were like, ‘I’m going to take a taxi,’ ” Chloe said, inserting herself into the conversation, “and we were both freaking out, like, ‘No! No! Don’t do that!’ ”
“Why?” Niki asked, perhaps genuinely confused or perhaps goading her friends.
“Hello?” Hannah said, seemingly exacerbated by Niki’s refusal to under-stand what appeared to be commonsensical to Hannah. “You can’t take a taxi alone at that young age.”
“Why? I always do,” Niki retorted, challenging Hannah and Chloe’s assumptions about what sorts of practices were accomplishable and acceptable for people of their age.
Less-privileged members of these cliques not only routinely referenced similar experience and knowledge in areas where they were more precocious and worldly than their more privileged peers, but they also performed their greater precociousness and independence from adults by demonstrating a willingness to resist the scripting of activities that adult authorities attempted to impose on them, especially at school. These autonomy displays ranged from challenging educator prescriptions (e.g., not following directions, questioning directives, etc.) to breaking prescriptions behind the teacher’s back (e.g., talking to each other, throwing notes back and forth, listening to music while on the computers, cursing, etc.), playing with the prescriptions (finding exceptions not covered by the literal meaning of directives, referencing alternative interpretations of the directives, fidgeting with binders, rulers, and other school supplies, etc.), or going along with the rules but in a manner that signaled resistance. These tactics often had the feel of dancing with the limits of what adult authorities would permit, and they often involved playing with the tacit assumptions of adult prescriptions, especially with unstated assumptions about temporality. For example, sometimes a student would walk more slowly than was tacitly expected, they would take longer than they were supposed to while providing an answer to a teacher’s question, and so forth.7 Many of these transgressions of adults’ prescriptions were, in my opinion, fairly minor, but they carried significant weight in the processes by which students distinguished themselves from one another at school, and, as such, they provided means for gaining status and recognition from their peers that were not only absent from, but also resistant to, many of the assumptions and values entailed in reformers’ imaginings of amenable and fixable subjects. While many other students also played with small transgressions of adults’ explicit and tacit prescriptions, they tended to do so more tepidly, and they did not tend to develop a reputation among their peers as being especially independent from, and resistant to, authorities’ attempts to control them.
Crossing Boundaries
While these negotiations over participation in school-based cliques often remade the social divisions that organized students’ lives outside of school, some students managed to cross the divisions that organized their out-of-school lives as they participated in the peer cultures that organized in and around the school. In some cases these crossings appeared to affirm reformers’ fixations of subjects that, regardless of background, would be amenable to and fixable with their remedy, and, as such, reformers and educators often celebrated these students as examples of their intervention’s idealized promises. As already mentioned, two sisters who were on free lunch, Amina and Malika, regularly hung out with the Good Two-shoes, a handful of less-privileged boys and one less-privileged girl, Nita, typically hung out with the Geeky Boys, and two girls with professional parents, Hannah and Chloe, mostly hung out with the main clique of girls from less-privileged homes, at least initially.
While I found these cases encouraging—as did many educators and reformers—taken as a whole they revealed more about the mechanisms that divided the students than they did about the intervention’s potential to mend entrenched social divisions. The students from less-privileged households who participated in groups of primarily privileged students had the burden of adapting to numerous practices that the privileged majority more or less took for granted, whereas privileged students who participated in groups of predominantly less-privileged students tended to retain the respect of their privileged peers and could fairly easily participate in the practices of their privileged peers when they wanted, an option not readily available to their less-privileged friends. For example, Amina and Malika could not afford the regular ice-skating trips that the mother of one of their more-privileged friends organized for some members of the friend group, so they went across the street to a public library and waited for their mom after school instead. And ice skating was just one among many expensive out-of-school practices—from summer vacations in Italy to weekend snowboarding trips, dance classes, and eating at downtown restaurants—that their privileged friends talked about at school, posted to Facebook, and sometimes participated in together.
Material disadvantages also hindered less-privileged students from participating more fully in the Geeky Boys clique. For example, Robert, who came from one of the most economically disadvantaged families at the school, was accepted and respected by coparticipants in this clique in large part because he was widely recognized as the best Modern Warfare II player in the school. And yet his family did not have a working personal computer in their home, let alone a high-end computer like those that privileged members of his clique, such as Raka, proudly owned and sometimes used for media-production projects with friends. These material disadvantages were both a source of longing and potential embarrassment for students who crossed racialized class divisions inside the school. For example, when I visited Robert’s apartment, I noticed that he had adorned his Playstation 3 with Apple stickers, even though he did not own any Apple products, which were expensive, and he made a point of rightly emphasizing to me that his phone was also a computer. Similarly, several boys from less-privileged homes who hung out in the Geeky Boys clique told me that they wished they had iMovie, Apple’s proprietary software for video production, at their homes. And many students from less-privileged homes yearned for cell phones that matched those of their more-privileged friends. Similarly, and as an example of what Thorne (2008) has referred to as “shame work,” Nita routinely exaggerated the toys and gadgets, particularly Legos, that she had at her home when she was bidding for inclusion and respect from some of the members of the Geeky Boys clique, something I learned only once I visited her house and got to know her family. In a related vein, Amina, who primarily hung out with the Goody Two-shoes, opted to not bring a cell phone with her to school even though her mom had purchased a less-expensive and less-coveted pay-as-you-go phone for her as a fifth grade graduation present.
As students and the school grew older, several of these initially encouraging cases of students crossing more entrenched out-of-school social divisions began to deteriorate. For reasons that are discussed in the next chapter, by the end of the first year, both Chloe and Hannah had distanced themselves from Niki and many of the other less-privileged girls as they increasingly hung out with members of the Goody Two-shoes, Robert had to repeat sixth grade for academic reasons and thus no longer shared classes with the friends he had made during the school’s first year. Most of the other less-privileged members of the Geeky Boys increasingly hung out with each other and less with their more-privileged friends in subsequent years. Similarly, in seventh and eighth grade, Nita shifted away from the clique of mostly privileged boys and toward the clique of mostly privileged girls. While this move allowed her to continue to participate in a clique that was primarily composed of more-privileged peers, it also led her to perform a more-normative gender orientation. Whereas she had once posted geeky content to her Facebook account, including examples of media that she had made, after she switched peer groups she started posting pictures of pop stars like Justin Bieber.
A few less-privileged students, such as Amina and Malika, as well as a boy named Issac and a boy named Ato, continued to hang out with cliques of predominantly more-privileged students. While these cases were encouraging, they were also exceptional, and yet reformers and educators routinely featured these students as model students when they presented their project to broader publics. These selection processes were especially noticeable whenever journalists and other influential outsiders visited the school, but they were also present in internal assemblies and showcases, all of which focused on the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. While being featured and celebrated was likely flattering for these students, I also suspect that some may have begun to feel tokenized, especially after being repeatedly put forth as promising success stories. The important point here is that while students’ out-of-school lives structured the processes by which divisions were produced within the school’s peer culture, reformers’ and educators’ fixations about amenable and fixable subjects excluded much of students’ out-of-school experiences. In the majority of cases, the reformers’ student-centered reform had little connection to students’ out-of-school lives, and the majority of the students for whom their intervention did resonate were boys with creative professional parents. Even in the realm of new media practices, the school’s sanctioned and valorized uses of new media technologies entailed unexamined class, race, and gender biases. In keeping with more middle-class parenting practices, precocious uses of social and communications media, especially by less-privileged girls, were either overlooked or stigmatized by educators, and in the school’s second year reformers and educators even devoted part of one of the special Level Up periods to the theme of “online safety and civility” in social media. By contrast, educators did not offer lessons about the safety and civility of playing masculinized video games, and if anything reformers and educators helped legitimize such practices as educational. In keeping with more-general cultural biases, technological practices associated with middle-class masculinity were applauded while those associated with femininity as well as more working class masculinity tended to be overlooked or discouraged (Wajcman 2007; Sims 2014b).
Conditions of Sanctioned Nonconformity
The examples discussed before draw attention to the salience of students’ out-of-school lives in the processes by which students constructed affinities and divisions with their peers in and around the school. While I have begun to draw attention to how reformers’ fixations of amenable and fixable subjects helped reinforce broader structures of privilege, the relations between reformers and their intended beneficiaries deserve further comment in this chapter and the next. The identities and divisions just discussed were produced in conditions that were not unlike the conditions that many people, regardless of their age, face everyday as they navigate institutional life: the students spent the majority of their days responding to the prescriptions of authorities in a bureaucratic organization, and they would remain subordinates, albeit with changing privileges, for as long as they remained a part of those organizations. One of the things that peer groups do in these circumstances is provide subordinates with different modes for coping with the experience of being monitored, assessed, and directed, often for hours at a time, day after day, for years on end. Peer groups provide collective ways for subordinates to not only make these conditions meaningful and livable but also with ways in which they can work through dilemmas about when and how to conform, or not, to processes of subjugation.
Interestingly, a similar dilemma animated the reformers’ attempts to design a new model of pedagogic intervention. On the one hand, the designers of the Downtown School championed nonconformity among those that they targeted for pedagogic intervention. In problematizing the rigid strictures of bureaucratic organizations, they claimed that contemporary organizations could not function, let alone innovate, unless knowledge, creativity, and learning were distributed, that is, unless subordinates in an organization could act creatively and in ways that their managers had not anticipated and scripted. In keeping with broader management discourses about the new economy, the designers of the Downtown School wanted to craft subordinates that were quirky, creative, and independent. Yet, and on the other hand, organizations require subordinates to comply with organizational demands, and managers are responsible for orchestrating and motivating that compliance. This tension puts both authorities and subordinates in the odd bind of being expected to conform to an organization’s demands and yet to break with its strictures of conformity. While conformity and creativity are not mutually exclusive, they are also difficult to reconcile in many cases.
The designers’ attempts to make schooling gamelike can be seen as one attempt to work through the preceding structural tensions. Yet, and as we just saw, of the main peer groups that formed at the Downtown School, only the group of mostly privileged boys, and really only portions of this group, attempted to resolve the conformity/nonconformity tension in ways that resonated with how reformers and educators also hoped to resolve the same tension. The school’s sanctioned counterpractices, particularly those practices that embraced gaming and certain forms of new media production, did provide this group of students with institutionally sanctioned ways to experience degrees of creativity and nonconformity. As the school’s designers had hoped, these sanctioned counterpractices afforded students opportunities to act in ways that were not tightly scripted by adults, and thus the students who embraced these practices as a means of differentiation could do so without feeling as if they were merely conforming to the bidding of those who held power over them in an institutional setting.
Yet other students, and even some of the students who hung out with this clique of predominantly privileged boys, did not resolve tensions between conformity and nonconformity in ways that both satisfied their attempts to participate in peer groups and matched reformers’ expectations about sanctioned nonconformity. Some responses were seen by other students, as well as many educators, as too conformist, whereas others were seen as not conformist enough, and there was no evident principle as to how to do nonconformity in the “right” way. As noted earlier, many students, and particularly students from less-privileged homes, often saw the Goody Two-shoes as too conformist, a view that some educators ironically also shared. This group’s lack of participation in the school’s nonrequired clubs and after-school programs focused on media production meant that they and their work were not often featured in many of the educator-sponsored festivals and showcases that celebrated the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. As such, this group came to be known and to know themselves as good students, but not as the rule-breaking innovators that are so often lionized.
In contrast with these students, other students came to be seen by many educators, involved parents, and students as not conformist enough. Instead of doing nonconformity by embracing the school’s sanctioned counterpractices—which again favored students, and especially boys, from privileged households—the cliques of predominantly less-privileged students navigated the conformity/nonconformity tensions by resisting, challenging, playing with, and sometimes transgressing the implicit and explicit prescriptions of the adults who held power over them, even though doing so risked punishment. Such an approach had the feel of a dance, especially at the beginning of the year. Counter to some popular accounts (Ogbu 1987), many of these students did not appear to have a counterschooling orientation, at least not yet. Most cared about getting good grades and aspired to attend college, and a few wanted to someday become doctors. Several routinely scored among the highest of their peers on exams, they congratulated each other for getting good grades, and they encouraged their friends who did less well on assignments and tests that they could do better. But they also oriented to school authorities in ways that demonstrated to themselves and their peers that they were not docile subjects.8 Their willingness to participate in counterpractices that school authorities had not designed and scripted complemented their presentations of themselves as more mature and autonomous than their peers, and initially these practices won them a cool status among many of their peers. Yet, and as I detail in the next chapter, after months of pressure from privileged parents, educators started ratcheting up punishment for these unsanctioned responses, and as they did so these students’ cool status among their peers changed from one of ambivalent respect to one of institutionally sanctioned dismissal, a repudiation that often consolidated stereotyped ascriptions of minority coolness, deviance, and race, even though there was a general taboo against using racial identifiers. By the end of the school’s first year, such ascriptions were commonplace among students who did not participate in this clique.
For example, when I spoke with Elinore and Joanna about the school’s cliques toward the end of the school’s first year, both girls expressed what appeared to me as a noticeable change in the ways they viewed the cliques that many students had come to refer to as the “Cool Kids.” Both girls identified as white, but they were less privileged than most of the other students at the school who also identified as white, and throughout the year they had periodically made attempts to hang out with the Cool Kids cliques, sometimes with success. For Elinore, there were two main types of cliques at the Downtown School. “There’s the smart and nerdy,” she told me, “and there’s the cool.” As she said this last word she raised her hands and made quotation marks with her fingers in the air, seemingly mocking the idea that the group of students were actually cool.
Given that she had previously appeared to admire these students, at least to a degree, I asked her why she had used the air quotes.
Her friend Joanna quickly chimed in, “Because they think they are so cool.”
Fairly rapid changes in judgments towards one’s peers are common among middle school students, but Joanna’s and Elinore’s apparent change of heart also paralleled privileged parents’ increasingly vocal critiques of these students as well as educators’ subsequent attempts to discipline members of the Cool Kids cliques.
“I’m not trying to be racist,” Elinore added, “but most of them are black.”
“Yeah,” Joanna quickly added, “I’m not trying to be racist but . . . ”
Elinore cut her off, “I’m just saying like the color.”
Sensing their uneasiness with racial labels, I asked them what made the group cool, but Joanna quickly reiterated her earlier point that they weren’t actually cool, they just thought that they were.
“They think they are tough,” Elinore elaborated. “They think because they curse that they are awesome.”
I had long observed that a willingness to curse, albeit typically when adults were not around, had been one of the small transgressions of adult strictures through which these groups of students differentiated themselves from, and were differentiated by, other groups of students. It was one of the symbolic practices by which members of these groups presented themselves as comparatively mature, and it was through these small acts of transgressions that some of these students had initially won a somewhat respected cool status among many of their peers. Earlier in the year Elinore and Joanna seemed to be somewhat impressed with these small acts of transgression, and I had even seen Joanna try to emulate their unsanctioned responses.
“They think that since they are black,” Elinore continued, “like in the movies you see, oh the big tough people are black. Like the bullies and stuff.” As we will see in the next chapter, this consolidation of stereotypes about race, toughness, and bullying were supported and accelerated by many of the privileged parents and, subsequently, educators, both of whom were especially anxious about bullying. Over the course of the school’s first year, this label, which legitimated the ratcheting up of educator-enforced discipline, became shorthand for many of the unsanctioned counterpractices of students from less-privileged backgrounds. As it did, the term also increasingly became part of students’ lexicon, although when students made similar ascriptions they were less careful than adults about combining them with explicit racial identifiers.
“There is even a song that is called White and Nerdy,” Joanna explained, “and it’s about black and white people.” I had not heard of the song, which I soon learned was by Weird Al Yankovic, a musician and video producer who frequently parodies popular culture. Joanna offered to play me the song on her iPod. “It is just a stupid video,” she said, perhaps recognizing that the song parodied racial stereotypes as it affirmed their existence, “but I like it.”
As reductive and pejorative ascriptions of race, coolness, and deviance became more consolidated and pervasive, the students who were the targets of such ascriptions responded with attempts to maintain the positive valuation of their various counterpractices while also exhibiting a reluctance to be fixed by their peers and educators as irredeemable delinquents. Ultimately, however, their efforts did not succeed. By the end of the first year, many of their peers dismissed them with labels such as “bad,” “low,” “bullies,” and “troublemakers.” The two participants in these cliques who seemed immune to these processes of racialization and status degradation were Hannah and Chloe, both of whom were from privileged homes. Even after the status of their original clique had been diminished, most students continued to treat both girls with respect, and most considered Chloe, who was white, the most-popular student in school.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how reformers tend to imagine the people they aim to help as if they are in need of, amenable to, and fixable with the reformers’ novel means of intervention. In the case of the Downtown School, reformers imagined the project’s intended beneficiaries as digital kids, a population that presumably would be especially amenable to the intervention’s focus on gaming and new media production. Through these subject fixations reformers overlooked and distorted much of what many of their intended beneficiaries’ were interested in, as well as much of what their lives were actually like. At the Downtown School, families with boys were much more attracted to the school than families with girls, and most of the students that attended the school divided themselves into cliques that largely mirrored the structural divisions that divided their out-of-school lives. Only one clique of students took advantage of the school’s after-school programs focused on media and technology production, and the participants in this clique were primarily boys with creative professional parents. Many students who either could not or did not wish to participate in this clique formed groups of their own, with alternative criteria for recognition and status and different orientations toward the reformers’ version of learning and fun. Like the students who gelled so well with the reformers’ sanctioned counterpractices, those who formed other groups drew extensively on their out-of-school lives as they worked to create differentiated identities in a community of peers. In doing so, all helped make realms of social life in which they could improvise practices, and hence selves, that had not been fully scripted for them by adults. But unlike the students who participated in the clique of predominantly privileged boys, students who participated in the other cliques, as well as many students who did not find a dominant clique to which to belong, improvised practices without much recognition or support from the adults who held power in the school. In some cases, and especially for the cliques of primarily less-privileged students, school authorities increasingly attempted to eradicate their unsanctioned responses.
Reformers’ fixations about digital kids not only occluded much of what mattered to many students, including, ironically, many uses of digital media, but they also limited the ways that reformers and educators understood students’ negotiations with each other over identity and difference at school. As we have seen, peer cultural practices were inextricably tied to students’ lives outside of school, and these lives were highly shaped by broader structures of power and privilege and particularly entrenched racialized social class and gender divisions. In making bids for belonging, recognition, and status within the school’s peer culture, different groups of students attempted to elevate different ways of doing middle school as worthy of admiration and respect, and they did so not only in relation to each other but also in relation to what reformers and educators held up as esteemed practices. While these negotiations over participation in school-based peer cultures could be seen as part of broader historical and political struggles, reformers’ processes of problematization and rendering technical largely excluded such an analysis.
As we will see in the next chapter, reformers’ fixations about their intervention’s intended beneficiaries were particularly limiting when reformers and educators had to figure out how to respond to students who did not embrace the school’s sanctioned counterpractices as a means for constructing their identities at school. Despite the reformers’ critique of authoritative pedagogical interventions and even though they had a sincere desire to right social injustices, the reformers did not tend to see students who resisted aspects of their remedy as creative and risk-taking innovators, nor did they recognize these practices as in-school attempts to reconfigure out-of-school inequities. Instead, they tended to either dismiss such responses as deviant or use them as evidence to problematize the shortcomings of some of the officials and educators who ran the school. At the same time, reformers’ fixations about the project’s intended beneficiaries helped reinforce the identity construction processes of students who were more enthusiastic about the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. This institutional sanctioning of particular ways of doing creativity and nonconformity helped many privileged students—and especially boy students who had creative professional parents—see themselves as counternormative even as they mostly conformed to the prescriptions of organizational authorities and accepted organizational hierarchies.
As I have argued elsewhere (Sims 2014b), the students’ constructions of classed and racialized peer groups also intersected with the processes by which students experimented with different ways of doing gender. Here, too, reformers’ fixations about the intervention’s target population unintentionally helped remake some of the very divisions they aimed to bridge. By sponsoring and celebrating a few digital media practices, and especially particular forms of gaming, as creative and original, the school provided the clique of mostly privileged boys not just with opportunities for forging friendships with peers at school, but also with an institutionally sanctioned way to construct themselves as masculine subjects. Not only were the media and technology practices that the school sanctioned a prime example of what Judy Wajcman (2009) has described as “both a source and a consequence of gender relations,” but they were also taken up by privileged boys as a way of working through tensions between, on one hand, masculinized pressures to assert autonomy from authorities and institutional strictures, while also, on the other hand, appeasing those authorities in order to use the resources of the institution to elevate their status.
On this last point a comparison with Eckert’s (1989) important study of adolescent identity formation is interesting as it highlights the ways in which school-sanctioned identities can shift over time and yet produce similar effects. For Eckert, who conducted her study at a high school in the US Midwest during the 1980s, jocks were the students who more often than not successfully navigated the gendered tension between autonomy and institutional demands, whereas the students who attempted to present themselves as jocks at the Downtown School were primarily both less-privileged and unsupported by the school (Eckert 1989, 494). Instead, at the Downtown School it was the students presenting themselves as enthusiasts of gendered forms of media and technology practice who were best positioned to simultaneously assert independence and reap institutional rewards, perhaps suggesting a shift in class-structured assumptions about normal ways of expressing adolescent masculinity. At the same time, similar attempts to exert autonomy while also accommodating pressures to be feminine were either overlooked or stigmatized by educators—even though these practices sometimes involved sophisticated uses of digital media—while approaches to femininity that mostly acquiesced to educator scripts did not reap the benefits associated with an enthusiastic embrace of the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. Finally, attempts to accommodate masculine pressures from nondominant positions were increasingly stigmatized as threatening and punished.
These varying responses to the students’ peer cultural practices bring to light a familiar paradox in philanthropically sanctioned educational interventions. Many people tend to see these interventions as enculturating mechanisms that can bring people of different backgrounds into some kind of local, national, or even global harmony. Yet in many ways educational interventions presuppose that very enculturation, assuming that everyone ought to understand the intervention’s demands and values in the same ways. As such, unsanctioned responses can be overlooked or dismissed as deviant, rather than as quite understandable responses given the perspectives and locations of those responding. If such a paradox is familiar, then what makes a disruptive educational intervention new is not that reformers have finally found a way out of this paradox, but rather that new technologies provide reformers, and many others, with new ways to reductively imagine philanthropic beneficiaries.