December 5: Prudence Carter

Boundaries in Schools: How Some Educational Contexts Enable Students to Cross More Than Others

6:15 pm

Cubberley 114

Dr. Prudence Carter is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and (by courtesy) Dept. of Sociology at Stanford University.

Research informs us that individuals use rules, codes, and resources as boundaries to create lines of demarcation that either exclude or distinguish in-groups (“us”) from out-groups (“them”) and to concretize social differences between these groups. In this talk, I ask how do school practices either weaken or strengthen boundaries, focusing on one particular indicator of social boundaries—students’ cultural flexibility. Cultural flexibility is defined as the students’ ability to accept and move across different cultural, linguistic and social spaces and environments. Results, drawn from a study of 471 students in four schools—two of color and two white—located in the Northeast and South—reveal that the school context or organization matters for Black students’ flexibility. Among white students, we find associations between regional location and cultural flexibility. These findings illuminate the critical influence of the context’s culture and climate on students’ abilities to mix across different social boundaries.